Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Step Aside Detroit: There Is A New “Worst” City For Housing In The U.S.

Step Aside Detroit: There Is A New “Worst” City For Housing In The U.S.

September 29, 2015 in Economy, Financial Crisis, News, U.S. News by Slad
Zero Hedge | Tyler Durden | 09/29/2015 15:48 -0400 
 

Photo: YoChicago.com

While the Case-Shiller index reported earlier was weaker than had been expected, and the 20 City composite index posted its third monthly decline in a row, the headline hid a wide dispersion of home prices beneath the surface.


Perhaps just to underscore this point, Case-Shiller also provided a handy chart showing the best and worst cities for home prices in the US.


It will come as no surprise that the west, with San Diego, is where the gains are still frothiest: after all the Chinese “hot money” exporters are rushing to park their funds before the exit door slams shut, and are doing so as close to home as possible.


What was surprising is the other end of the spectrum, because as Case-Shiller clearly shows, Detroit – after staging a brief dead cat bounce in the aftermath of its bankruptcy and since sliding once again – may no longer be the worst city for home prices in the US. It has now been displaced by a city which many speculate will be nothing short of the “next Detroit.”

The silver lining: while Chicago home prices have been sliding for the past 4 months, they are still up compared to last year… if only for the time being.
 
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As Rapes & Murders Go Unsolved, Cops Make Arrests Every 51 Seconds for Marijuana Possession

As Rapes & Murders Go Unsolved, Cops Make Arrests Every 51 Seconds for Marijuana Possession


The Free Thought ProjectJohn Vibes | September 29, 2015
 
every-51-seconds-there-is-a-marijuana-arrest
 

Despite the fact that many states are finally legalizing the plant and the culture is starting to be more accepting, in recent years, there has actually been an increase in marijuana arrests. In fact, more often than once every minute, someone is arrested and put in a cage for marijuana possession. 

Many prohibitionists and mainstream media commentators insist that police have a hands-off strategy with marijuana and that small time users never actually do any time under the current laws. However, this assessment could not be further from the truth. Marijuana possession is actually one of the most common reasons for someone to be behind bars.  

According to data released this week by the FBI over 620,000 people were arrested for simple possession in the past year. This number averages out to 1,700 people per day, or one person every 51 seconds. These numbers don’t even consider the many unreported arrests that take place throughout the country each year. The numbers also seem to indicate that as some states are legalizing marijuana, other states are cracking down even more in response. 

Tom Angell of the Marijuana Majority responded to the data in a statement to the Washington Post, saying that, “It’s unacceptable that police still put this many people in handcuffs for something that a growing majority of Americans think should be legal. There’s just no good reason that so much police time and taxpayer money is spent punishing people for marijuana when so many murders, rapes and robberies go unsolved.”
 
Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project said that “These numbers refute the myth that nobody actually gets arrested for using marijuana. It’s hard to imagine why more people were arrested for marijuana possession when fewer people than ever believe it should be a crime. Law enforcement officials should not be wasting their time and resources arresting and prosecuting adults for using marijuana.  While law enforcement was busy making nearly three quarters of a million marijuana arrests, more than 35% of murders went unsolved, the clearance rate for rape was less than 40%, and for robbery and property crimes, it was below 30%.”

 
“Could you imagine if hundreds of thousands of adults were arrested last year simply for possessing alcohol? That would be crazy. It’s even crazier that hundreds of thousands of adults were arrested for possessing a less harmful substance. As long as we have these silly laws on the books, law enforcement resources will be wasted on enforcing them. It’s time for state officials to step up and end the outdated policy of marijuana prohibition,” he added.


The numbers also indicated that total marijuana arrests have increased nationwide for the first time since 2009.


In the United States, the murder clearance rate in 1965 was more than 90 percent. Since the inception of the war on drugs, the murder clearance rate has plummetted to an average of less than 65 percent per year.


This decline is in spite of there being far fewer murders. It is also in spite of new technological developments to help police solve crimes, like DNA testing, advanced forensic labs, and unethical spying devices like the stingray.


Despite the near complete erosion of the constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure, the clearance rate for murder continued its free fall. This highlights the fact that no matter how many rights are given up or freedoms diminished, police cannot guarantee your safety.

It’s not just murders that police fail to investigate, it’s rapes too.

 
According to the Department of Justice, there are currently over 400,000 untested rape kits collecting dust in police evidence rooms nationwide, and many other estimates suggest that this number could be as high as one million.

