School 'no touch' to be scrapped

All Surrey schools could become academies
A Conservative-controlled local authority is considering converting all its secondary schools to independent academies in one move. Surrey County Council has written to the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, asking for his views on an "exciting" proposal for it to relinquish control of all 53 schools. The Department for Education said it welcomed the "ambitious thinking". None of the county's secondaries took up Gove's recent invitation for schools rated outstanding to get academy status,...

NJ student's suicide resonates on campus, beyond
"To this poor kid, it's better to be dead than to have people know he's gay," said Jean-Marie Navetta, a spokeswoman for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. "Therein lies the real tragedy here." Clementi's death was part of a string of Suicides last month involving youngsters who were believed to have been Victims of Anti-gay Bullying. Fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas hanged himself in a barn in Greensburg, Ind. Asher Brown, 13, shot himself in the head in Houston. And 13-year-old Seth Walsh...

Michael Gove promises 'new deal' for teachers on classroom discipline
The so-called "no touch" rules that discourage teachers from restraining or comforting schoolchildren are to be abolished as part of a "new deal" for teachers, the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, said yesterday. In an exclusive interview with The Guardian before the Conservative conference in Birmingham, which starts tomorrow, Gove also disclosed that he will give teachers a right to anonymity when faced by allegations from pupils, overcoming doubts within the Ministry of Justice. Gove, one...

Tough training regiment for England team
AFP England women's field Hockey Team underwent a Military-style training regime to gear themselves up for the challenging conditions in the Delhi Commonwealth Games starting on Sunday. The players took part in an extensive session in an "environmental chamber" at the High Performance Centre in the English Institute of Sport (EIS) in Berkshire ahead of their trip to India. The chamber's temperature was set at 30 degrees and humidity level at 85 per cent to help them to acclimatise to the hot...

Useful Study of the Day
Science addresses one of the great mysteries of life : If you think you hear women saying "I'm sorry" more than men, you're right. Women apologize more often than men do, according to a new study. But it's not that men are reluctant to admit wrongdoing, the study shows. It's just that they have a higher threshold for what they think warrants reparation. When the researchers looked at the number of apologies relative to the number of offenses the participants perceived they had committed, the...

2009 National School Climate Survey: Nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT Students Experience Harassment in School
hearing homophobic remarks; however, LGBT Students' experiences with more severe forms of Bullying and harassment have remained relatively constant. "In 1999, GLSEN began data collection on the school experiences of LGBT Students in order to fill a critical void in our knowledge and understanding of the ways LGBT issues play out in schools. It could not be clearer that there is an urgent need for action to create safe and affirming schools for LGBT Students," GLSEN Executive Director Eliza Byard...

Ellen DeGeneres Records Passionate Message For Teenage Bullying Victims
The Suicide of Tyler Clementi has received a large amount of press coverage in the past few days but, unfortunately, it’s actually only one of a handful of tragic Deaths related to teenage Bullying and harassment that have occurred lately. A number of public figures have been trying to help like advice columnist Dan Savage who created the It Gets Better Project , in which people can upload videos to YouTube offering hope to LGBT despairing teenagers. Meanwhile, Ellen DeGeneres ...

Memorial for Calif. teen who suffered gay taunts
T EHACHAPI, Calif. - More than 500 people attended a memorial service for a 13-year-old Central California boy who hanged himself after enduring taunts from classmates about being gay. Seth Walsh was remembered Friday night in Tehachapi as a warm-hearted teen who loved to laugh. His mother, Judy Walsh, says the family doesn’t want to cast blame and wants the service to be a call for tolerance. Walsh died Tuesday, nine days after he was found unconscious in his backyard. He had been in a...

School Bullying: A National Pandemic Disease
But LGBT Bullying won't end if we separate it from Bullying suffered by other Students. With Gay History Month starting, it's a good moment to put our demographic Suicide problem into a bigger perspective. School Bullying is a contagious social Cancer that is invading America's whole body. Now that we know Cancer can be caused by viruses, we can say that Bullying is a national pandemic, no less lethal than AIDS or a fulminating flu. The Suicides it causes are threatening the lives of thousands...

Rutgers-Tulane Game Notes Suicide Victim
(NEWSCORE) - Players and fans held a moment of silence Saturday ahead of the Rutgers-Tulane football game to honor the Rutgers Student who committed Suicide after classmates secretly fed onto the Internet a live stream of him having sex with another man. Visibly moved spectators and Students at Rutgers Stadium in Piscataway, N.J., remained quiet for one minute before the National Anthem was sung to honor Tyler Clementi, who jumped to his death Wednesday from the George Washington Bridge....

Feds on hunt for curvy, blond beauty Kristina Izvekova in cyber scam
The feds said Friday they are still hunting for 16 suspects in an international cyber Fraud scheme - including this curvaceous Russian blond. Kristina Izvekova , 22, is one of the sexy coeds who allegedly acted as "money mules," opening Bank Accounts to help overseas Hackers steal funds. Authorities have arrested 80 people, but others are still at large. They say Izvekova used a fake Greek passport to open a Bank Account at a TD branch in New York in July, and tried to pressure another...

Advice for Changing the Culture That Enables Cyber-Bullying
A Rutgers University freshman committed Suicide this week after two classmates secretly recorded him engaged in a sexual encounter, and then broadcast the video over the Internet. Tyler Clementi jumped off a bridge to his death, virtually pushed off, frankly, by the sick act of vicious bullies who thought it was fun to exploit a human being for a cheap sexual online thrill. A 15 year-old Massachusetts High School Student named Phoebe Prince recently took her own life after six classmates...

