Class Dismissed, a new full-length documentary film about homeschooling, was screened in the Boston area on December 1, having already been seen by sold out audiences in November on the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland). It explores the rapidly growing homeschool movement - its challenges and great successes. I was informed about it by my old friend and "unschooling" pioneer Pat Farenga, who appears briefly in the film. He described it in an e-mail:

Class Dismissed follows one family's quest to better their children's lives by pulling them out of one of the highest-rated schools in L.A. Parents Rachel and Todd are frustrated by the rigid state-imposed standards of the modern educational system and hope 21st century technology and new research will provide a means for their two daughters to earn a quality education outside the modern school system. They quickly discover that they must overcome long-standing assumptions about education and face the social ramifications of their bold experiment.

A Baptist pastor in Tempe, Arizona called for the mass extermination of LGBT people on Sunday in a sermon entitled "AIDS: The Judgement of God."

In the sermon, which was uploaded to YouTube on Monday from Faithful Word Baptist Church, Pastor Steven Anderson said that God has ordered in the scriptures that gays should be killed, and that if humanity wants to have an "AIDS-free world by Christmas," he said, that's what should be done.

"Turn to Leviticus 20:13," he says in the video, "because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS."

A New York City grand jury has decided not to indict the New York Police Department officer accused of killing a Staten Island man by putting him in an illegal chokehold. The NYPD is now preparing for more protests stemming from the decision.

Early Wednesday afternoon, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post all reported that a grand jury declined to indict the officer.

Although the special grand jury declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the white officer accused of strangling Garner, who was black, the police department can still reprimand Pantaleo under a basic rule that loosely states if an officer does anything to embarrass the department, then they can be disciplined.

"It's sad if they take that position," Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, told Staten Island Live. "I'd be surprised and a bit disappointed if he was used as a political pawn to appease the community."
The incident occurred on July 17, when at least five New York Police Department officers took 43-year-old Eric Garner, a Staten Island father of six, to the ground in an attempted arrest on Staten Island. One put Garner in a chokehold that caused Garner - who suffered from asthma - to lose consciousness and reportedly go into cardiac arrest. He was declared dead at a nearby hospital.

The Staten Island District Attorney's Office convened the grand jury in September, but did not announced the list of potential charges against Pantaleo. But prosecutors outside the district told ABC News that the range could have included second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, felony assault or reckless endangerment. Legal experts and former prosecutors had said that, despite the medical examiner's ruling the death a homicide, murder charges were unlikely, the New York Times reported.

Perhaps the most dangerous nuclear reactor in the U.S. is in partial shutdown following the discovery of a steam leak.

South Florida's ailing Turkey Point nuclear power station is in the news again, with Unit 4, one of its two reactors, taken offline Sunday due to a steam leak, according to a Dec. 1^st update released by Industrial Info Resources online. Conspicuously, as of the writing of this article, there is no indication that this highly concerning event has received mainstream media coverage.

In a recent report, Is Miami on the Brink of a Nuclear Disaster?, we discussed the imminent possibility of a Fukushima-style meltdown at Florida Power & Light's Turkey Point facility, only 41 miles south of Miami near Homestead; a reactor so primitively designed that it uses a 168-mile network of open air canals to cool it's ancient reactors (built in 1972), reminiscent of a Medieval moat system.

"It's been three weeks since the flashbang exploded next to my sleeping baby, and he's still covered in burns. There's still a hole in his chest that exposes his ribs. After breaking down the door, throwing my husband to the ground, and screaming at my children, the officers - armed with M16s - filed through the house like they were playing war. They searched for drugs and never found any.

I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn't see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he'd just lost a tooth. It was only hours later when they finally let us drive to the hospital that we found out Bou Bou was in the intensive burn unit and that he'd been placed into a medically induced coma." - Alecia Phonesavanh, the mother of Baby Bou Bou

After a year dominated with news of police shootings of unarmed citizens (including children), SWAT team raids gone awry, photo ops of militarized police shouldering assault rifles while perched on top of armored vehicles, and reports on how the police are using asset forfeiture laws to pad their pockets with luxury cars, cash and other expensive toys, I find myself wrestling with the question: how do you prepare a child for life in the American police state, especially when it comes to interactions with police?

Do you parrot the government line, as the schools do, that police officers are community helpers who are to be trusted and obeyed at all times? Do you caution them to steer clear of a police officer, warning them that any interactions could have disastrous consequences? Or is there some happy medium between the two that, while being neither fairy tale nor horror story, can serve as a cautionary tale for young people who will encounter police at virtually every turn?