As a result of this horrific negligence, roughly 3% of rape cases in America are actually solved. This is in spite of the fact that many rape kits have a high chance of leading to an arrest since most rapists are career criminals who have their DNA on file.


When the government is more concerned with kidnapping and locking people in a cage for possessing a plant that grows from the ground, instead of preventing and solving rapes and murders, something has gone horribly wrong.


If you think the war on drugs is an abject failure, please share this article with your friends and family to let them know how the state is more interested in a plant than they are “protecting” anyone.



John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter-culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work, he organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference, which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com.
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/real-crime-unsolved-police-arrest-50-seconds-marijuana-possession/#ezWO11cb7x5arBwi.99

 

School District Called Police on Students 1,745 Times in Single School Year

(For California if the student has 3 offenses they get 25 years to Life, and no Removal for just vandalism of Graffiti!!!)
 

School District Called Police on Students 1,745 Times in Single School Year

Watch Video:
A Bay Area school district recently referred more students to police than nearly every other district in the country. Bigad Shaban reports in a story that first aired September 29. (Published Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2015)


Read the first part of this two-part story here.

An NBC Bay Area investigation into the use of police on school campuses found one Bay Area school district called police on its own students so many times they outranked nearly every district in the country.

East Side Union High School District in San Jose referred students to police 1,745 times during the 2011-2012 school year, ranking them 14th in the country, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Education.


Critics say that when police handle school discipline, the line between childish misbehavior and criminal activity is often blurred leaving some students with a criminal record before they hit puberty. Certain groups of students find themselves face-to-face with police more often than others, with African Americans and students with disabilities referred to police at disproportionately high rates.

At East Side Union High School District, Superintendent Chris Funk said a combination of factors led to the extreme numbers of police encounters on campus. Zero-tolerance discipline policies and insufficient staffing numbers meant that police were being called when it wasn’t always appropriate.

“I think that we had a practice here where we were relying too much on having the officer do the facilitation and the legwork versus the administration doing the legwork,” Funk said.

To put those numbers in perspective, Oakland Unified School District only referred 12 students to law enforcement during the same year, despite enrolling nearly 15,000 more students than East Side Union High School District. No other Bay Area school district came close to East Side Union’s numbers.


“I think what happened was because of zero-tolerance policies, there was a period of time where people just went to the police and had students cited for everything,” Funk said. “Now, we’ve really narrowed that gap.”

The U.S. Department of Education has not released police referral data since the 2011-2012 school year, so NBC Bay Area filed public records requests with each of the Bay Area’s 25 largest school districts to obtain the most recent data. 20 school districts provided the information by our deadline.

The Investigative Unit found that East Side Union’s referrals dropped dramatically to just 214 during the 2013-2014 school year.

Bay Area School Referrals to Law Enforcement (2013-2014)
California schools referred 31,961 students to law enforcement, according to the latest available statewide data for 2011.
To get the most recent numbers, the Investigative Unit individually requested the latest student disciplinary data from 20 of the Bay Area's largest schools. In many districts, schools refer students of color and students with disabilities to law enforcement at a much higher rate than their peers.
 See Chart:

Funk attributed the decline to doubling the number of counselors in the district and placing social workers on every campus.

“Those positions are just starting to come back in the last two years,” Funk said. “We hired 207 new staff members in the last two years as budgets continue to grow. There were a lot of loop-holes where kids were falling through the cracks, and hopefully we’re closing them now.”

However, the district’s lower referral rates are still among the highest in the Bay Area. The Investigative Unit also found that minorities and students with disabilities were still sent to police at disproportionately high rates.

During the 2013-2014 school year, children with disabilities made up 10 percent of the population, but totaled 25 percent of all students referred to law enforcement. Hispanic children represented 47 percent of the population, but 73 percent of all the students referred to police.

The practice of staffing police on school campuses is not unique to East Side Union High. School-based “resource officer” programs began in the 1950s, but grew in the 1980s and 1990s to weed out drugs, weapons and violence from schools.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 76% of all high schools have police or security officers on campus. While the goal of these policies is to make schools safer, some believe they can actually harm students.

“There are tragic long-term consequences,” said Laura Garnette, Chief Probation Officer for Santa Clara County.

