Wow. I think the worst part is the complete lack of humor. They seriously arrested a 6 year old and charged her with a felony and felt like there's nothing wrong with it. Maybe it's just the way the article described it, but that's the way it seems.
Alright, I have a brother who used to go through the same thing... he's got aspergers (high-finctioning autism), and he used to have extreme problems with anger when he was around 7 or 8. He'd throw chairs across the room, attack teachers, scream, lock himself into things.... to the point where he was expelled from like 2 schools, and unofficially kicked out of a few more. But once he got a crisis aid, and a teacher that wasn't afraid to physically restrain him, he figured out "hey, maybe havign a temper tantrum isn't such a great idea."
While I think it's better that they got some bigger force involved with really bad behavior problems, I think calling the police and even charging the girl is going a little bit too far...
I've worked with several children with autism and some with aspergers, Ive never felt the need to call the police for any of them. And I know how bad they an get. At 6 years old, she literally does not understand how hitting someone could be considered so bad that she would be arrested. You don't even need any training to understand that one. We need to move back to common sense. This whole fucking country, man. I'm gonna run for president and my platform will be (not so)common snese. People are too dan literal with the law. Just sit back and think for half of one fucking second and you'll understand what is right and what is wrong.
The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland's enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.
Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland's remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea.
Shaped like a three-fingered hand some 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it has been discovered by a veteran American explorer and Greenland expert, Dennis Schmitt, who has named it Warming Island (Or Uunartoq Qeqertoq in Inuit, the Eskimo language, that he speaks fluently).
The US Geological Survey has confirmed its existence with satellite photos, that show it as an integral part of the Greenland coast in 1985, but linked by only a small ice bridge in 2002, and completely separate by the summer of 2005. It is now a striking island of high peaks and rugged rocky slopes plunging steeply to a sea dotted with icebergs.
As the satellite pictures and the main photo which we publish today make clear, Warming Island has been created by a quite undeniable, rapid and enormous physical transformation and is likely to be seen around the world as a potent symbol of the coming effects of climate change.
But it is only one more example of the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet, that scientists have begun to realise, only very recently, is proceeding far more rapidly than anyone thought.
The second-largest ice sheet in the world (after Antarctica), if its entire 2.5 million cubic kilometres of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 metres, or more than 23 feet.
That would inundate most of the world's coastal cities, including London, swamp vast areas of heavily-populated low-lying land in countries such as Bangladesh, and remove several island countries such as the Maldives from the face of the Earth. However, even a rise one tenth as great would have devastating consequences.
Sea level rise is already accelerating. Sea levels are going up around the world by about 3.1mm per year - the average for the period 1993-2003. That is itself sharply up from an average of 1.8mm per year over the longer period 1961-2003. Greenland ice now accounts for about 0.5 millimetre of the total. (Much of the rest of the rise is coming from the expansion of the world's sea water as it warms.)
Until two or three years ago, it was thought that the break-up of the ice sheet might take 1,000 years or more but a series of studies and alarming observations since 2004 have shown the disintegration is accelerating and, as a consequence, sea level rise may be much quicker than anticipated.
Earlier computer models, researchers believe, failed to capture properly the way the ice sheet would respond to major warming (over the past 20 years, Greenland's air temperature has risen by 3C). The 2001 report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was relatively reassuring, suggesting change would be slow.
But satellite measurements of Greenland's entire land mass show that the speed at which its glaciers are moving to the sea has increased significantly in the past decade, with some of them moving three times faster than in the mid-1990s.
Scientists estimate that, in 1996, glaciers deposited about 50 cubic km of ice into the sea. In 2005, it had risen to 150 cubic km of ice.
A study last year by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology showed that, rather than just melting relatively slowly, the ice sheet is showing all the signs of a mechanical break-up as glaciers slip ever faster into the ocean, aided by the "lubricant" of meltwater forming at their base. As the meltwater seeps down it lubricates the bases of the "outlet" glaciers of the ice sheet, causing them to slip down surrounding valleys towards the sea,
Another discovery has been the increase in "glacial earthquakes" caused by the sudden movement of enormous blocks of ice within the ice sheet. The annual number of them recorded in Greenland between 1993 and 2002 was between six and 15. In 2003, seismologists recorded 20 glacial earthquakes. In 2004, they monitored 24 and for the first 10 months of 2005 they recorded 32. The seismologists also found the glacial earthquakes occurred mainly during the summer months, indicating the movements were indeed associated with rapidly melting ice - normal "tectonic" earthquakes show no such seasonality. Of the 136 glacial quakes analysed in a report published last year, more than a third occurred during July and August.
