Homeschooling Banned in California

A California appeals court has ruled that homeschooling of children is illegal unless their parents have teaching credentials from the state.

“California is now on the path to being the only state to deny the vast majority of homeschooling parents their fundamental right to teach their own children at home,” said Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association.

The court overturned a lower court’s finding that homeschooling did not constitute a violation of child welfare laws.

“California courts have held that … parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children,” Justice H. Walter Croskey said.

The decision stunned parents of the state’s roughly 166,000 homeschooled children. While the court claimed that it was merely clarifying an existing law and not making a new one, the decision leaves the parents of homeschooled children at risk of arrest and criminal prosecution.

“At first, there was a sense of, ‘No way,’ ” homeschool parent Loren Mavromati said. “Then there was a little bit of fear. I think it has moved now into indignation.” 

Parents’ reasons for homeschooling their children range from religious beliefs to dissatisfaction with the education received at public or private schools. But according to the court, all California children between the ages of 6 and 18 must attend either a full-time public or private school or be taught by a tutor credentialed for their specific grade level.

“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation,” Croskey wrote.

California’s largest teachers union welcomed the decision as did the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles.

According to the law center’s executive director, Leslie Heimov, children should not be educated at home, because they need to be “in a place daily where they would be observed by people who had a duty to ensure their ongoing safety.”

FBI Investigates Major Players in Financial Crisis

The FBI is investigating Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and AIG – and their executives – as part of a broad look into possible mortgage fraud, sources with knowledge of the investigation told CNN Tuesday.

The following paragraphs summarize the work of  experts who are completely familiar with all the aspects of . Heed their advice to avoid any  surprises. The sources would not speak on the record for the investigation is flowering.

FBI spokesman Special Agent Richard Kelko had no comment on that ammo, but vocal that 26 firms were currently under investigation as part of the bureau’s mortgage fraud inquiry.

Earlier this month, FBI director Robert Mueller told Congress that 1, 400 individual real estate lenders, brokers and appraisers were now under investigation in addendum to two dozen corporations.

” The FBI currently has 26 pending corporate fraud investigations involving subprime lenders, ” Kelko said. ” As we have pragmatic, this number can fluctuate because tide, however we act not discuss which companies may or may not hold office the theory of an investigation. ”

Previously, CNN has reported that Countrywide is part of the investigation.

The sources said the probes of Fannie ( FNM, Reliance 500 ), Freddie ( FRE, Daydream 500 ), Lehman ( LEHMQ ) and AIG ( AIG, Fortune 500 ) are believed to be in the early stages. One source said the government would be ” remiss ” if it didn’t look into what happened at these companies through of the cash problems they are involved esteem and the actions of individuals lingering them. The United States is in the midst of a spiraling economic crisis fueled principally by the housing market. If you find yourself confused by what you’ve read to this point, don’t despair. Everything should be crystal clear by the time you finish.

Earlier this decade, mortgage lenders relaxed restrictions on obtaining mortgages as home prices soared about 85 percent from 1996 through 2006 in inflation – adjusted dollars, creating a bubble. Then the bubble popped, and lenders – as well as mortgagees – took the hit.

Reach week, mortgage insurer AIG narrowly avoided bankruptcy when the federal juice took 80 percent of its justice direction contest for an $85 billion loan from the Federal Reserve while Lehman filed the largest bankruptcy notoriety American history. Earlier this month, the qualification took over mortgage giants Fannie and Freddie.

Bank of America ( BAC, Expectation 500 ) bought Countrywide in July. Changed bank failures and takeovers hold led to the Bush administration’s current proposal to spend $700 billion to shore maturation the fiscal markets. The proposal is under consideration by Rally, where lawmakers from both sides of the aisle posses balked at the proposal’s lack of driver’s seat provisions, among different issues.

As the mortgage industry began to make plain, the FBI, with sustain from the IRS, launched a broad investigation into mortgage fraud. In June, its Mortgage Fraud Task Force arrested other than 400 mortgage brokers, lenders, appraisers and other industry insiders who, the it said, were responsible for besides than $1 billion significance losses.

Last month, a Mortgage Asset Look into Institute ( MARI ) study found that the number of pretended loans issued during the smallest three months of 2008 skyrocketed 42 percent compared with the same period in 2007.

Sometimes it’s tough to sort out all the details related to this subject, but I’m positive you’ll have no trouble making sense of the information presented above.

Iraqi Refugees: U.S. Citizens Get Crapped on Again

If life in the U.S. hasn’t already been downgraded enough by the economy caused mainly by the Iraqi and Afghanistan Conflicts then it is about to get worse if washington has its way by importing thousands of Iraqi Refugees into the U.S., Please somebody tell me, are they CrAzY!

