Datasets:
Recag
/
C4_1

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
1
text
stringlengths
10
56.7k
Mir Quasem Ali was hanged after being convicted for offences committed during 1971 war with Pakistan.
Bangladesh has executed a wealthy tycoon and top financial backer of its largest opposition party after his family paid him a final visit.
Mir Quasem Ali, a key leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was hanged on Saturday after being convicted by a controversial war crimes tribunal of offences committed during the 1971 independence conflict with Pakistan.
"The execution took place at 10:35pm (16:35 GMT)," said Anisul Huq, the country's law and justice minister.
Ali had been imprisoned in the Kashimpur high security jail in Gazipur, some 40km north of the capital Dhaka.
After the Supreme Court rejected his final appeal against the penalty on Tuesday, Ali declined to seek a presidential pardon, which would require an admission of guilt.
Ali was a key commander of the pro-Pakistan militia in the southern port city of Chittagong during the 1971 war, and later became a shipping and real estate tycoon.
Past convictions and executions of high-profile Jamaat leaders have triggered violence in Bangladesh, which is polarised along political lines.
Russel Sheikh, a senior Gazipur police official, told the AFP news agency that officials took "highest security measures" ahead of the execution for fear of violence by his supporters.
"More than 1,000 police have been deployed in the district," Sheikh said.
Talha Ahmad, a commentator and lawyer on Bangladeshi affairs, told Al Jazeera that Ali was different from other Jamaat leaders.
"He was a celebrated philanthropist, a very successful businessman and somebody who has done a tremendous amount of work to create free media and with vulnerable people, especially refugees," Ahmad said.
"He was one of the rare breed of Jamaat politicians who was able to reach out to the wider society. It seems government goes after anybody who is capable of mounting an intellectual and practical challenge to the them. The government has become so authoritarian recently that it doesn't allow any opposition activism at all, whether it is Jamaat or any other party."
The Supreme Court's decision to reject Ali's appeal was a major blow for the Jamaat-e-Islami party, which the 63-year-old tycoon had helped to revive in recent decades.
Five opposition leaders have been executed for war crimes since 2013. Ali was the last prominent leader of Jamaat to face execution.
The war crimes tribunal set up by the government has divided the country, with supporters of Jamaat and the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party branding it a sham aimed at eliminating their leaders.
Ali was convicted in November 2014 of a series of crimes during Bangladesh's war of separation from Pakistan, including the abduction and murder of a young independence fighter.
His son, Mir Ahmed Bin Quasem, who was part of his legal defence team, was allegedly abducted by security forces earlier in August, which critics say was an attempt to sow fear and prevent protests against the execution.
PARIS – French children go to school four days a week. They have about two hours each day for lunch. And they have more vacation than their counterparts almost anywhere in the West.
It may sound a bit like the famously leisurely work pace enjoyed by their parents, most of whom work 35 hours per week as dictated by law.
But the nation's new government says elementary school kids risk classroom burnout, and is moving to help them cope. The issue: French school days may be relatively few, but they are at least as long as a day of work for adults. Even 6-year-olds are in class until late into the afternoon, when skies are dark, attention flags and stomachs rumble.
As a candidate, President Francois Hollande promised to change things by adding a fifth day of classes on Wednesday while shortening the school day. For France, it's something of a revolutionary idea that would overturn more than a century of school tradition. The thinking is that the days are too full for young children under the current system and that Wednesday free time could be put to more productive use.
"France has the shortest school year and the longest day," Hollande said at the time, promising change.
His education minister, Vincent Peillon, will decide this month how to carry out the reform. He has said he may also compensate for a shorter school day by trimming France's sacred summer vacation. A panel of experts will present their conclusions on Friday, and the president is expected to address the issue on Tuesday.
No proposal affects tradition — and potentially family and municipal budgets — as much as what the French call changes to the "scholastic rhythms."
There's been a midweek break in French primary schools dating back to the 19th century, a government concession to the Roman Catholic Church, which wanted children to study the catechism on their weekday off. In today's secular France, Wednesdays currently are a blur of sports, music, tutoring for families of means, or a scramble for working parents struggling to get by — who must either find a sitter or send their kids to a full day at a state-run "leisure center."
Things aren't exactly easy for French kids.
Despite long summer breaks and the four-day school week, French elementary school students actually spend more hours per year in school than average — 847, compared with 774 among countries in OECD, a club of wealthy nations. But the time is compressed into fewer days each year. The French school day begins around 8:30 and ends at 4:30 p.m., even for the youngest, despite studies showing the ability of young children to learn deteriorates as the day goes on.