When a child enters the criminal justice system at an early age, Garnette said, they begin to identify as a criminal and are more likely to offend again in the future. It is part of a phenomenon known as the “School to Prison Pipeline”, where zero-tolerance policies criminalize certain behaviors and funnel students from the school system into the justice system.

Schools that aren’t well resourced with counselors and staff tend to lean more heavily on police, according to Garnette, which can lead to students getting in serious trouble for some not-so-serious misbehavior. If a student is cited by police for that conduct, it is the equivalent of an arrest and goes on a child’s criminal record.


Garnette says her probation officers drop nearly 70% of juvenile cases because they do not find them serious enough to get referred to the District Attorney for criminal charges.

“I think we certainly see a lot of cases where we think, ‘seriously?’” Garnette said. “The consequences of having the criminal justice system and police intervene in what by most people’s account is normal adolescent behavior is tragic.”

However, even if no charges are filed, the arrest still shows up on a student’s criminal record.

That was the case for 15-year-old Adrian Crosby. Crosby, who is autistic, was in seventh grade at Bret Harte Middle School in San Jose when he used a small rock to write his initials on the sidewalk outside the school. School staff called the campus resource officer, and Adrian received a juvenile citation for vandalism.


“It is just unbelievable,” said Aida Crosby, Adrian’s mother. “It brings me chills down my back and it is injustice. It is injustice.”

Adrian’s probation officer closed his case two years ago, but Aida said her family was never told Adrian would still have a criminal record. Aida said she had no idea until the Investigative Unit explained the process to her. By law, the Crosby family will have to wait until Adrian turns 18 before they can petition the court to seal his juvenile record.

“The feeling is a feeling of desperation,” Aida said. “It’s a feeling…like they have cut the oxygen out of you – like you can’t breathe and it’s painful and it makes you kind of want to give up.”

Islam quiz has U.S. parents 'outraged'

Islam quiz has U.S. parents 'outraged'

'They're not teaching 10 Commandments' but Muslim prayers allowed


Above is an excerpt from a quiz given to students in Walton County, Georgia.
Above is an excerpt from a quiz given to students in Walton County, Georgia.

Hundreds of irate parents are planning to attend the Walton County, Georgia, school board meeting Oct. 10 to convey their outrage over their children being taught the religious beliefs of Islam in middle-school social studies.
The outrage erupted over a quiz handed out to students asking them to answer questions related to the five pillars of Islam, the Quran as the “holy” book of Muslims, and the conversion prayer known as the “shahada,” which states, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” Perhaps most disturbing to Christian parents was the “correct” answer that the Muslim god Allah is the “same god” that is worshiped by Christians and Jews.
At the same time Islam is being studied in detail, the beliefs of Christianity are glossed over, parents say. They now have more than 2,300 parents and concerned citizens who have joined a Facebook group dedicated to opposing the school system’s methods of teaching comparative religions.
“I believe my children are my responsibility, and I believe I need to be the one teaching them what we believe instead of the school,” Bill Green told News 95.5.

Watch local TV report from Fox 5 News below:

'Nothing about 10 commandments'
Parent Michelle King told WSB-TV she's upset because students seem to spend a lot more time learning about Islam than any other religion.
"My daughter had to learn the (shahada), and the five pillars of Islam, which is what you learn to convert," King said. "But they never once learned anything about the Ten Commandments or anything about God."
"What they are learning goes against my religion completely," she said.
Kim Embry, spokeswoman for the Walton County School District, said in an interview with Fox 5 that some Christian students may need to learn more about Islam than Christianity since they're already familiar with the Christian faith.

Watch Embry's comments below:

Ryan Breece launched the Facebook page in an attempt to get school officials to alert parents to upcoming lessons on religion or other sensitive topics. They say that would give them a chance to opt their children out of assignments with which they disagree.
Breece said he pulled his sixth-grade daughter out of recent lessons on Islam, and her grade suffered as a result. He doesn’t think that's right.
"We need to see the assignments, and we need to be able to opt out without any grade negativity on our children," he told News 95.5, adding that he expects hundreds of parents to attend the Oct. 10 board meeting with similar demands.
Breece said Tuesday he has been invited to a private meeting with the school board Wednesday at 9:15 a.m.
"Fox News will be there," he wrote on the group's Facebook page. "Please come and gather in the parking lot or lobby to show your support. Now it's time for us to show we all care about this issue."
The Board of Education building is at 200 Double Springs Church Road, Monroe, Georgia.
The education standards being used in Walton County are the same standards used in all of Georgia and there have been complaints in the past. Last year, parents from Cartersville Middle School in Cartersville, Georgia, contacted WND and said their school was inviting Islamic teachers to come and indoctrinate their children about the tenants of Islam.
The latest controversy was touched off when Youth Middle School gave a fill-in-the-blank test on the basics of Islam as one of several examples of controversial lessons (correct answers in parenthesis):
  • "In 610, Muhammad was told by the angel (Gabriel) that he was a (prophet) sent to Earth by (God)
  • "He began preaching a new monotheistic faith called (Islam) – (Surrender) to God"
  • “Basic beliefs of Islam:
  • "Followers of Islam are called (Muslims) who believe in (one) God, called (Allah)
  • "Allah is the (same God) worshiped by Jews & Christians
  • "Muslims believe Muhammad was the (last) of God’s prophets
  • "The teachings of Muhammad were written down in the (Quran) …, the holy (book) of Islam."
Other assignments delved into the five pillars of Islam – pilgrimage to Mecca, giving of alms, fasting and prayer five times a day, along with the associated Arabic words and phrases.
Arabic is the fastest-growing language in U.S. public schools, likely due to the 70,000 foreign refugees, the majority of them Muslim, who are being resettled annually by the Obama administration in cities and towns across the U.S.

Just latest in long line of complaints by parents
This type of parental uproar over Islamic teachings in public schools has become endemic across the U.S. in recent years, with complaints by parents popping up in school districts nationwide since 2011.
Christina Michas, founder of Operation Jericho Project and co-founder of Citizens United for Responsible Education, has been tracking the encroachment of Islam into public schools for several years, and she says it's obvious that atheist groups are not nearly as concerned about Islam in the schools as they are about Christianity.
"It's everywhere," she said, noting that a teacher in Texas who gave students a more accurate history of Islam got fired. She was referring to the case of Dale Wolverton in Richmond, Texas.
Wolverton was forced to resign on April 8 when the Hamas-supporting Council for American-Islamic Relations filed a complaint against him for handing out brochures detailing the bloody history of Islam, ABC News reported.
Tennessee pastor Greg Locke in Mt. Juliet recently encouraged students to "take an F" on their test about the Islamic religion over what he described as "absolute brainwashing of religion," EAGnews reported.
Locke pointed out in a viral video that local history books include about 28 pages on Islam, but only "a half-page of watered down Christianity," according to the Tennessean.
Dozens of teachers and administrators in Pennsylvania's Lebanon School District attended a taxpayer-funded workshop at a local mosque to learn about Islam, EAG News reported in June.
About 50 staffers from the district attended the workshop led by former district Arabic translator Mohamed Omar, who "took time off from his new job as a case worker for the Department of Human Services in Philadelphia to share his knowledge of Islam with the staff, which included Superintendent Marianne Bartley and several other administrators," the Lebanon Daily News reports.
Afterward, they headed to the nearby Lebanon Valley Mosque to join an Islamic prayer service with the congregation, according to the Daily News.
This is the second year the school district has held the mosque workshop.
"There was no mention of objections or threatening letters sent to the school district by atheist groups that typically scream foul with religious-themed school events," EAG News reported.

Teachers and staff from Pennsylvania's Lebanon School District bow to Allah inside a local mosque.

Teachers and staff from Pennsylvania's Lebanon School District bow to Allah inside a local mosque.

For the teachers it appeared to be all about comparing cultures and conveying them as equal.
"It's important that we educate ourselves about cultures that are different from our own and that we try to eliminate some misunderstandings," English as a second language teacher Lara Book said. "Although our cultures are different, the fundamentals of them are similar and we all want the same things: happiness for our families health, and success. Although we might go about finding those things in our lives differently, from a cultural standpoint, we all want the same thing."
Meghan Frick, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Education, said school systems in Georgia have "pretty broad freedom" in how they teach the required Georgia Performance Standards in social studies.
"They have that standard and it's just a couple of sentences, and they can teach that to students however they choose," she said. "We don't dictate a curriculum, we don't tell them what worksheets to hand out or what textbooks to use."
In Castle Rock, Colorado, earlier this year, the Douglas County School System required middle-school girls to comply with a special dress code suitable for visiting a mosque in Denver. The school system sent a note home to parents that read:
"THERE IS A DRESS CODE FOR THIS TRIP: All students must wear appropriate long pants. Ankles must be covered. Girls must bring wide scarves or hooded sweatshirts for the mosque."
Once at the mosque, the students were told to bow to Allah.