Children are taught from an early age that there are consequences for their actions. Hurt somebody, lie, steal, cheat, etc., and you will get punished. But how do you explain to a child that a police officer can shoot someone who was doing nothing wrong and get away with it? That a cop can lie, steal, cheat, or kill and still not be punished?

Kids understand accidents: sometimes drinks get spilled, dishes get broken, people slip and fall and hurt themselves, or you bump into someone without meaning to, and they get hurt. As long as it wasn't intentional and done with malice, you forgive them and you move on. Police shootings of unarmed people - of children and old people and disabled people - can't just be shrugged off as accidents, however.

Aiyana Jones was no accident. The 7-year-old was killed after a Detroit SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into her family's apartment, broke through the door and opened fire, hitting the little girl who was asleep on the living room couch. The cops weren't even in the right apartment.

A global study of adolescents from low-income neighborhoods revealed that teenagers from Baltimore, a city located just 40 miles from the US capital, are faring worse than their counterparts in Nigeria.

Many people tend to associate child poverty with desperate scenes out of Africa or India. But according to a recent WAVE study, an international survey that examined the living conditions of 15-19 year olds in poor areas in Baltimore, Shanghai, Johannesburg, New Delhi and Ibadan (third largest city in Nigeria), the problem is much closer to home than many people realize.

In the five neighborhoods examined in the study, poverty was the common thread that linked these culturally diverse locations. Differences among the teens in these urban areas became obvious, however, when it came to how they perceived their state of well-being.

Teens from Baltimore and Johannesburg, South Africa, viewed their communities more negatively than the other locations in the study.

A physical fitness assessment program is under scrutiny after a middle school student in Iowa refused to be weighed in front of her classmates.

During a check-up in her physical education class, Ireland Hobert-Hochtold told her teacher that she didn't want to take part in the FitnessGram program, a fitness measurement tool her school has used for at least four years.

Ireland's decision landed her in the principal's office.

"I don't feel like it's [the school's] business," Ireland told the Des Moines Register. "I feel like it's my doctor and my mom and my own business - or maybe not even my own, because I don't need to know that right now."

The FitnessGram program, which has been in existence since 1982, assesses six areas of health-related fitness - including body composition, flexibility, muscular strength and endurance, and aerobic capacity. Once physical education teachers conduct tests, they measure scores using the Healthy Fitness Zone standards. School administrators use the reports in letters addressed to parents that explain the importance of physical activity and outline "areas for improvement."

I decided to read the comments on Bulgarian information resources. You can feel for our Bulgarian brothers. Translated a couple dozen of them. The vast majority of the comments, of course were written in the following spirit:

* * *
Yes, something happened, what I was talking about a long time ago - the South Stream will pass through the territory of the country, which is a more reliable partner than we are! Well, we're a wealthy country, for us 400 million euros... is nothing. We will not even ask for compensation from the EU, you can be sure!
* * *
God, what idiots are in charge right now!
* * *
Are you Bulgarians or are you stupid? We had to fight!!!
* * *
It's very simple. To this point we were led by greedy Prime Minister with BSP party. It is a national disaster!

A California woman sued her former employer, the online real estate firm Zillow, after supervisors allegedly harassed and propositioned her for sex and subjected her to what she described as "sexual torture," the Recorder reported.

The suit by Rachel Kremer, filed in Orange County on Monday, accuses supervisors at the company's Irvine office of cultivating an "adult frat house" culture and refusing to take action when she reported the offensive behavior. Kremer also accuses the Seattle-based company of firing her for bringing the harassment to light.

"Privately, Zillow executives bragged that the office culture led to more sexual encounters than Match.com, and referred to the internal office directory as 'Zinder,' named after the dating application Tinder," the suit states.

Kremer began working for the company's sales department in June 2012. Her attorneys enclosed copies of lewd messages she received between December 2012 and her termination this past August.

"I have a great opportunity that just opened up on my face in the 92660 market," sales manager Cody Fagnant told her in a text message. "Call me if you are interested. This is an executive position and won't last long. Haha. Goodnight Rachey."

Many young French jihadist fighters who joined the Islamic State militants have started questioning what they are really doing with them. Their lawyers say they want to come home but dread possible criminal charges, France's Le Figaro has reported.

"If I go back to France, what will happen to me? Can I avoid prison? "- these are the questions young jihadists ask their lawyers and families. Their messages were exclusively leaked to France's Le Figaro newspaper which says that it contacted the extremists' lawyers.


Some of the "IS newbies" complain they have been misled into journeying to the Middle East.