The creation of Warming Island appears to be entirely consistent with the disintegrating ice sheet, coming about when the glacier bridge linking it to the mainland simply disappeared. It was discovered by Mr Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, California, who has known Greenland for 40 years, during a trip he led up the remote coastline.
According to the US Geological Survey: "More islands like this may be discovered if the Greenland Ice Sheet continues to disappear."
A self-governing dependency of Denmark, Greenland is the largest island in the world but is inhabited by only 56,000 people, mainly Inuit. More than 80 per cent of the land surface is covered by the ice sheet.
Members of the area Chinese community have rallied behind a Clements High School senior who was removed from the campus and sent to M.R. Wood Alternative Education Center after parents complained he’d created a computer game map of Clements.
About 70 people attended the Fort Bend Independent School District’s April 23 meeting to show support for the Clements senior and his mother, Jean Lin, who spoke to FBISD Board trustees in a closed session.
While an agenda document does not specify details, the board is holding a special meeting tonight to address the boy’s actions and the discipline that was meted out as a result, sources close to the matter say. The boy’s name was not identified last week, and the district has declined to discuss his case.
Richard Chen, president of the Fort Bend Chinese-American Voters League and a acquaintance of the boy’s family, said he is a talented student who enjoys computer games and learned how to create maps (also sometimes known as “mods”), which provide new environments in which games may be played.
The map the boy designed mimicked Clements High School. And, sources said, it was uploaded either to the boy’s home computer or to a computer server where he and his friends could access and play on it. Two parents apparently learned from their children about the existence of the game, and complained to FBISD administrators, who investigated.
“They arrested him,” Chen said of FBISD police, “and also went to the house to search.” The Lin family consented to the search, and a hammer was found in the boy’s room, which he used to fix his bed, because it wasn’t in good shape, Chen said. He indicated police seized the hammer as a potential weapon.
“They decided he was a terroristic threat,” said one source close to the district’s investigation.
Sources said that although no charges were filed against the boy, he was removed from Clements, sent to the district’s alternate education school and won’t be allowed to participate in graduation ceremonies with classmates.
“All he did was create a map and put it on a web site to allow students to play,” Chen said. “The mother thinks this is too harsh.”
FBISD officials declined to comment on the matter Monday. “Our challenge is, people in the community have freedom of speech and can say what they want, but we have laws” covering privacy issues, especially involving minors, that the district has to respect, said spokeswoman Nancy Porter.
Speakers at the FBISD Board’s April 23 meeting alluded to the Clements senior’s punishment, and drew a connection to the April 16 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in which a Korean student shot and killed 32 people.
The Asian community “faces new pressures” as a result of the shootings, William Sun told board members. “We urge the school and community not to label our Asian students as terrorists.”
“We should teach our children not to judge others harshly” and not to target people as being a threat because of their race, said Peter Woo, adding that the school district should lead the way in such efforts.
But Chen said Monday he and other community members don’t consider FBISD’s actions in the case to be racially motivated, and don’t think they blew the incident out of proportion.
“They all think the principal has to do something – but how much? We do understand with the Virginia Tech incident…something has to be done,” Chen said. “Someone just made a mistake, and we think the principal should understand that.”
I'm going to China in less than three weeks! I'll be there until the end of June.
I will tell you all about how free speech is impeded, or how the Chinese are happy with their government, depending on how much the government lets me say.
Who knows, maybe they block the Orange Belt over there for its capitalistic doctrines! If you don't hear from me, assume that happened. Or that I died.
Comments
"You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can, and will be used against you in a court of law..."
jeez, what the fuck? you do not arrest six year olds, that should be against the law, hell they don't even understand the concept of crime yet.
While I think it's better that they got some bigger force involved with really bad behavior problems, I think calling the police and even charging the girl is going a little bit too far...
There. That's a better name.
Those silly chinese don't realize that there are no terrorists out to get China.
But in all seriousness, Jack Bauer is. He's effing pissed with them right now, I tell you...
As long as they are communists, I'll never feel safe giving my kids little plastic toys that say "MADE IN CHINA" on the back of them.
They want to be like their Uncle America so much, they've even started polluting just as much as us.
I will tell you all about how free speech is impeded, or how the Chinese are happy with their government, depending on how much the government lets me say.
Who knows, maybe they block the Orange Belt over there for its capitalistic doctrines! If you don't hear from me, assume that happened. Or that I died.
If there's one thing I learned from Sliders and that old game Raid Over Moscow, it's that communim is evil.