Modern education reformers often repeat the idea that simply throwing more money at public schools isn't enough to improve them. As the Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution who's done a great deal of academic writing on the subject, puts it, "We know that there's not much relationship between spending and performance." Rather than funnel more dollars to public education, the thinking goes, we need to change how funding gets used (which, in the minds of many, means strict standards enforced by a boatload of testing, plus weaker teachers' unions).

London street artist Pegasus has sent a clear message that he believes Donald Trump is a tyrant in the making. The artwork depicting the Republican presidential hopeful in the guise of Adolf Hitler was painted on the side of a pub in Bristol.

Pegasus told Mashable that the piece took five days from design to implementation and hopes that it will "give voters the wake up call they need."

One person has died and three people are missing following the collapse of a building at Didcot A Power Station. A major incident was declared at the site in south Oxfordshire after initial reports of an explosion at 16:00 GMT.

Thames Valley Fire Control Service confirmed the fatality and also reported four people were injured in a "very severe incident". The decommissioned Didcot A plant closed in 2013 and demolition work has been taking place.

The US government agency charged with handling the influx of child refugees that have arrived along the US-Mexico border in recent years does not have a system for tracking the kids, nor does it maintain complete case files, according to a federal report.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency with the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is tasked with placing unaccompanied child migrants with sponsors while their hearings in immigration courts are pending. More than 125,000 such children have been captured at the border since 2011. This flood of refugees has put tremendous strain on ORR, a new report by the US Government Accountability Office has found, echoing previous media reports and congressional investigations regarding substandard government handling of child placement and claims of abuse.

ORR has often left child refugee case files incomplete, complicating efforts to ensure children are receiving proper care or medical services, GAO reported. Furthermore, contractors and non-profits allowed to run shelters and locate sponsor for child refugees have not received adequate oversight. GAO investigators found that ORR staff visited only 12 of 133 shelter sites in 2014, and only 22 of 140 sites as of August 2015.

The hedge fund magnates Daniel S. Loeb, Louis Moore Bacon and Steven A. Cohen have much in common. They have managed billions of dollars in capital, earning vast fortunes. They have invested large sums in art — and millions more in political candidates.

Moreover, each has exploited an esoteric tax loophole that saved them millions in taxes. The trick? Route the money to Bermuda and back.

With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the "income defense industry," consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.

In recent years, this apparatus has become one of the most powerful avenues of influence for wealthy Americans of all political stripes, including Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen, who give heavily to Republicans, and the liberal billionaire George Soros, who has called for higher levies on the rich while at the same time using tax loopholes to bolster his own fortune.

All are among a small group providing much of the early cash for the 2016 presidential campaign.

At least one person is dead and three are missing after an incident at the UK's Didcot power plant, authorities say. Witnesses reported an explosion at the site, after which part of the building collapsed.

The incident occurred at the Didcot power station in Oxfordshire, around 70 miles (113 km) west of London.

Witnesses describe hearing a loud blast before part of the building collapsed. Several videos and photos posted on Twitter show plumes of smoke and dust rising into the air near the damaged building.

Here's a bothersome trend that seems quite fitting for the smoke and mirrors driven, celebrity obsessed, hologram society that America has become. A company known as Crowds on Demand is actually in the business of providing fake protesters for causes, fake entourages for wanna be celebrities and seemingly even fake supporters for unpopular corporate activities.

This just furthers my feeling that action is far more important than traditional protests in the 21st Century. They key to getting out of the mess we are in is to actively create a parallel economy and even monetary system adjacent to the current terminal one. That way, when this one blows up, we already have the infrastructure in place to move to another paradigm. One characterized by peaceful, voluntary human interaction and dominated by decentralization in virtually all aspects of human existence.

- From the 2013 post: Protesters for Hire: For a Few Thousand Dollars We'll Buy You a Small Entourage

I first highlighted the company Crowds on Demand over two years ago in the above post. Turns out it's much worse than I could have imagined.

Shocking video has emerged of the moment a man pulled a shark out of the sea to pose for selfies with the distressed animal.

Shot in Florida, USA, the footage shows the unidentified man return from the water with the shark and posing with it on the beach as it struggles to breathe. The footage comes just days after a crowd of tourists in Argentina sparked global outrage when they 'killed' a baby dolphin by plucking it from the sea for selfies.

It is believed the blacktip shark was out of the water for at least a minute while the man posed for photographs with it. The animal writhes around on the sand, clearly terrified and unable to breathe. The man eventually throws the animal back out to sea - but he doesn't take it out far enough and it washes back up.

A Facebook post by WPTV journalist Ashleigh Walters said the shark was eventually taken further out, but it remains unclear whether it survived.

When the next major earthquake hits Afghanistan, could it leave the leadership of the Afghan military buried under five stories' worth of rubble? John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, does not rule it out. In an audit set for release Thursday, Sopko said the new $155 million Afghan military headquarters, funded by U.S. taxpayers, may not withstand the Big One.

"Although the building generally met contract requirements and appears well built, we found some construction deficiencies that may have safety implications . . . in the event of an earthquake," the inspector general wrote to U.S. military leaders. Sopko was referring to engineering standards that call for the foundations of large buildings to be segmented, allowing movement to be diverted in multiple directions. That would lessen the chance of large structures shaking to the point of collapse. In this case, the new jewel of the Afghan military — a structure often referred to as the Afghan Pentagon — does not even meet the standards of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the report says.

The document is the latest question to be raised about how the United States spent more than $68 billion in funding for Afghan security forces since 2001, including $6 billion for bases and buildings. When the new Defense Ministry headquarters was proposed in 2009, it was slated to cost about $49 million. But the project encountered numerous delays and cost overruns, in part because the Afghan military kept adding new features to the project. By 2014, the project had become so expensive that the U.S. military had effectively run out of money to complete it, prompting a stop-work order.

But Congress replenished the funds, and the building was completed this past summer. The 516,000-square-foot structure features a 1,000-seat auditorium, state-of-the-art command-and-control centers, a dining hall, a library and conference rooms. Sopko said the lack of adequate structural support represents a glaring oversight, considering Afghanistan's history of significant earthquakes.

As any resident of Kabul can attest, there can be multiple jolts in a single week. In the past four months, the maze of fault lines in northeastern Afghanistan produced two earthquakes with a magnitude of 6 or greater, including a 7.5-magnitude temblor in October. In 2002, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake flattened dozens of buildings in Kabul.

Edgar Camacho-Alvarado, 23, was shot and killed by police this weekend while police were searching for a murder suspect in his neighborhood. The young man was not actually guilty of any crime, nor did he pose a threat to officers, and he never even attempted to interfere with their investigation. He was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, working to fix the engine in his truck in the driveway in front of his home.

The police are refusing to release any further information about the shooting, but Edgar's family wants answers.

"This morning, we got a call about APD and U.S. Marshals being at my aunt's house. We have no idea why they shot him. He passed away instantly. They were looking for someone else and they killed him," Perla Alvarado, Edgar's cousin told KRQE News 13.