Teach For America (TFA) is best known for dispatching hundreds of idealistic college graduates to work in inner cities across the United States each year, but it also sends selected members on free, religious-themed tours of Israel.

Called The Reality Israel Experience, the TFA-sponsored trips bring idealistic young American teachers into contact with Israeli politicians and military personnel while "introducing [TFA] corps members to Israel's education and social justice systems."

According to testimonies featured on Reality Israel's official website, participants are at times led by a "military tour guide," visit with Israeli military educators at an army base "near Jerusalem" (in the occupied West Bank?), and enjoy "ATV off-roading all over the Golan Heights," an Israeli-occupied region of Syria.

The Reality Israel Experience is largely a project of Lynn Schusterman, the wealthy widow of the oil and gas tycoon Charles Schusterman. Since taking control of her husband's fortune, she has established a reputation as one of America's most aggressive backers of pro-Israel campus advocacy, funding campus-oriented ventures like Birthright Israel and The David Project.

As publicly-funded, privately-operated charter schools expand their reach and their wealthy advocates gain increasing influence over public education, boundaries between religion and state have blurred. This has opened avenues for ideologues like Schusterman to advance their political and religious agenda among a population of needy and impressionable children.

With an eye on promoting Israel advocacy in public schools, Schusterman has begun injecting millions into TFA, the advance guard of the education privatization movement.

Backed by billionaires

Since its birth in 1990, TFA has become a Wall Street-backed behemoth at the forefront of a movement that is rapidly placing large sectors of America's public education into private hands.

With at least $350 million in assets, including substantial support from billionaires like Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the heirs to the Walmart fortune, TFA has taken advantage of education reforms introduced under President George W. Bush and accelerated under the administration of Barack Obama. Thousands of its corps members are being moved into cities where certified, union-affiliated teachers are being laid off by the thousands.

Unlike certified teachers, TFA members must only complete a five-week summer training program before they enter the classroom. They work for lower salaries than certified teachers and must accept weaker health and pension benefits, a prime arrangement for libertarian-minded governors and mayors seeking to hollow out the public sector.

Former San Francisco resident Joseph Naso faces a possible death sentence after a Marin County jury on Tuesday found him guilty of murdering four Northern California women - prostitutes who were raped, strangled and dumped along rural roads in the late 1970s and early 1990s.

The verdict in a San Rafael courtroom followed two months of often lurid testimony in which prosecutors recounted how the discovery of a "rape journal" and other obsessive writings by Naso cracked the cold cases.

Naso, acting as his own lawyer, countered that he wasn't the "monster" authorities described.

The jury spent less than a day deliberating before finding Naso, 79, guilty of four counts of first-degree murder, along with the special circumstance of committing multiple killings. The same jury will convene for a death penalty hearing starting Sept. 4, after which they must decide whether Naso should be executed or sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Marin County prosecutors will be asking a jury to impose the death penalty for the first time since 1990. If executed, Naso would be the oldest person ever put to death in California.

Authorities believe Naso may have committed other killings, but they charged him with leaving four bodies along roads in Marin, Contra Costa and Yuba counties. The onetime photographer acknowledged that he hired prostitutes and photographed them in sexual positions, and admitted that he wrote in journals that he raped women. But he said he did not kill anyone.

Long-expected letter from Pink Floyd front man to the 'family of Rock and Roll' blasts Israel for 'apartheid' and 'ethnic cleansing'

British rocker Roger Waters has published an open letter calling on fellow musicians to join a boycott of Israel.

The letter, which condemns Israel for apartheid and ethnic cleansing, has been expected for several months, according to the Electronic Intifada, which first reported on its existence.

"I write to you now, my brothers and sisters in the family of Rock and Roll, to ask you to join with me, and thousands of other artists around the world, to declare a cultural boycott on Israel," Waters wrote in the letter dated Aug. 18. The letter was drafted in July.

The former Pink Floyd front man said he was inspired to release the letter after British violinist Nigel Kennedy called Israel an apartheid state at a recent promenade concert at the Albert Hall in London. The BBC said it would remove his remarks in rebroadcasts of the concert.

A 44-year-old man climbed onto the roof of his apartment and began acting strangely. Police arrived to help him down, but instead ended up killing him with a series of offensive maneuvers including tasing him while in a choke-hold, and finally dragging his lifeless body down a staircase, with his skull banging against every step.

Michael Angel Ruiz is the son of a retired LAPD detective and had a history of drug addiction. On July 28, for reasons unknown, he climbed onto the roof of his apartment. Witnesses called the police to protect his safety. This turned out to have been a fatal decision.

