#Institutional Reformation

[firstavina]

Lesson Learned: Water and Sanitation Sector Transformation of Aguas de Portugal

This article also published at NUWSP website at: https://nuwsp.web.id/artikel/7164 One of the important things from the 10th World Water Forum Summit in Bali on 18-24 May 2024 was a special session presented by Aguas de Portugal (AdP). On that occasion, the transformation of the water and sanitation sector carried out by Portugal since 1993 was explained. This presentation was considered…

[alwaysbewoke]

On March 5th, 1959, 69 African American boys, ages 13 to 17, were padlocked in their dormitory for the night at the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville. Around 4 a.m., a fire mysteriously ignited, forcing the boys to fight and claw their way out of the burning building. The old, run-down, & low-funded facility, just 15 minutes south of Little Rock, housed 69 teens from ages 13-17. Most were either homeless or incarcerated for petty crimes such as doing pranks. 48 boys managed to escape the fire. The doors were locked from the outside and fire mysteriously ignited on a cold, wet morning, following earlier thunderstorms in the same area of rural Pulaski County. The horrific event brought attention to the deplorable conditions in which the boys lived. The boys all slept in a space barely big enough for them to move around & theyre one foot apart from one another & their bathroom was a bucket at the corner where they had to defecate in. In an ironic twist, the land in which the school stood is now the Arkansas Department of Correction Facility Wrightsville Unit. In 2019 a plaque was finally placed after 60 years.

PURE EVIL!!! MY GOD!!

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

In the aftermath of the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court's potentially deadly rampage against federal regulators, its ruling in support of the criminalization of homelessness, and its decision to grant former President Donald Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution, Sen. Bernie Sanders said late Monday that nation's highest judicial body is "out of control" and must be reined in before it can inflict even more damage.

"Over the years, among other disastrous rulings, this right-wing court has given us Citizens United, which created a corrupt, billionaire-dominated political system," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. "It overturned Roe v. Wade, removing women's constitutional right to control their own bodies. Last week, the court chose to criminalize poverty by banning homeless encampments in public spaces—forcing more poor people into the cycle of debt and poverty."

"With the Chevron case," the senator continued, "they have made it far more difficult for the government to address the enormous crises we face in terms of climate change, public health, workers' rights, and many other areas. And, today, the court ruled in favor of broad presidential immunity, making it easier for Trump and other politicians to break the law without accountability."

Such far-reaching and devastating decisions, Sanders argued, highlight the extent to which unelected Supreme Court justices—with the backing of right-wing billionaires and corporations bent on sweeping away all regulatory constraints—have arrogated policymaking authority to themselves with disastrous consequences for U.S. society and the world.

"If these conservative justices want to make public policy, they should simply quit the Supreme Court and run for political office," said Sanders. "At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, billionaire control of our political system, and major threats to the foundations of American democracy, it is clear to me that we need real Supreme Court reform. A strong, enforceable code of ethics is a start, but just a start. We'll need much more than that."

Sanders did not make specific reform recommendations beyond an ethics code in his statement Monday, but he has previously suggested rotating judges off the Supreme Court—which would effectively end lifetime appointments.

The Vermont senator's progressive colleagues floated a range of possible actions following the high court's presidential immunity ruling on Monday, including adding seats to the Supreme Court and impeaching individual justices.

"Today's decision, along with the court's decision to overturn Chevron, is an assault on the separation of powers under the Constitution," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in response to the court's ruling in Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

"An extremist Supreme Court stacked by Donald Trump has snatched power away from an elected Congress and handed lawmaking power over to a few far-right unelected judges," Warren added. "This Supreme Court is undermining the foundations of our democracy; Congress must restore balance by adding more justices to the court."

The Supreme Court's recent flurry of rulings has already thrown existing cases into chaos and opened the floodgates to new corporate-backed lawsuits against longstanding federal regulations.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that "mere hours after the Supreme Court sharply curbed the power of federal agencies" by scrapping the Chevron doctrine, "conservatives and corporate lobbyists began plotting how to harness the favorable ruling in a redoubled quest to whittle down climate, finance, health, labor, and technology regulations in Washington."

"The National Association of Manufacturers, a lobbying group whose board of directors includes top executives from Dow, Caterpillar, ExxonMobil, and Johnson & Johnson, specifically called attention to what it described as regulatory overreach at the [Securities and Exchange Commission] and the Environmental Protection Agency," the Post noted.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation's largest corporate lobbying organization, and the American Petroleum Institute were also among the big business groups applauding the fall of Chevron, fueling calls for Congress to codify the doctrine into federal law.

The American Prospect's Hassan Ali Kanu wrote Tuesday that the high court's latest term has "demonstrated how lacking our system is in terms of safeguards that can prevent or correct the Supreme Court when it oversteps its authority or engages in unjustified exercises of power."