But many parents are afraid that the changes will force them to figure out extra childcare five days a week, especially at schools where the afterschool program amounts to sitting silently at a desk for two hours or near-chaos in the play areas. Under the education proposal, school would end at lunchtime on Wednesday.
"It's completely unrealistic," Valerie Marty, president of the national parents' organization, said of the proposed timetable. "They have to figure out who will take care of the children after school, who will finance it."
In France, the answer is usually the government.
The state is expected to provide for just about everything education-related: Classes come under the national budget, and lunches and leisure are the domain of municipalities. So if school lets out most days at 3:30 p.m., under the plan most recently floated, more working parents than ever would need afterschool care — and towns would have to figure out what to do with restless children. That would almost certainly involve something more constructive than sitting quietly at desks, kicking around a ball, or playing cards until the evening when parents get out of work.
The Education Ministry has proposed more organized extracurricular activities like sports, theater and art to replace the relatively free form time children now have after school. But that means trained staff and, of course, more money from local budgets already strained in difficult economic times.
Marty, who has three children, proposes something entirely different: lengthening lunch to three hours.
"After a meal, children have a moment when they're tired. They're not ready for intellectual activities and could do something more relaxing," she said, suggesting theater, or quiet time in a library for others. Afterward, she said, classes could resume until evening.
Trimming the hallowed summer break is another tricky proposition. The school year ends at the beginning of July. Some families take July off, some August. But nearly everyone takes a month, and many French families travel for the entire period.
Peillon said he was flexible about vacation time: "If the question of vacation is blocking things, I'll propose that the prime minister leave it alone."
Eric Charbonnier, an OECD education expert supports the proposed changes. He believes the current system isn't working for the children most in need of a good education.
"A schedule with long days and lots of vacation is not one that will help the students who are having problems," he said.
Peter Gumbel, a British journalist who has lived in France since 2002 and written a book about the country's education system, said the length of the school day is only part of the problem. He says that French schooling is outmoded, dull and grinding. His take is clear from his book's title: "They Shoot Schoolchildren, Don't They?"
"You have to tackle head-on the fundamental questions of the classroom," he said, citing "the sheer heaviness of the national curriculum, the enormous amount of hours, the enormous amount of unbroken attention required, and the sheer boredom and tiredness."
A lot has changed since the Federal Reserve decided in September once again to take a pass at raising interest rates and normalizing monetary policy. For hawks, not much of it has been particularly good.
When choosing not to move last month, the Federal Open Market Committee referred to some vague "international developments" it was monitoring to decide when it would enact its first rate hike since 2006.
For Wall Street, the message was clear: Fed officials worried that the slowdown in China would spread to other areas of the global economy, dampening prospects at home and making it the wrong time to lift off from the zero-bound range where it has been for seven years.
Since then, the news from China has gotten marginally better, with the government reporting that gross domestic product gained 6.9 percent in the most recent period.
The news from home, though, has improved little. Expectations for U.S. third-quarter GDP have tumbled in recent weeks, with the consensus now at just a 1.7 percent gain, according to FactSet, down from 3.9 percent in the inventory-inflated second quarter and well off hopes for 2.5 percent or better. CNBC's Rapid Update tracker has the estimate down to 1.4 percent.
A batch of economic data points Tuesday helped drive home the weakness: Consumer confidence declined and was below economist expectations, orders for long-lasting goods fell in line with consensus at 1.2 percent, and the Markit Purchasing Managers Index survey of manufacturing activity hit its lowest level since January, with the hiring component particularly worrisome.
Indeed, the jobs market, considered perhaps the brightest spot in the economy, has tailed off considerably, with September adding just 142,000 positions, according to the latest government report that came out after the last Fed meeting.
Not to mention corporate profits, which currently are tracking for a 3.8 percent decline in the third quarter, according to S&P Capital IQ.
"Global weakness, a large inventory overhang, economic uncertainty — take your pick. The current environment leaves businesses hesitant to invest in everything from equipment to structures to additional employees," Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel Fixed Income, said in summing up the most recent indicators.
The conditions add up to a headache for the Fed during a year in which Chair Janet Yellen and her top lieutenants repeatedly have expressed a desire to begin the rate normalization process. The first hike was supposed to happen in March, which would have been five months after the Fed ended its quantitative easing program, a series of monthly bond purchases that exploded the central bank's balance sheet past $4.5 trillion.
Now, the target again appears to be March, but in 2016. Traders at the CME assign just a 1 in 20 chance that the FOMC will announce a hike on Wednesday. The outlook has dimmed so much that traders say there's a 16 percent probability the Fed will still hold steady next September.
Fed watchers should expect the FOMC to tone down its assessment of the economy in the statement it releases at the meeting's conclusion, said Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank.