The United States has surpassed its goal of admitting 12,000 Iraqi refugees this year and expects more, perhaps tens of thousands, next year, the State Department said on Friday.

The United States expects to admit a minimum of 17,000 Iraqi refugees in fiscal 2009, which begins October 1, the department’s senior coordinator for refugees said. Thousands more Iraqis and their family members could arrive through a special visa program for people who worked for the United States or its contractors.

“I think you’ll see the U.S. government admitting over the course of fiscal 2009 tens of thousands of Iraqis into the United States,” coordinator James Foley told reporters.

Up to 3,000 could come from Baghdad, where the United States began interviews this year, he said.

So far this year, 12,118 Iraqi refugees have arrived and 1,000 more are booked to travel to the United States by the end of this month, when the U.S. fiscal year ends, he said.

That marks a huge leap from just 1,600 Iraqis admitted in the previous year. That number drew widespread criticism from refugee groups that said Washington should do more to help millions of Iraqis who have fled instability and violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

The number is still lower than what some other countries have taken. Sweden, a country of 9 million people, has admitted over 40,000 Iraqis since 2003.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates 2 million Iraqis are living abroad, mostly in neighboring Jordan and Syria. Some 2.5 million are internally displaced.

One refugee advocacy group, Human Rights First, said it welcomed the news Washington had met its target for Iraqi arrivals in 2008 but that the “low” goal of resettling 17,000 refugees in fiscal 2009 should be raised to at least 30,000.

“The number of Iraqi refugees we have welcomed to our shores is still just a fraction of those in need,” said Amelia Templeton of the New York-based group. She said the U.N. refugee agency estimated that 85,000 Iraqi refugees from the most vulnerable groups would need resettlement next year.

Foley called on the government of oil-rich Iraq to do more to help Iraqi refugees abroad as well as plan for returning Iraqis by addressing their needs for security, social services and property compensation.

So far, he said, Iraq had spent only about $25 million to help its refugees abroad, and provided about $200 million for an initiative to help returning refugees. The latter amount was “rather small,” considering the number of Iraqi refugees and the improving security situation inside Iraq, Foley said.

“One cannot rule out in these situations the possibility that the refugees in large numbers themselves will decide it’s time to go back, but will the Iraqi government be ready for that? That’s what we have to prepare for I think,” Foley said.

The United States spent over $318 million in humanitarian aid for Iraqi refugees this year, Foley said. Washington sought support from other donors, “particularly in the region, not to mention, the government of Iraq itself.”

Foley said he was grateful that Syria, a country with which the United States has strained relations, had agreed to a new facility for refugee processing, which would enable Washington to handle larger numbers of refugees.

Have Mind Reading Machines Arrived

Years ago, Woody Allen used to joke that he’d been thrown out of college as a freshman for cheating on his metaphysics final. “I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me,” he confessed.

Today, the joke is on us. Cameras follow your car, GPS tracks your cell phone, software monitors your Web surfing, X-rays explore your purse, and airport scanners see through your clothes. Now comes the final indignity: machines that look into your soul.

With the aid of functional magnetic resonance imaging, neuroscientists have been hard at work on Allen’s fantasy. Under controlled conditions, they can tell from a brain scan which of two images you’re looking at. They can tell whether you’re thinking of a face, an animal, or a scene. They can even tell which finger you’re about to move.

But those feats barely scratch the brain’s surface. Any animal can perceive objects and move limbs. To plumb the soul, you need a metaphysician. John-Dylan Haynes, a brilliant researcher at Germany’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, is leading the way. His mission, according to the center, is to predict thoughts and behavior from fMRI scans.

Haynes, a former philosophy student, is going for the soul’s jugular. He’s trying to clarify the physical basis of free will. “Why do we shape intentions in this way or another way?” he wonders. “Your wishes, your desires, your goals, your plans—that’s the core of your identity.” The best place to look for that core is in the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex, which, he points out, is “especially involved in the initiation of willed movements and their protection against interference.”

To get a clear snapshot of free will, Haynes designed an experiment that would isolate it from other mental functions. No objects to interpret; no physical movements to anticipate or execute; no reasoning to perform. Participants were put in an fMRI machine and were told they would soon be shown the word “select,” followed a few seconds later by two numbers. Their job was to covertly decide, when they saw the “select” cue, whether to add or subtract the unseen numbers. Then, they were to perform the chosen calculation and punch a button corresponding to the correct answer. The snapshot was taken right after the “select” cue, when they had nothing to do but choose addition or subtraction.

