Thursday, November 16, 2006

U.K.: ANOTHER CRACKDOWN ON HUGGING

The anus running this school should be delighted that the kids are affectionate towards one-another

A school has told pupils to avoid hugging because they are taking too much time to reach their lessons. Callington Community College, a mixed comprehensive in Cornwall with 1,250 pupils, said hugging had begun to cause "problems". The headmaster, Stephen Kenning, wrote on the school's website: "Hugging has become very acceptable amongst students. This has led to some students believing that it is okay to go up to anyone and hug them, sometimes inappropriately. "This is very serious not only for the victim but also for anyone accused of acting inappropriately. To avoid putting anyone at risk please avoid hugging."

Yesterday, Mr Kenning added: "During the changing of lessons, girls were hugging each other and taking too much time to get to lessons. "We also had complaints from other students about inappropriate hugging. It was going on too often and people were abusing it. The school has not banned it. However, it is being discouraged and we are asking pupils to cut out anything unnecessary and only hug when they need to hug." Pupils would not get into trouble if they ignored the advice, he added.

However, Kath Pascoe, a local councillor who has two grandchildren at the college, said: "I don't see anything wrong with hugging - better that than fighting and arguing. Surely it can't take that long to get to lessons?"

Mr Kenning said he had had one complaint from parents about the anti-hugging drive and that pupils had taken the advice on board. David Cohen, a member of the British Psychological Society and author of the book Body Language said hugging was a basic human instinct. He said: "Human beings are touchy-feely creatures by nature. It is only a problem if you invade someone's personal space. Surely it is better youngsters get the human contact they need innocently. If you ban it, they are far more likely to seek it round the back of the bike sheds." Pupils said there had been detentions at the school for hugging, and a "naming and shaming" policy in assembly.

Source



UK: Fox hunters outfoxing the law



Eighteen months ago hunting was banned. Or was it? The hounds are still running, foxes are still being killed and the number of people taking part has actually increased. As the new season begins, Stephen Moss saddles up and discovers how the hunts are outfoxing the law.

'Are you pro or anti?" Florence (aka Florrie, aka Flossie) asks me. "Neither," I insist, sitting firmly on the fence. "I'm here to report, to see both sides, to be objective, to tell it as it is, to -" "Yes, but are you pro or anti?" she asks again, seeing through my obfuscation. Florrie is nine, and nine-year-olds just won't put up with bullshit.

"My children have grown up marching," says Florrie's mother, Philippa Mayo. She is the head of the Countryside Alliance's hunting campaign, and one of the reasons I am sitting on a horse, about to follow the hounds across the Leicestershire countryside.

Eighteen months ago, hunting was banned. Remember? Hounds were going to be slaughtered; red coats abandoned; huntsmen sacked. It was the end of hunting - and probably the end of rural life, too. Today, however, there are more hunts than there were at the time of the ban; more hunters, too, according to the Countryside Alliance. No stores selling hunting gear have gone bust. Indeed, business is buoyant, according to Jane White at equestrian store Calcutts in Sutton Scotney, Hampshire. "There was a drastic dip in 2004, the year of the ban," she says. "People didn't know what was going to happen. Last year saw a slight improvement, and this year has picked up incredibly. A lot of people have taken it up." Hunting, a banned activity, appears to be booming.

Mayo lives in a village on the border between Leicestershire and Rutland. This is a place where everyone says good morning; despite the November chill, elderly ladies engage in lengthy conversations outside the post office; and the newsagent's counter is covered not with copies of Closer and Heat, but with Horse and Hound, the Field, Sporting Gun. Here, field sports call the shots.

Mayo has convinced me that I should ride with the Cottesmore in my quest to discover how hunting has survived the ban. She is lending me a horse and promises to keep me company during the hunt. I haven't ridden for four years, so anything could happen. The Cottesmore is what might be called a middle-ranking hunt - not as posh as the neighbouring Quorn, but more upscale than the farmers' packs in Wales and the West Country. There are about 70 riders this Saturday morning, with another 40 or so people following in cars. Hunting's car followers are often forgotten, but they are a vital part of its ecology.

