Eideard

An eighth-grade student in North Carolina was suspended for 55 days for showing another boy a bag of oregano and claiming it was marijuana, his family said.

“It was just a joke,” the boy’s mother told FoxNews.com. “He’s embarrassed that it’s turned into such a big issue. He’s actually said he doesn’t know why he did it. But he didn’t have an illegal substance to begin with.”

The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group best known for defending the right to religious expression, has taken up the boy’s cause. John Whitehead, the institute’s president, said the suspension may violate the boy’s constitutional rights…

Under Union County Public Schools policy, students can be suspended for 10 days for possession of a real or counterfeit drug with an additional 45 days possible if the student’s behavior was egregious. Whitehead argues that oregano is clearly not an illegal drug, and the school district does not define counterfeit drugs.

Any schools left in this nation that [a] concentrate on education instead of being nannies – and [b] have a sense of humor?

Xi Jinping kicking a Gaelic football at Croke Park in Dublin
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Ireland’s reputation as a technology hub is a big draw for China, the Chinese leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping said at the end of a three-day visit, his only European Union stop on a world tour. Speaking at an investment forum Monday with some 350 companies, Xi said Ireland’s history, scenery and culture had impressed the Chinese people.

But he made clear the country’s clout in hi-tech and emerging industries, largely due to a low corporation tax rate that has lured Silicon Valley heavyweights, was a key factor.

“Ireland is strong in software development, ICT and biotech medicines and other hi-tech industries…We give top priority to the new generation of IT and bio-tech,” Xi told delegates via a translator Monday, adding it would be the priority for future trade between the two countries.

“Ireland is a country that is strong in trade and services and this bodes well for our co-operation,” he added…

“They are hungry for technologies, things are changing so fast. Ireland is such a small country but we have lot of small and medium businesses with great technologies,” said Jo Cheng, head of analytics at Dublin-based Idiro Technologies, which she noted, had been approached by two Chinese companies in recent months for the first time.

“Ireland is the (European) headquarters of so many massive technology companies like Google, Facebook, eBay. There is a reason why they’re here,” said Cheng, a Chinese national living in Ireland…

His fascination with Ireland dates back to his first trip to Dublin in 2003 when he was a provincial party secretary…”I recall my first visit to this country in 2003. At that time one Irish person I met said to me an Irish saying that is good things often come in small packages and that person said that is us, that is Ireland. We believe Ireland has so many good things to offer,” said Xi Sunday evening.

Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who will visit China next month with a trade delegation, added that the countries had a lot to offer each other, despite the differences in size…

Xi, who visited the United States last week and moves on to Turkey Tuesday, began his Irish stay at a high tech zone near Shannon airport that inspired the building of a similar zone in Shenzhen, the pilot project of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms…

Beijing has followed with interest Ireland’s transformation from a developing farming economy to one that attracted international technology and drug companies, and is now showing first signs of rebounding from an economic crash…

Eire closed the loophole style of taxation years ago and has committed to a good education through college level free for its citizens. Two things that don’t stand a chance of getting through our ideologue-governed Congress.

Though specifics didn’t come up, I imagine the likelihood of real investment of Chinese companies in Irish firms won’t have to pass through the sort of Cold war vetting that is inevtiable in the US or the UK.

And baby makes two…

It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education…

The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage…

Which gives an idea how dim and out-of-date conservatives can be. Sad. Life really is more complex than black-and-white B movies.

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Look – it’s the Antichrist in chrome and glass!

Students at Shippensburg University in central Pennsylvania can get the “morning-after” pill by sliding $25 into a vending machine installed at the request of the student government.

The Etter Health Center at Shippensburg, a public school of 8,300 students in Appalachia’s scenic Cumberland Valley, provides the Plan B One Step emergency contraceptive along with condoms, decongestants and pregnancy tests. The pill is available without a prescription to anyone 17 or older, and the school checked records and found that all current students are that age or older, spokesman Peter Gigliotti said.

The machine was installed after a request from the student association. The pill’s availability in a vending machine appears to be rare, if not unprecedented…

“The machine is in a private room in our health center, and the health center is only accessible by students,” Gigliotti said in a statement. “In addition, no one can walk in off the street and go into the health center. Students proceed to a check-in desk located in the lobby and after checking in are granted access to the treatment area.”

Taking Plan B within 72 hours of rape, condom failure or just forgetting regular contraception can cut the chances of pregnancy by up to 89 percent. It works best if taken within 24 hours.

Some religious conservatives consider the emergency contraceptive tantamount to an abortion drug…and like everything else which offends religious nutballs, they believe women don’t have the right to make a choice.

The drug isn’t covered or subsidized by the school. Its price at the vending machine is set by the school’s cost to the pharmaceutical company and is less than at off-campus pharmacies.

Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if Republicans made a stink about cut-price pharmaceuticals. After all, they’re locked into their belief that nothing is more important than maximizing profits.

This will be a delightful object lesson for the students about asking permission from some church-or-other before they make a decision.

More female priests are joining the Church of England than male ones for the first time ever, it can be disclosed as it takes another step towards the introduction of women bishops.

Official figures show that 290 women were ordained in 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available. By contrast, just 273 men entered the priesthood.

The watershed moment comes less than 20 years since the Church first allowed women to be priests, in the face of opposition from Anglo-Catholics and conservative evangelicals who believe that only men can be church leaders…

Sally Barnes, spokesman for the campaign group Women And The Church, said: “The figures are very good news. They show the increasing numbers of women whose vocations are being recognised, accepted and valued by the Church.”

But detailed breakdown of the figures, published in The Church of England Yearbook 2012, shows that most of the new women priests are “self-supporting” rather than having full-time clergy jobs…

The figures on ordination come on the eve of another critical meeting of the Church of England’s governing body, the General Synod.

