Society's Child
Salvador Castro Middle School in Westlake North went into lockdown Thursday morning, with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) warning of a shooting in progress.
Only 38 percent agreed with the statement that "Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals," the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found.
The 58 percent support for government marks an all-time high during the 20 years the question has been posed, analysts noted. The poll was taken nationwide Jan. 13-17, in the run-up to the recent three-day government shutdown.

Acting on adulterous fantasies may strengthen a relationship, as counterintuitive as it may sound.
Comment: From "cuckservative"? Umm, no. The euphemism was inspired by the Cuckoo bird, who would lay its eggs in another bird's nest.
But, according to a recent study by David Ley, Justin Lehmiller and the writer Dan Savage, acting on cuckolding fantasies can be a largely positive experience for many couples, and hardly a sign of weakness.
Comment: That stretches even our credulity.
References to cuckolding appear in literature as early as the 13th century, usually in the form of male characters who fear that their child has been sired by another man during an act of infidelity.
Comment: No. A cuckhold is a person who knowingly raises the child of an adulterous affair. It's not just someone who "fears that their child has been sired by another man."
Today, however, cuckolding has become fetishized into a powerful sexual fantasy for some men, who get aroused by the idea of their romantic partner engaging in sexual activity with someone else.
Comment: We wonder how that happened.
Women also share this fantasy, but less so than men."This fantasy has been around as long as marriage and sexuality," said Ley, whose book "Insatiable Wives" addresses cuckolding in heterosexual couples. "But we're hearing more and more about it these days, and more people are rejecting the social stigma against this fantasy."
During a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, the former China editor said the BBC risks indelibly tarnishing its reputation as it falls short of admitting the pay discrepancy that exists between its male and female staff.
Comment: Admit your predetermined guilt, BBC. The pitch forks are coming.
"Yet the BBC lives or dies by its reputation for telling the truth," Gracie said.
She was giving evidence to MPs during her grievance process after she resigned last month in protest over what she called the "secretive and illegal pay culture," which she detailed in an open letter published in the Times.
It came after a report found that two-thirds of those earning more than £150,000 ($213,800) a year at the BBC were men.
Comment:
On Friday, the Manchester Art Gallery announced it would be temporarily removing a painting from the 1890s in order to "prompt conversation about how we display and interpret artwork" during a time when several sexual harassment scandals are in the headlines.
"The gallery exists in a world full of intertwined issues of gender, race, sexuality and class which affect us all. How could artworks speak in more contemporary, relevant ways?" the gallery's statement reads.
John William Waterhouse's 1896 painting Hylas and the Nymphs depicts a scene from Greek Mythology where Nomia, a water nymph, lures Hylas, one of Heracles' companions, to his watery grave. The seven mythical creatures in the painting are all shown as naked women.
The painting used to hang in a room called "In Pursuit of Beauty," which features paintings of beautiful women, some of whom are represented without any clothing.
Comment: How best to make art speak in a "contemporary, relevant" way? Remove beauty.
"This gallery presents the female body as either a 'passive decorative form' or a 'femme fatale'. Let's challenge this Victorian fantasy!" the museum stated in the announcement.
Comment: Arguably all objects depicted in art are presented in a passive, decorative form. Free the apples! Free the flowers! Free the stern, unsmiling portraits!

Police arrested five people for stealing 4.4tonnes of oranges from a nearby town
The fruit robbery ignited a police car chase when local Seville police became suspicious of the three vehicles travelling together in a close line.
When the vehicles spotted the police they made a 'sharp' turn, causing police to pursue the cars on a dirt road to track down the group.
In one van a couple traveled with their adult son. In the second, two brothers traveled together. Both were packed with with massive amounts of oranges in sacks.

Roman Abramovich was estimated to have lost $60m from his $9bn fortune in the 24 hours after the ‘Putin list’ was published.
RBK, a Russian newspaper, reported on Wednesday that the business people included on the "Putin list" had lost a combined total of $1.06bn (£750m) in the 24 hours after its publication.
The biggest losses were reportedly incurred by Vagit Alekperov, the owner of Lukoil, Russia's biggest privately owned oil company, who lost $226m. Alekperov's total wealth is estimated by Forbes at more than $14bn. Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club, lost $60m from his total fortune of about $9bn, RBK reported, using figures compiled by Forbes.
"The Forbes list has been transformed from a list of vanity into a list of toxicity," wrote Nikolai Mazurin, the editor-in-chief of Forbes' Russian edition. He complained that some wealthy Russians who had previously been happy to speak to the magazine were now giving it the cold shoulder.
The ruling on Belykh's conviction was announced in Presnensky District Court on Thursday afternoon. The sentence is expected to be pronounced later in the day, with prosecutors demanding 10 years in prison and a 100 million ruble fine ($1.75 million) for the ex-official.
The case against Belykh began in June 2016, after the then-governor was detained in the process of receiving a €400,000 (over $440,000) cash bribe in a Moscow restaurant. Investigators suspected the bribe was intended as payment for including two local companies - a ski factory and a forest-management firm - in a federal investment program as priority projects. During the investigation, more instances of bribery were uncovered, bringing the total amount of received funds to €600,000 ($745,000).
Amanda Spielman, head of Ofsted, is calling on teachers not to shy away from reproaching religious fundamentalists who are trying to brainwash pupils and cut them off from society.
"Ofsted inspectors are increasingly brought into contact with those who want to actively pervert the purpose of education," she is expected to tell a Church of England school conference on Thursday.
"Under the pretext of religious belief, they use education institutions, legal and illegal, to narrow young people's horizons, to isolate and segregate, and in the worst cases to indoctrinate impressionable minds with extremist ideology."
Comment: One wonders just what British "values" are being undermined. Perhaps the values that led to colonialism, slavery, genocide, class warfare and xenophobia? Plenty of elite Brits would hate for those values to go away.
Ethan Stables, 20, is alleged to have planned to kill people at a gay pride demonstration in Barrow, Cumbria, last June. He denies preparing an act of terrorism and threats to kill, and says he is not homophobic but was just trying to impress his friends.












Comment: Words fail us. They truly do.