[AnNahar] School canteens will no longer offer non-pork meal options in towns where La Belle France's anti-immigration far-right National Front party won local elections, its leader Marine Le Pen said Monday.
Because little Christian and atheist French schoolchildren cannot possibly eat chicken, fish, beef, or quiche for lunch?
Le Pen reignited debate on a sensitive issue about the substitution meals targeting mainly Mohammedan and Jewish pupils for whom pork is taboo.
"We will accept no religious requirements in the school lunch menus," Le Pen told RTL radio. "There is no reason for religion to enter into the public sphere."
She defended the decision saying it was necessary to "save secularism".
The FN, skilfully rebranded as more than just an anti-immigrant party, won control of 11 towns and more than 1,400 municipal seats nationwide in recent local elections, easily its best ever performance at the grassroots level of French government.
This has caused great unease among a section of the population.
Many Mohammedans view La Belle France, which is officially a secular republic despite being overwhelmingly Catholic, as imposing its values on them and other religious minorities.
La Belle France has one of the biggest Mohammedan populations in Europe.
The issue of halal meat is also a controversial topic in La Belle France and has been used as a political football.
Le Pen had launched a fierce row before the last presidential polls in 2012 by claiming that all meat distributed in the Gay Paree region was halal, or slaughtered according to Islamic law, and that non-Mohammedan consumers were being misled.
There has been controversy in the past over whether schools and holiday camps should be required to provide halal food for Mohammedan children, as well as higher-profile disputes over the wearing of veils in La Belle France.
Had they been providing kosher food or a meat-free option for the Jewish children, or was it just assumed that such children would be segregated in private religious schools?
Any form of clothing linked to religious observance is banned from French state schools and since 2011 the wearing of full-face veils in public has been outlawed.
#2
There's an old saying. "You have one lawyer in town, he/she about starves to death. You have a few lawyers and they do fairly well. You have a few more and they all very well. You have an overabundance of lawyers in town and they starve to death." Lawyer Reform.
With free advice from the Rantburg Law Department.
Attorney General Eric Holder disputed a Government Accountability Office report on his use of Justice Department airplanes for personal trips, saying it overstated the number of trips he took and failed to recognize that some trips were job-related. You have the right to remain silent when questioned, so shut the f--k up.
"My staff keeps telling me to take it easy, you know, well, this is one that gets me," Holder told Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing. Anything you say or do can be used against you in a court of law, and if I were you, I wouldn't count on a pardon from Champ. Always room under the bus.
"There was this notion that we've taken -- I think it was described as hundreds of personal trips. That was wrong. GAO counted flights, not round trips. You have the right to consult an attorney a whole lot better than you before speaking and to have a real attorney present during questioning.
And we looked at it and figured out from the time period that they were looking, If you cannot afford an attorney *cough*, one will be appointed for you since you're a big-shot politician.
we took not hundreds, but 27 personal, four combined -- official and nonpersonal trips -- and none of the trips that I took or that the [FBI] director took ever had an impact on the mission capability of those airplanes." And how many hungry children could have been fed from the money used to buy fuel for those little junkets, you pompous jerk? And how many ordinary people have you prosecuted for a whole lot less?
Posted by: Matt ||
04/05/2014 09:20 ||
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#1
Eric Holder embracing the Grace Mugabe justification for her Paris shopping junkets. Niiiiiiice.
[KANSAS] TOPEKA -- The Senate voted to halt state spending on Common Core on Thursday night, during debate over a court-ordered fix for funding inequities between school districts. If you haven't been watching, Common Core's yet another experiment in pedagogy.
It went on to pass a school finance bill that provides more money for local option budgets if voters approve, grants tax credits to parents who have their children in private school or home school, allows tax breaks for corporations that provide scholarships for private schools and removes administrative due process for public school teachers. I went to help my granddaughter with her math a few weeks ago. I do arithmetic in my head and usually come out with the right answer. What they're pushing isn't arithmetic.
Senators gave the bill final passage 23-17 a little after 1:30 a.m. Friday. Good riddance.
The House will consider its own school finance bill Friday after its budget committee restored cuts to virtual schools, transportation and at-risk funds late Thursday.
Sen. Forrest Knox, R-Altoona, introduced an amendment early in the Senate debate to halt state money for the implementation of Common Core, a set of national performance standards adopted by the Kansas Board of Education in 2010 without the Legislature's approval.
It passed, 27-12.
Knox and many others said this would help free up funding to address inequities, but the move caught many educational experts by surprise.