The week-long gathering in Church House, Westminster, will hear four debates on the draft legislation to introduce women bishops…

Meanwhile new divisions are opening in the Church over whether or not clergy should be able to bless civil partnerships or support full gay marriage.

Anyone send a copy of the memo to the Pope?

The chief executive of JPMorgan says he can understand some of the grievances of the Occupy movement, describing some of Wall Street’s actions as “a total disgrace.”

Speaking with CNN’s Richard Quest at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon was asked if he was worried about growing antagonism towards the rich.

“It’s becoming an entrenched view, but here’s the parts I agree with,” he said. “People are angry because a lot of people in Wall Street made a lot of money as companies went down the tubes, and I agree with them. That’s a total disgrace.”

He stressed his firm had acted responsibly. “We never had special severance packages and stuff like that… So a lot of new rules being promulgated, we were always doing them.”

Dimon said he was concerned about the gap between rich and poor. “I do think we’re all better off if society gets increasingly equitable. The question we’ve got to deal with is, how do you do that?”

He advocated progressive taxation, and a focus on “giving people better opportunities.”

“In the United States, half the kids in inner city schools don’t graduate — that’s the biggest sin we make in our country right there.”

Jamie Dimon must drive most of his competitors round the bend. He’s never reticent to tell the truth as he sees it.

Click through to the article and watch the video. His remarks on an equitable society are about halfway through. It’s all interesting.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Hoping to combat the growing problem of childhood obesity, the Obama administration on Wednesday announced its long-awaited changes to government-subsidized school meals, a final round of rules that adds more fruits and green vegetables to breakfasts and lunches and reduces the amount of salt and fat…

The rules were announced by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Michelle Obama at Parklawn Elementary School in Alexandria, Va.

“As parents, we try to prepare decent meals, limit how much junk food our kids eat and ensure that they have a reasonable balanced diet,” Mrs. Obama said in a statement. “And when we are putting in all that effort the last thing we want is for our hard work to be undone each day in the school cafeteria…”

The rules are the first changes in 15 years to the $11 billion school lunch program. They will double the amount of fruits and vegetables children are served in school and will require that all grains served are whole grains.

All milk served must be low fat, and for the first time the rules set limits on levels of salt and trans fats. They also set a minimum and maximum calorie intake per day based on student age…

Nutrition experts praised the new standards…

Representatives of the food industry generally also approved. Which only leaves Republicans and members of the Kool Aid Party to protest.

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Click on photo for video

Two Toronto teenagers with an interest in space flight became overnight rock stars after their mission to send a Lego man into near space captured international attention.

Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, two 17-year-old Agincourt Collegiate students, successfully sent a balloon carrying a Lego man and a small Canadian flag to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

The mission was more than a year in the making and was completed two weeks ago. It gained the attention of local media on Wednesday and, within 24 hours, their exploits and the awe-inspiring images they collected were being talked about across North America and mentioned as far away as Australia and Germany…

Ho and Muhammad first started sketching out their plans to send a pod into the middle stratosphere last September, working only on weekends as they balanced life as high school seniors.

Two weeks ago, the unit was attached to a helium-filled balloon and launched from a park near Ho’s east-end home, ascending 24 kilometres in 97 minutes before the balloon popped.

The Lego man and his cargo fell safely to Earth, with the help of a homemade parachute, where it landed in a field near Rice Lake, about 120 kilometres from the launch point.

The whole mission, which cost about $400, was captured by four cameras on board the shuttle and tracked by the GPS inside a phone. The astonishing photographs showed the Lego man hovering well above earth and captured glorious views of our planet from space…

Ho and Muhammad became friends in elementary school when Muhammad’s family moved to Toronto from Pakistan.

Good luck to you both.

A four-year-old U.S. boy who announced to his teacher at school snack time that he wanted to share pulled nine bags of marijuana out of his jacket pocket…Police in Meriden, Connecticut were called to Hanover Elementary School Tuesday afternoon after the young special needs student displayed the drugs, authorities said.

Meriden police said the nine individually wrapped bags of marijuana appeared prepared for sale…

“What’s so disheartening is this is really an adult issue and problem and adult behavior put a student at risk,” Meriden schools superintendent Mark Benigni told Reuters.

“This student had no idea what he brought to school or what the substance was,” he added.

Authorities are not releasing the names of the student or parents and police said there is a possibility for arrests pending the outcome of the investigation.

The coppers should smack daddy on the wrist for being extra dumb about hiding his retail stash. Unless he was more than extra dumb and just wanted his kiddie to build up his business with free samples?

A yearlong pilot program with digital textbooks on Apple’s iPad found that students’ algebra scores increased by 20 percent when compared to a curriculum with traditional books.

On the heels of Apple’s e-textbook announcement in New York City this week, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced the results of its “HMC Fuse: Algebra I” pilot program at Ameila Earhart Middle School in California’s Riverside Unified School District. The Algebra I digital textbook is touted as the world’s first full-curriculum algebra application developed exclusively for Apple’s iPad.

In its test run, the “HMH Fuse” application helped more than 78 percent of students score “Proficient” or “Advanced” on the spring 2011 California Standards Test. That was significantly higher than the 59 percent of peers who used traditional textbooks…

The first pilot program took place during the second trimester of the 2010-2011 school year, when students using “HMH Fuse” were said to have scored an average of 10 points higher than their peers. But that number jumped even higher for the California Standards Test in spring 2011, when “HMH Fuse” students scored about 20 percent higher than students who used traditional textbooks…

A white paper on the HMH Fuse Pilot Program is available for download from the publisher. Other schools and students can download the “HMH Fuse Shell” applications available for free on the iPad App Store, with curriculums available as in-app purchases within the applications.

Bravo!