Profile of a suspect
K imani Washington is a vicious drunk, an aspiring rapper and a swaggeringly confident ladies’ man, who turned away from his loving family to embrace the thug life, devastated friends and relatives said yesterday. But even as a hardened career criminal, Washington, 35, a father of five, knows better than to get mixed up in the slaughter of a mother and her baby, they said. “My whole family is blown away,” one of Washington’s many cousins told the Herald yesterday....

Swedish Man in Bid for Breast Milk
Swedish father Ragnar Bengtsson, 26, has entered into an experiment that he hopes will help him breastfeed his future Children.On Tuesday, the Stockholm family man began stimulating his breasts with a pump in a bid to produce milk.   "Anything that doesn't do any harm is worth trying out. And if it works it could prove very important for men's ability to get much closer to their Children at an early stage," Bengtsson told The Local.   His efforts are to be documented by Swedish TV8,...

A Good Rant
Dan Savage goes off on someone who “loves the Lord and does not support Gay Marriage” but was “heartbroken” to hear about the male Rutgers Student who committed Suicide after his sexual encounter with another male Student was livestreamed over a Webcam by some other Students. Being told that they’re sinful and that their love offends God, and being told that their relationships are unworthy of the civil right that is Marriage (not the religious rite that some...

Paris rally hits age of retirement
P ARIS - Hundreds of thousands of Protesters young and old demonstrated in France yesterday, waving union flags and pressing conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to drop plans to raise the Retirement Age from 60 to 62. It was the third day of Protests in a month. Unions tried a new tactic, scheduling the Protest for a Saturday instead of a weekday to draw families, youths and Private-sector employees who don’t show up during the workweek. Pockets of Students marched among the unions,...

Utah residents fear 'Israeli art students' prying into NSA data center
A local ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City, Utah has caused a stir online with a report suggesting that self-proclaimed Israeli art Students, peddling their artwork from door to door, have been asking disturbing questions about plans to build an NSA data center in the area. "These salespeople say they're Israeli Students," ABC4 reporter Brent Hunsaker explained. "They even produce Israeli passports. They say they're selling their own artwork to raise money to open a gallery. So why would the...

STRANGE de JIM'S ZINGERS COLLECTION OCTOBER 1 2010
David Letterman : “A big Scandal, New York cabbies have been overcharging. Just this morning I had to pay an extra $11.95 for shipping and handling. Several cabbies were ordered to report to the Court House downtown, but none of them could find it.” “A guy in Canada has invented a plane powered solely by his feet. Don’t laugh; he just sold one to Delta.” “People are always saying to me, ‘Conan, what’s the next big thing in fashion?’ Well,...

Storm Claims 7th Victim: NY Woman Lost In Flood
BRADLEY, N.Y. (AP) -The body of a 55-year-old woman reported missing amid a deadly Northeast storm was pulled from a reservoir Saturday, a day after Police believe rising waters swept her car off the road. Searchers recovered Nancy Lavelle’s body Saturday morning in the Neversink Reservoir in Bradley, more than 10 miles from where her vehicle was found the previous day. The car was upside down in a remote part of the Neversink River, said State Police Sgt. James...

Paxman and top BBC journalists warn against strike during Tory conference
Jeremy Paxman and Martha Kearney are among the signatories to a letter warning against strike action during the Tory conference. Photograph: BBC BBC News presenters and political Journalists, including Huw Edwards, Jeremy Paxman , Martha Kearney and Nick Robinson , have sent a letter to the National Union of Journalists expressing "serious concerns" with next week's planned strike during the Conservative party conference . The letter warned that holding the 48-hour strike over proposed...

BBC strike threat to Tory conference lifted
A union official mans the picket line during a strike by BBC employees outside BBC Television Centre in 2005. Photograph: John D Mchugh/AFP/Getty Images BBC strike action planned for next week during the Conservative party conference has been called off after broadcasting unions received a "significantly improved" offer from management today. The National Union of Journalists , Bectu and Unite today decided to scrap a planned 48-hour strike in Protest at proposed changes to the BBC final...

A social event for 'The Social Network'
It was a social event for "The Social Network." On Friday, the New York Tech Meetup (NYTMU) hosted a premiere screening of 'The Social Network' at 34th Street AMC Loews Theatre. The NYTMU is a New York City -based group of approximately 15,0000 Hackers, entrepreneurs, and investors. According to its website, NYTMU holds monthly meetings where "6 people get 5 minutes each to demo something cool to New York 's tech community" and perhaps become the Facebook of tomorrow. "The Social Network"...

Student's brain in a jar horrifies former classmates
Parents from New York are suing the city after their dead son's classmates discovered his brain on display at a city morgue. Andre and Korisha Shipley lost their son in a car accident in 2005. Three months after the Funeral, though, his classmates were on a field trip to the city morgue — a group that included his former girlfriend — and they saw the young man's brain on display in a jar, the New York Daily News reports. The Shipley's were aghast, having thought they buried all of...

Growing Anti-Immigrant Sentiments in an Unlikely State
Source: New York Times Nebraska may appear to be an unlikely setting for swelling Anti-Immigrant sentiment. This agricultural hub is far removed from any border. It has long been more preoccupied with bolstering its population than keeping people out. And Immigrants, legal and otherwise, have been fixtures for years in the fields and meatpacking plants here, helping this state put meat and vegetables on dinner tables around the country. But even as the state enjoys relative economic health ...

Late Night: Fear the Smartitude of The Bigbag Teabrains!
Charles Blow of the New York Times informs us that the Teabaggers are ever so smart, neener. Big-city Liberals and their blogging buddies love to paint Tea Partiers as yokels with incoherent Candidates and language-mauling signs. (Some have even dubbed their misspellings and grammatical gaffes Teabonics.) On some level, this may be true. But there is also a certain hypocrisy to these taunts. The unpleasant fact that these Liberals rarely mention, and may not know, is that large...