The other misconception is that all these 70 riders are engaged in the act of hunting. They aren't. The only people who hunt are the professional huntsman, his two whippers-in (also usually professional hunt servants), and two or three trusted volunteers. They and the hounds do the hunting; everyone else - "the field", in the jargon - tries to keep up as best they can. But they are expressly forbidden to get too close in case they distract the hounds. Hunting is a secretive activity, often undertaken in wooded areas that are out of bounds to the field, and largely impenetrable to the non-expert. All of which makes it very difficult to decide whether huntsmen are acting legally.

And that is the crux. Does the legislation outlaw hunting or not? Those who succeeded in getting the Hunting Act on to the statute books in 2004 are in no doubt - hunting is banned. "Hunting live quarry is illegal," says the RSPCA's Becky Hawkes. "If dogs are not being kept under control and people going out hunting are aware of that, then the law would be broken." "Any pursuit or chase is illegal," insists Barry Hugill of the League Against Cruel Sports. They are right - up to a point. There it is in the first line of the act: "A person commits an offence if he hunts a wild mammal with a dog." Couldn't be clearer. Except there are a further five words in that sentence: "... unless his hunting is exempt." Those five words - and the list of exemptions in schedule one of the act - have been the salvation of hunting. One exemption in particular has been manna to the hunters: "Flushing a wild mammal from cover is exempt hunting if undertaken for the purpose of enabling a bird of prey to hunt the wild mammal." And so hunts have begun using packs of hounds in combination with birds of prey.

Today the Cottesmore is out with its golden eagle, Anna (they did think about calling it Notil, as in Notil-eagle, but pulled back). It is perched on the arm of its handler, Vernon Moore, and is the most important participant in the day's hunting. Without the bird of prey, it would not be legal to flush out a fox using a pack of hounds. All that would be permissible would be the use of a pair of hounds to flush out a fox to be shot. Some hunts are using the latter exemption, but it is the presence of a bird of prey that permits the hounds to work as a pack of 30 or 40 - the essence of hunting, in the view of connoisseurs. "The exemptions in the act allow us to do an awful lot," admits Mayo, "and the mood is much more optimistic now than it was. For so long we had the ban hanging over us, and then the worst that could ever happen happened. Now we're over that huge hump. We've survived two seasons, and for the first time in years there is a real prospect of my grandchildren being able to hunt. Meltdown didn't happen." ....

The hunts are using every grey area in the act. What they cannot afford is a chase across open country, which would be a clear breach of the law, might be witnessed or photographed, and could end up with the huntsman in court. Overall, it's a mess, a farce, a typical British fudge that leaves no one happy except the lawyers......

The ultimate objective, of course, is repeal, and for the hunters there is a knight on a white charger on the horizon. David Cameron has pledged that, if he becomes prime minister, he will allow another free vote on the issue. With a Conservative majority, backed by a group of Labour pro-hunters and about half the Lib Dems, the hunts are convinced they will get repeal. All they have to do is sit tight and live with pseudo-hunting for the next four or five years....

Seed says the present chaos helps no one - least of all the foxes, which are being shot in far greater numbers than when farmers left them for hunts to deal with. "The hunts are continuing; the hounds are continuing; all those misguided parliamentarians have done is condemn a far greater number of foxes to a slower and longer death." When hounds kill, hunters argue, death is instantaneous. A man with a rifle may only wound a fox, leaving it to die lingeringly.

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SHOOTING EAGLES OK IF YOU ARE AN INDIAN?

Federal prosecutors are appealing a judge's decision to dismiss a case against an American Indian who shot a bald eagle for use in a tribal religious ceremony. U.S. Attorney Matt Mead filed notice Wednesday that he will ask a federal appeals court in Denver to overturn U.S. District Judge William F. Downes' dismissal of a case against Winslow Friday, 22, a Northern Arapaho Indian who acknowledged shooting a bald eagle in March 2005.

Friday could have been sentenced to up to a year in jail and a $100,000 fine if convicted.

Eagle feathers are a key element of ceremonies of the Northern Arapaho and many other tribes. Downes said in his ruling last month that the government's actions have shown "callous indifference" to American Indian religious beliefs.