"The financial markets will treat the marking down of the Fed's near-term assessment of the economy as dovish, thereby further reducing the probability of a December 2015 rate hike, because the data will simply not be strong enough to convince the financial markets the Fed can actually begin tightening," LaVorgna said in a note.
"And if the Fed determines that it really wants to raise rates this year, the likely tightening in financial conditions that would accompany such a desire would give policymakers pause," he added. "Therefore, we do not expect a rate hike until the March 2016 meeting at the earliest."
Sure, there's been a rebound of sort in the global equity markets, but even that only seems to exemplify how much investors have come to depend on monetary largess from the Fed and its global counterparts. The S&P 500 index had been in a sharp tumble around the time of the September meeting, falling more than 12 percent from its July peak until it cratered 12 days after the FOMC decision.
Since then, the market is up nearly 10 percent, buoyed in part by hopes of a lower-for-longer Fed.
Summing up the Faustian bargain between the two entities, Hans Mikkelsen, credit strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, wrote, "Global weakness is OK for U.S. markets as long as the Fed refrains from hiking rates, and vice versa it would be OK from a markets perspective for the Fed to begin hiking rates if global weakness diminishes (but not OK if US data rebounds in isolation)."
Mikkelsen added that it's important the Fed acknowledge that the U.S. growth story is deteriorating.
"Hence risk assets have rallied for three weeks prompted by the turn to weaker U.S. data that began with the weak September jobs report, as the Fed's rate decision is understood to be completely data dependent," he said. "However, clearly for the market rally to be sustained it would be helpful if (the) FOMC statement tilted dovish by acknowledging this turn to weaker U.S. data."
A Florida felon is back in jail after uploading photos to his Instagram page showing him posing with firearms.
Police raided Depree Johnson’s Lake Worth home last week after investigators spotted the incriminating images of the 19-year-old on the photo-sharing web site. Johnson’s rap sheet includes convictions for grand theft, burglary, and felon in possession of a firearm.
As seen above, one of the Instagram photos (click to enlarge) shows Johnson holding two handguns, while a friend points another weapon at his head.
Detectives with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office recently examined Johnson’s Instagram account as they were investigating his possible involvement in a series of burglaries.
The search of Johnson’s home turned up numerous pieces of stolen jewelry and a pair of stolen firearms. As a result, Johnson was arrested and booked into the county jail on 142 criminal counts.
According to c8sciences.com, “While they share some of their respective symptoms, the definitions of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Executive Function Disorder aren’t quite the same. There is a definite difference between ADHD and Executive Function Disorder. A child or adult with ADHD might be hyperactive, inattentive, and/or impulsive, and while clinicians have always had a grasp on impulsivity and hyperactivity, the concept of inattention has evolved from a simple focus on “inability to stay on task” to a broader concept of “executive functioning”. Executive Functioning problems involve a pattern of chronic difficulties in executing daily tasks.” With that said, this article will describe the difference between Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Executive Function Disorder.
According to c8sciences.com, “Wouldn’t it make sense, then, that someone experiencing issues with executive functioning may have problems analyzing, planning, organizing, scheduling and completing tasks? Children and adults with EFD exhibit issues with organizing materials and setting schedules; they misplace papers, reports and other school materials and often times will have similar problems keeping track of their personal items or even keeping their bedroom organized. No matter how hard they try, the failure rate remains.” With that said, children and adults with Executive Function Disorder have difficulty with organization and setting schedules.
With that said, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Executive Function Disorder are similar to one another. However, it is also important to note that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Executive Function Disorder are also different from one another. To be specific, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity focuses on staying focused on tasks. In contrast to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Executive Function Disorder focuses more on completing tasks. Therefore, to conclude this article, on a final note, similarities do exist between Executive Function Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder but so do differences, as well.
Art can be found anywhere. And it doesn't have to be created with paint on canvas, sculpted from clay, or chiseled in stone.
Sometimes all it takes is a simple piece of chalk and a public sidewalk. That's the theory behind the annual Chalk Art Festival, which is June 13 at the Uptown Shopping Center in Richland. Registration starts at 8 a.m. Chalkers will begin their work at 9 a.m. and continue until 3 p.m.
"Chalk art is a wonderful and unique form of creativity," said Gus Sako, the event's organizer and owner of the Octopus' Garden novelty store in the Uptown.
"Give the smallest toddler a piece of chalk and sidewalk and they will be happy for hours," he said.
"I get off work and usually just head to the sidewalk," she said with a chuckle. "It's just too irresistible not to take part."
Both women also say creating chalk art can wreak havoc on the body, especially the knees, the back and shoulders.