Modern Russian residents have largely changed compared to Soviet people, independent pollster Levada Center has said, citing a recent poll.

Asked whether the residents of today's Russia are different from people who lived in the Soviet Union, 74 percent of respondents said they are completely or in many respects different.

Fourteen percent said Russian nationals today have changed little or have remained the same, and 12 percent said they did not know.

Of those who said Russian residents are different, 58 percent said people have become more calculating and colder toward one another, 35 percent said people have grown intolerant, 30 percent said people are poorer and 29 percent called modern Russians freer.

Malaysian rescuers recovered 37 bodies after a tourist bus plunged into a ravine near a resort outside Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday, killing many of the passengers in one of the worst road accidents in many years.

"Rescue operation is still on. We think there were 53 passengers on board, but we are not sure," said Che Shaari Abdullah, an assistant director at Kuala Lumpur's Fire and Rescue Department. The cause of the accident is still being probed, he added.

Malaysian emergency services personnel work to rescue passengers after a bus carrying tourists and local residents fell into a ravine near the Genting Highlands, about an hour's drive from Kuala Lumpur.

Fire Department spokesman Christopher Chong said that the bus was likely overloaded as it was meant to carry only 44 passengers.

The bus was coming back from the Genting Highlands - a patch of hillocks 55 kilometers (34 miles) from Kuala Lumpur and home to Malaysia's only casino - when it skidded off the road Wednesday afternoon.

Sixteen passengers were rescued - some with serious injuries - and are being treated in hospitals in Kuala Lumpur and its suburbs, the official said.

Duncan, Oklahoma. -- With a motive that's both chilling and simple - to break up the boredom of an Oklahoma summer - three teenagers randomly targeted an Australian collegiate baseball player who was attending school in the U.S. and killed him for fun, prosecutors said Tuesday as they charged two of the boys with murder.

Prosecutor Jason Hicks called the boys "thugs" as he described how Christopher Lane, 22, of Melbourne, was shot once in the back and died along a tree-lined road on Duncan's well-to-do north side. He said the three teens, from the grittier part of town, chose Lane at random and that one of the boys "thinks it's all a joke."

Hicks charged Chancey Allen Luna, 16, and James Francis Edwards Jr., 15, of Duncan, with first-degree murder. Under Oklahoma law they will be tried as adults. Michael Dewayne Jones, 17, of Duncan, was charged with using a vehicle in the discharge of a weapon and with accessory to first-degree murder after the fact. He is considered a youthful offender but will be tried in adult court.

Jones wept in the courtroom after he tried to speak about the incident but was cut off by the judge who said it wasn't the time to sort out the facts of the case. Jones faces anywhere from two years to life in prison if convicted on the counts he faces.

The two younger teens face life in prison without parole if convicted on the murder charge.

"I'm appalled," Hicks said after the hearing. "This is not supposed to happen in this community."

An explosion at a Navy base in New Jersey on Tuesday left at least eight people hurt, one of them seriously, the authorities said.

The Navy said the blast occurred around 9 a.m. in a marine boat repair shop at the Naval Weapons Station Earle, in Monmouth County. Workers were doing routine maintenance at the time of the explosion.

Naval officials said that the cause was still under investigation and that the damage was contained in the boathouse area.

Seven of those injured were treated at area hospitals - most for smoke inhalation - and had been released by Tuesday afternoon, the Navy said. One person, who suffered a broken arm and underwent surgery, remained hospitalized.

An ammonia leak and ensuring explosion in Central American country of Mexico has left at least three people dead and 10 others injured while prompting mass evacuations.

Local authorities of the country's southern state of Oaxaca stated Tuesday that the leak occurred after construction equipment operated by a private company struck a pipeline that carries ammonia to a nearby petrochemical plant owned by the state's oil monopoly Pemex.

The local government officials further added that the pipeline rupture on Tuesday also resulted in an explosion.

All of the three fatalities were reportedly construction workers employed on a highway expansion project.

The ten injuries came from the explosion while 40 others reportedly fell ill by inhaling ammonia.

Sweden's justice minister on Tuesday met with activists who convinced prominent Swedes to wear headscarves this week to protest an alleged attack on a Muslim woman who wore a hijab.

"We tried to say that there is structural discrimination ...but (Justice Minister Beatrice Ask) kept referring to individual responsibilities," Foujan Rouzbeh, one of the organisers, said at a press conference after the meeting.

"I also said that under this government, we've gotten the impression that that this type of crime has increased," she added.