Friday's lawyers argued that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service generally refuses to grant permits allowing tribal members to kill bald eagles, even though federal regulations say such permits should be available.

"It is clear to this court that the government has no intention of accommodating the religious beliefs of Native Americans except on its own terms and in its own good time," Downes wrote.

Friday said in a telephone interview that other Indians complain that a federal repository that dispenses eagles killed by cars or power lines works too slowly and sometimes provides remains of poor quality. The judge said Friday's tribe also argued that such birds are not considered "clean" for ceremonies, and that the hunting of a bald eagle is in itself a religious act.

"The way it was told to me, the eagle takes the prayers that we have here, takes them up to the creator," Friday said. "That's one main reason that we believe in it so much, it does that. It's an offering -- you want it to be nice."

More than 5,000 American Indians are on a waiting list to receive eagles from the National Eagle Repository in Colorado, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife papers filed in Friday's case. The agency gets only about 1,000 dead eagles per year, meaning applicants can expect to wait about 3 1/2 years for an entire carcass to be sent to them, according to the court documents.

About 7,700 nesting pairs of bald eagles live in the lower 48 states, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates. The species was reclassified from endangered to threatened in 1995.

Robert Rogers, Friday's attorney, said he doesn't think the ruling will allow American Indians to declare open season on the birds, but that the case highlighted problems they were having obtaining permits.

"If a person did not try to work with this permitting process that has now been outed, I think he might not succeed in this motion, and he would probably be convicted for doing the same thing," Rogers said.

Source



TOLERANCE AND OPEN-MINDEDNES -- SAN FRANCISCO STYLE

No tolerance for military training

The sounds of staccato drumming and boots pounding on pavement filled the midday air Saturday on Market Street as both veterans and civilians turned out under cloudy skies to pay homage to the nation's armed forces at San Francisco's Veterans Day parade. Traveling west from Second Street to City Hall, members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Veterans for Peace, Filipino American veterans and others proudly represented their military comrades. The marching units, drum corps and drill teams from seven San Francisco high schools kept the tempo upbeat. Onlookers included tourists, locals out for a stroll and shoppers, but veterans and the parents of students in the high school JROTC paid close attention as the procession strode by.....

Ray Smith, an Army Vietnam War veteran who runs the JROTC program at Mission High School, said that he and other former soldiers believe that the military cannot abandon the mission in Iraq. "Rumsfeld never should have been in charge, but now we can either run like cowards or we can stay until we get the job done," Smith said. "Even though it was a bad idea in the first place, we have to try to get back our credibility in the world ... all we can do is try."

The other issue troubling Smith was the strong possibility that the San Francisco school board will decide Tuesday to discontinue the JROTC program at Mission High and six other San Francisco high schools at the end of the school year.

A majority of board members say the benefits of the 90-year-old program are not worth the association with the U.S. military, an institution they consider discriminatory, homophobic and at odds with the mission of public education. Nearly 1,600 San Francisco cadets go through JROTC roll call each day. "There's a lot of mixed emotion on campus right now," Smith said. "A lot of the students are torn up about it. ... It's a real depressed situation."

Luis Aguilar, a member of the Galileo High School drum corps, said he can't imagine not having the drum corps next year. "I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning thinking about this parade; I love the drum corps," said Aguilar, who is 17. Danielle Meskell sat on the steps of City Hall and watched her son Thomas, 14, march as part of the Galileo JROTC unit as the parade came to a close. Meskell, 37, who also participated in JROTC at Galileo, but did not serve in the military, said she hopes the school board decides to preserve the programs. "The kids learn leadership, they learn how to present themselves and apply themselves; it's a very good thing for them."

Source

Update:

After 90 years in San Francisco high schools, the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps must go, the San Francisco school board decided Tuesday night. The board voted 4-2 to eliminate the popular program, phasing it out over two years. Dozens of JROTC cadets at the board meeting burst into tears or covered their faces after the votes were cast. "We're really shocked,'' said fourth-year Cadet Eric Chu, a senior at Lowell High School, his eyes filling with tears. "It provided me with a place to go.''

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