"It's pretty hard for anyone to whip out a drawing in the hot sun on a dirty sidewalk. And, at almost 66, my knees are pretty creaky," Loomis said. "On the other hand, my kids just gave me a gardening stool with rails that might be just the thing!"
Calicoat says creating chalk art is like doing one-arm push ups for hours.
"I've been trying to train myself to use my left hand to paint so I'll probably do the same thing with chalk," Calicoat said.
The Chalk Art Festival was started by the now defunct Corporate Council for the Arts as a regional arts activity, Sako said. The festival moved to several locations until it finally settled at the Uptown a few years ago.
Categories and registration fees are: Up to age 5 $5; Ages 6-9 $5; Ages 10-12 $7; Ages 13-17 $7; Ages 18 and older $12. Sidewalks to be used for the chalk artistry will be on George Washington Way, Jadwin Avenue, Symons Streets and Williams Boulevard.
For more information, call 946-0077 or 943-6542.
EXCLUSIVE: Actor and comedian Joel McHale has signed with UTA and Anonymous Content for representation. Previously with WME, McHale is perhaps best known for starring as Jeff Winger for six seasons on the NBC/Yahoo comedy Community and spent twelve seasons as the host of E!’s satirical series The Soup. Most recently, he toplined CBS’s short-lived sitcom The Great Indoors.
McHale will next be seen in the Netflix biopic A Futile & Stupid Gesture, portraying former Community co-star Chevy Chase, and in Sam Levinson’s upcoming thriller Assassination Nation.
Other credits include A Merry Friggin’ Christmas, where he played Robin Williams’ son, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced supernatural thriller Deliver Us From Evil, Warner Bros’ rom-com Blended, and Seth MacFarlane’s blockbuster comedy Ted.
BARTOW - The next regular meeting of the Central Florida Regional Planning Council is scheduled for Jan. 9, at 9 a.m. at the Bob Crawford Agriculture Center, 605 East Main Street, Bartow.
The Florida Retired Educators Association District 8, Unit II will meet at 10 a.m. Jan. 7, at the First United Methodist Church of Haines City, at 21 S. Second St. The program will be "Fun Time" presented by Dolla Williams. Cost is $6 for those eating brunch, others free.
volunteering, and other services that benefit our community. In December the unit gave food, toys, and books, to area schools to be distributed to needy families.
For details, call Betty Woodard, Vice-president at 863-324-0214.
LAKELAND - Polk Works Workforce 2020 will host two employers' edge seminars with the topic "Retaining Your Employees" in March.
On March 11 from 7:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., the first seminar will be at the Hilton Garden Inn, 3839 Don Emerson Dr., Lakeland.
The second seminar will be held March 19 from 7:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Lake Ashton Golf Club, 4141 Ashton Club Dr., Lake Wales.
Employers' Edge Seminars help business owners, executives, managers and human resource professionals gain the edge in hiring, training, motivating and retaining good quality employees.
The spring agenda will focus on motivation techniques for four generations in one workplace and retention best practices that you can implement tomorrow.
SEBRING - Founders' Day of the P.E.O. Sisterhood will be observed on Jan. 19, 2008, with a luncheon at 11:30 a.m. to be held at the Sebring Lakeside Inn and Tea Room, 1063 Lake Sebring Drive in Sebring. Cost of the luncheon is $18. All P.E.O.s in the area are invited to attend.
For reservations call Martha Carter, secretary of the Ridge Reciprocity Council, at 863-655-5630.
Deadline for reservations is Jan. 7.
Classes for the AARP 55 Driver Safety Program are being conducted at the following locations: the Gill Jones Center in Winter Haven, the Winter Haven Senior Center, Lake Region Mobile Home Park and the Lakeland Police Department.
To enroll in the Gill Jones, the Lakeland Police Department or the Lake Region classes, call Ernie Conte at 863-324-6887.
To enroll in the Winter Haven Senior Center class, call John O'Flaharty at 863-984-9721.
WINTER HAVEN -�The Winter Haven AARP Tax-Aide Program will begin training sessions for old and new volunteers in January. The training dates will be on Jan. 11, 15, 18, 22, and 25 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Last year, the program prepared free-of-charge over 800 tax returns for area Senior citizens. The location of the program will continue to be in the meeting room of the Hope Presbyterian Church at 2110 Cypress Garden Blvd SE. The facility and utilities are donated by the church as part of its Senior citizen outreach program to the community, and are very much appreciated.
All volunteers must pass a standardized test that is part of the course materials provided by the Internal Revenue Service. All of the computers and programs are provided by IRS in cooperation with AARP. The entire program is administered by volunteers with AARP and IRS oversight.