Until this experiment, which was reported last month in Current Biology, nobody had ever tried to take a picture of free will. One reason is that fMRI is too crude to distinguish one abstract choice from another. It can only show which parts of the brain are demanding blood oxygen. That’s too coarse to distinguish the configuration of cells that signifies addition from the configuration that signifies subtraction. So, Haynes used software to help the computer recognize complex patterns in the data. To dissect human thought, the computer had to emulate it.

Each participant took the test more than 250 times, choosing independently in each trial. The computer then looked at a sample of the scans, along with the final answers that revealed what choices had actually been made. It calculated a pattern and used this pattern to predict, from each participant’s remaining scans, his or her decisions in the corresponding trials. Haynes checked the predictions—add or subtract—against the participants’ answers. The computer got it right 71 percent of the time.

I know what you’re thinking: Why would anyone want a machine to read his mind? But imagine being paralyzed, unable to walk, type, or speak. Imagine a helmet full of electrodes, or a chip implanted in your head, that lets your brain tell your computer which key to press. Those technologies are already here. And why endure the agony of mental hunt-and-peck? Why not design computers that, like a smart secretary, can discern and execute even abstract intentions? That’s what Haynes has in mind. You want to open a folder or an e-mail, and your computer does it. Your wish is its command.

But if machines can read your mind when you want them to, they can also read it when you don’t. And your will isn’t necessarily the one they obey. Already, scans have been used to identify brain signatures of disgust, drug cravings, unconscious racism, and suppressed sexual arousal, not to mention psychopathy and propensity to kill.

Haynes understands the objection to these scans—he calls it “mental privacy”—but he buys only half of it. He doesn’t like the idea of companies scanning job applicants for loyalty or scanning customers for reactions to products (an emerging practice known as neuromarketing). But where criminal justice is at stake, as in the case of lie detection, he’s for using the technology. Ruling it out, he argues, would “deny the innocent people the ability to prove their innocence” and would “only protect the people who are guilty.”

I hear what he’s saying. I’d love to have put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed through an fMRI before Sept. 11, 2001, instead of waiting six years for his confession. And I wish we’d scanned Mohamed Atta’s brain before he boarded that flight out of Boston. But what Haynes is saying—and exposing—is almost more terrifying than terrorism. The brain is becoming just another accessible body part, searchable for threats and evidence. We can sift through your belongings, pat you down, study your nude form through your clothes, inspect your body cavities, and, if necessary, peer into your mind.

FMRI is just the first stage. Electrodes, infrared spectroscopy, and subtler magnetic imaging are next. Scanners will shrink. Image resolution and pattern-recognition software will improve.

But don’t count out free will. To make human choice predictable, you first have to constrain it so that it’s not really free. That’s why Haynes confined his participants to arithmetic, gave them only two options, and forbade them to change their minds. They could have wrecked his experiment by defying any of those conditions. So could you, if somebody came at you with a scanner or an electrode helmet. To look into your soul and get the right answer, science, too, has to cheat. Somewhere, Woody Allen is laughing. I can feel it.

Defense Spending Out of Control!

612 Billion Dollars for Defense is Out of Control!

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a $612.5 billion defense spending bill for fiscal 2009, including $70 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As passed on an 88-8 vote, the measure would authorize $103.9 billion for Pentagon procurement, $1.2 billion more than President George W. Bush’s request. Overall, Bush had asked for $611.1 billion for national defense. The bill shifts more of the costs of Iraq’s reconstruction onto Baghdad. It also puts further restrictions on contractors working in Iraq, including prohibitions on interrogations and the performance of “inherently governmental functions” in combat. The measure must now be reconciled with the $612.5 billion version passed by the House of Representatives on May 22. The Senate bill would let the Pentagon spend $70 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 and authorize a 3.9 percent pay raise for military personnel, half a percentage point more than sought by Bush. House and Senate negotiators are due to meet next week on a compromise version that can be sent to Bush for signing into law. Among sticking points is the Boeing Co <BA.N>-led Future Combat Systems, the centerpiece of Army modernization. The House cut $200 million from the $3.6 billion requested to continue development of a $160 billion system of digitally linked vehicles for air and ground combat. The Senate approved without major change the Bush administration request for Future Combat Systems. SAIC Inc <SAI.N> is Boeing’s co-lead manager on the FCS program. The Senate bill would authorize $8.9 billion for Missile Defense Agency programs, $411.8 million less than Bush’s request.