"President Joe Biden's commission to explore Supreme Court reform produced a number of viable and sensible options," Kanu continued. "Congress could curtail or end judicial review, the power the court aggregated to itself to exclusively interpret the Constitution."

"Even more modest proposals could further democratize the Court and judiciary, like prohibiting them from declining to apply laws passed by Congress unless they have at least a supermajority vote; or implementing sortition, random assignment, and rotation into the process of appointing or assigning judges to the Supreme Court," he added. "At this point, when a six-member majority is literally declaring a former president who appointed three of them to be functionally above the law, against all prevailing opinion, scholarship, analysis, and experience, the case for court reform couldn't be clearer."

[ofdinosanddais1]

The church when pastors groom and abuse children: uwu everyone deserves forgiveness

The church when a homeless guy steals because he's literally starving: irredeemable scum. I support the 13th amendment because lowly criminals deserve to be enslaved.

[salvidida]

Scar's a character I love regardless of adaptation, but mangahood Scar not remaining consistently acab about the Amestrian military is the most out of character shit to come from the original mangaka possible

[alexkablob]

Continuing my Dorley reread and in many ways Dorley is a comedy and one of the most horrifying ways in which Dorley is a comedy is the comedy of watching Steph's idiot self be convinced that she can pull one over on a cult to get transition services from them without herself getting radicalized by said aforementioned cult

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alice Herman at The Guardian:

By 9am on Monday, hundreds of worshipers who had gathered under a tent in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, were already on their feet. Praiseful music bumped from enormous speakers. The temperature was pushing 90F (32C). The congregants had gathered in north-western Wisconsin for the Courage Tour, a travelling tent revival featuring a lineup of charismatic preachers and self-styled prophets promising healing, and delivering a political message: register to vote. Watch, or work, the polls. And help deliver the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Serving as a voter registration drive and hub for recruiting poll workers, it was no mistake that the Courage Tour came to Wisconsin just three months ahead of the presidential election in November. The tour had already visited three other swing states: Georgia, Michigan and Arizona. Heavy-hitting Maga organizations – including America First Policy Institute, TPUSA Faith and America First Works – had a presence outside the tent. Inside, headlining the event was Lance Wallnau, a prominent figure in the New Apostolic Reformation – a movement on the right that embraces modern-day apostles, aims to establish Christian dominion over society and politics and has grown in influence since Trump was elected president in 2016.

“‘Pray for your rulers,’ that’s about as far as we got in the Bible,” said Wallnau, setting the tone for the day, which would feature a series of sermons focused on the ideal role of Christians in government and society. “I think what’s happened is over time, we began to realize you cannot trust that government like you thought you could trust, and you can’t trust the media to tell you what’s really happening,” he exclaimed. What followed in Wallnau’s morning sermon were a series of greatest hits of the Maga right: January 6 (not an insurrection), the 2020 election (marred by fraud) and Covid-19 (a Chinese bioweapon). Many of the attendees had learned of the event from Eau Claire’s Oasis church – a Pentecostal church whose congregants were already familiar with the movement’s goal to turn believers into activists with a religious mission. “This is wonderful,” said Cyndi Lund, an Oasis churchgoer who attended the four-day event. “I teach a class on biblical citizenship – the Lord put in my heart that we have to be voting biblically, and if nothing else, we have a duty in America to vote.”

According to the preachers who sermonized on Monday, the correct biblical worldview is a deeply conservative one. The speakers repeatedly stated their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, ideas that were elaborated on in pamphlets passed around the crowd and on three large screens facing the audience. (“Tolerance IS NOT A commandment,” read one poster, propped up in front of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA stall outside the tent.) After Wallnau spoke, Bill Federer, an evangelist who has written more than thirty books weighing in on US history from an anti-communist and rightwing perspective, offered a brief and often intensely inaccurate, intellectual history of the US and Europe. During his talk, Federer dropped references to the villains of his historiography – among them Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, the German philosopher Hegel and, “a little closer to home”, the political theorist of the New Left, Saul Alinsky. The crowd, apparently already versed in Federer’s intellectual universe, groaned and booed when Federer mentioned Alinsky.

The Courage Tour led by Christian Nationalists and 7MD advocates Lance Wallnau and Mario Murillo serve one purpose: to elect Donald Trump and other Republicans into office.

[eypril-eypril]

the king

when i was doing some research for a historical wilmon fanfic at the royal library’s archive last year i found a short story called the king by martin andersen-nexö from 1914. it was a story of a king who no longer held any power, but was worshipped by his people who didn’t dare to criticize him.  