Mark Tallman, front man for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said the vote causes uncertainty for districts in the midst of implementing the standards.
"So what does that mean? What are we supposed to do? Because most districts have spent several years adopting curriculum, adopting textbooks that are based on the Common Core standards," Tallman said.
"One Common Core standard is that essentially that first-graders have to be able to count to 100. So does this mean districts aren't supposed to teach how to count to 100, because that's a Common Core standard? Now, I don't think that's what they mean, but what do they mean?" He said the practical effect of this amendment was unclear.
The Common Core initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. It has been heavily promoted by President B.O. and has benefited from incentives offered by the U.S. Department of Education, leading some people to believe it is a federal program.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/05/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Bully for you Kansas. Now outlaw teachers' unions...
#2
From what I've seen on the net Common Core math teaches algorithms for solving arithmetic problems that are mathematically correct but also inefficient and needlessly complicated.
Unfortunately CC insists that the students do apply these algorithms and document the process.
The focus is on bad algorithms, not results or good algorithms.
#3
EH2660 sums it up nicely, if you have not had the courtesy of trying to teach your kids that closeness in math is not OK.
Grom, we are moving in the right direction; the education womps have their tamborenes out and banging; if we can undo Sebelius' Court then maybe we can attract business again. She was the crap tenant who on her last day went and hid candy bars all over the place and now we have an ant problem.
The answer is forty-ish. Then go and bring together the 4 and 6, and add that to the 40ish, to get fifty.
If you learn your 25s, or column add, you know the answer is not close to 40ish.
So what goes on is the smart kids get dulled because they are doing extra steps which are unnecessary with just some fundamentals. The dull kids are being outsmarted by the process and with no failure allowed they will learn enough Pavlovian math to pass but will be cheated of actually learning the basics*. The uninterested kids will be uninterested because their family never taught them to be interested in learning.
*this has implications later in life, as making quick change, $0.68 out of a dollar is..., finance and investment become a second or third tier of thinking. That is, so long as the CC/EBT clears then so what?
#11
Geez this stuff is giving me nightmares. I was a victim of one of the earlier excursions into "New Math" when I was in 7th & 8th grade (circa 1961). The texts (and I use the term loosely) were thin paper backs and the only thing I recall is that they were really big oon Venn diagrams for everything.
Me, too. Cheap paperback texts from the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG). We learned set theory and how to convert numbers from base 6 to base 8. I loved it! Not so much Ms. O who taught a split 5th/6th grade class and was horrified to realize *none* of her 5th graders could do long division.
[THEFISCALTIMES] The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors.
In a special "management alert" made public Thursday, the State Department's Inspector General Steve Linick warned "significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at the department has led to billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years.
The alert was just the latest example of the federal government's continued struggle with oversight over its outside contractors.
The lack of oversight "exposes the department to significant financial risk," the auditor said. "It creates conditions conducive to fraud, as corrupt individuals may attempt to conceal evidence of illicit behavior by omitting key documents from the contract file. It impairs the ability of the Department to take effective and timely action to protect its interests, and, in tum, those of taxpayers."
In the memo, the IG detailed "repeated examples of poor contract file administration." For instance, a recent investigation of the closeout process for contracts supporting the mission in Iraq, showed that auditors couldn't find 33 of the 115 contract files totaling about $2.1 billion. Of the remaining 82 files, auditors said 48 contained insufficient documents required by federal law.
In another instance, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement issued a $1 billion contract in Afghanistan that was deemed "incomplete."
Posted by: Fred ||
04/05/2014 00:00 ||
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#3
I wait with bated breath for the resignations, dismissals, and criminal prosecutions.
Posted by: Matt ||
04/05/2014 9:15 Comments ||
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#4
I'm waiting for them to 'find' it again. Only it won't actually be found and the guy who noticed it was missing will take up a state department post in Antarctica.
#5
Surprised the press has reported anything that makes Hildabeeste look bad. Guaranteed mainstream press will studiously ignore this. Were it a republican, this would be all over the news.
#9
As long as you don't hold your breath, #3 Matt.
Posted by: Barbara ||
04/05/2014 14:56 Comments ||
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#10
Hillary's hogwash. The worlds all better now for her being in State and the "ONE" ruling the universe in a benevolent and compassionate manner. "Chicken in every pot" has been replaced by welfare benefits for all, free phones, abortion on demand, and pot for everyone all in exchange for your vote (or several).
#11
They could have just been open about it. Claimed they were investing in Green Technologies for the State Department, allow them time to squirrel away the 6 Bs into off shore accounts, then file bankruptcy.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