School girls in Littleton, Colorado, don the required attire as they get ready to enter a mosque in Denver.

School girls in Littleton, Colorado, don the required attire as they get ready to enter a mosque in Denver.

"Shariah in the classroom," wrote Pamela Geller, author of "Stop the Islamization of America," on her website. "Here again we see anywhere American law and Islamic law conflict, it is American law that has to give way."
Geller adds, "The subjugation and oppression of women are enshrined under the Shariah. Young school girls should not be forced to 'respect' a dress code that represents honor violence, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, child marriage et al."
The Jersey City Board of Education recently voted not to close schools for the Muslim holiday of Eld al-Adha. It has been reported that a Muslim woman in attendance made a veiled threat saying: “We’re going to be the majority soon."
New York City schools already sanctions the closure of schools for Muslim holidays while Christian holidays such as Christmas are referred to generically as "winter recess."
In 2013 at Lumberton High School in Texas, girls were encouraged to dress up in burqas during a geography class to expose them to "world cultures, religions, customs and belief systems." There was no clothing brought for the students to experience dressing like a nun or Orthodox Jew, according to a Front Page Magazine report.
The Lumberton teacher was quoted by a student as saying, "We are going to work to change your perception of Islam" from one sullied by terrorism into one hoping for peaceful coexistence.
Thomas More Law Center is representing the father of an 11th-grade La Plata High School student in Maryland who was given a failing grade for refusing to complete assignments she considered to be Islamic indoctrination.
She had to affirm, similar to the Georgia quiz, that "there is no god but Allah" and the remaining five pillars of Islam. John Wood, a former Marine, demanded his daughter be given an alternative assignment, but the school refused and banned him from school property.
"We're talking about assignments where the right answer is, ‘There’s no god but Allah,' and that Allah is the same god that is worshiped in Christianity and Judaism,” Michas said.
Lack of balance in teaching about Islam
But what is most troubling about these assignments is they never provide any balancing material on the dark side of Islam, Michas said.
For instance, there is no mention of the harsh treatment under Shariah law of women, homosexuals, Christians, Jews or other religious minorities. There is no teaching on the recurring strong themes of jihad throughout Islamic history, or that Muhammad personally beheaded at least 600 Jewish men and pubescent boys after they unconditionally surrendered at the Battle of the Trench in Medina, taking the women and children as slaves.
There is nothing about female genital mutilation, or the fact that a woman must have multiple male witnesses to press charges for rape or she will be blamed for the “crime.” Nor are students taught that the Quran (in 4:34) says its acceptable for Muslim men to strike a disobedient wife.
"I lived in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, all over the Middle East. My father was in the Air Force,” Michas said. “I saw how women are treated over there."
Women are also entitled to only half as much inheritance as their male siblings under Shariah.
But American school children are being fed a distorted view of Islam in U.S. public schools, Michas said.
She said the largest textbook provider, United Kingdom-based Pearson, has been bending for years to the will of influence agents tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The texts often state as fact that Muhammad was the "last prophet."
'Connect All Schools'
Michas said the Islamization of American schools has been going on since at least 2011 and just keeps getting worse.
She traces the phenomenon back to 2009 and a program called “Connect All Schools,” which came out of the Obama administration’s U.S. Department of Education. WND has previously reported on the program and its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood.
The stated goal of the initiative is to "connect every school in the U.S. with the world by 2016." On its website, the organization reports that 316 internationalized U.S. schools have already connected with 140 countries, the majority of them from the Middle East and Africa.
The Qatar Foundation International, or QFI, partnered with the U.S. State Department and Department of Education in the launching of Connect All Schools. The QFI is closely linked to the Al Jazeera news network and the Muslim Brotherhood, WND reported.
Vartan Gregorian, a board member of the QFI, was appointed in 2009 to President Obama’s White House Fellowships Commission.
WND previously exposed that Gregorian served as a point man in granting $49.2 million in startup capital to an education-reform project founded by former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and chaired by Obama.
Documentation shows Gregorian was central in Ayers’ recruitment of Obama to serve as the first chairman of the project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge – a job in which Obama worked closely on a regular basis with Ayers.
Copyright 2015 WND

http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/islam-quiz-has-u-s-parents-outraged/