“let him sit!”, the wise men of the country said. “he’s the unsound fantasies of the people, collected in one hand - it’s the cheapest option. and he is our only memory of the slavery of the past. the more he stands out, the more he brings attention to how far we’ve come.” 

the king stayed on his throne, but he wasn’t allowed to speak. the people traveled from east and west to see him, and he had to sit nicely on the throne while the people looked at him. meanwhile, the people invented a road of light that would lead talented people to success, no matter their social class. but the king’s throne cast a shadow over the road of light, which paralyzed the entire country. 

after some time, the king asked if no one was upset with him. the people didn’t dare to be mad at him, because he sat so nicely on his throne. finally, the king had had enough and his soul left his body, but his body remained sitting. once his soul was gone, nothing stopped him from sitting nicely. he sat there, deaf and blind, until humanity accidentally pushed his throne so that it fell over.  

i love this story because in my opinion, it pinpoints some of the reasons as to why i think monarchs - both the real and fictional ones - shouldn’t exist. it’s fascinating how a story published in 1914 so perfectly describes the themes of a tv show from 2021. because this could have been a fabel about wilhelm, who is forced to sit nicely on his throne as tourist attraction and a symbol of the past, which in turn harms not only the people but also wilhelm himself. and if he continues to sit nicely, his soul will eventually leave his body, because it won’t be able to stand it any longer. 

[s1ithers]

—Was sending an apostate to poison Eamon your duty as well?

obsessed with how fast she turns on him after the alienage quest tells you repeatedly how the templars were turning a blind eye. mother superior knows which way the wind blows. ice cold

[scorpius-rising]

Since more people are talking about Dragon Age I would like to reiterate my opinion that it is absolutely incomprehensible that Cassandra Pentaghast was straight

[alwaysbewoke]

the fix is in!!

[absolutelybatty]

Salloween Day 7: Prison

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

"Don't make a wrong move," the officer said as he pinned the struggling subject to the ground. "Period."

The officer tightened the handcuffs around the subject's thin wrists.

"Ow, ow, ow, it really hurts," the subject exclaimed.

The officer pressed his weight into the subject's small body while school staff watched it all unfold. The person he was restraining was 7 years old.

"If you, my friend, are not acquainted with the juvenile justice system, you will be very shortly," the officer told the child.

Earlier that day, the child allegedly spit at a teacher. Now, he was in handcuffs and a police officer was saying he could end up in jail.

That child — a second grader with autism at a North Carolina school — was ultimately pinned on the floor for 38 minutes, according to body camera video of the incident. At one point, court records say, the officer put his knee in the child's back.

CBS News is not identifying the North Carolina child to protect his privacy.

Similar scenes have played out in viral incidents: police officers arresting young children like him at school, often violently.

In 2018, a 10-year-old with autism was pinned face down and cuffed in Denton, Texas.

Another boy with autism, just 11 years old, was handcuffed and dragged out of school and forced into a sheriff's deputy's car in Colorado in 2021.

And that same year, officers handcuffed and screamed at a 5-year-old who had wandered away from school.

There are many more cases of young children arrested in school — cases that don't make headlines, according to a CBS News analysis of the latest data from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

More than 700 children were arrested in U.S. elementary schools during the 2017-2018 school year alone, according to CBS News' analysis.

Experts tell CBS News the fact that young children are arrested at all is troubling.

Ron Applin, chief of police for Atlanta Public Schools, says they've never arrested an elementary school child in his six years running the department.

"I've never seen a situation or a circumstance in my six years where an elementary school student had to be arrested," Applin said. "We've never done it. I don't see where it would happen."

But it does happen elsewhere — and to some kids more than others, CBS News' analysis showed.

Children with documented disabilities were four times more likely to be arrested at school, according to CBS News' analysis of the 2017-2018 Education Department data.

Federal law requires schools to have a plan, known as an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), for dealing with the needs of every student with disabilities.

Those plans help schools understand how to care for children with disabilities, said Alacia Gerardi, the mother of the North Carolina child who was arrested. Without this plan, she said, a police officer might misunderstand her son's behavior.

"I believe a lot of it is a misunderstanding with children who are struggling, that they believe that in general, that behavior indicates intention. And when you're dealing with a child who's going through a difficult time, any child, that is not the case."

Anyone working with children with disabilities must understand how to respond when a child with an emotional or behavioral disorder acts out, according to Dr. Sonya Mathies-Dinizulu, who teaches psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago.

In a crisis, children need someone to "be there to help the kid start to de-escalate and help soothe," said Mathies-Dinizulu, who works with children who are exposed to trauma.

Black students are even more disproportionately affected. They made up nearly half of all arrests at elementary schools during the 2017-2018 school year, CBS News' analysis showed. But they accounted for just 15% of the student population in those schools.

Those disparities could be explained, at least in part, by the mentalities of the officers who work in schools, according to Professor Aaron Kupchik, who teaches sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware.

In a 2020 study, Kupchik and his colleagues analyzed interviews with 73 School Resource Officers, or SROs. Nearly all the officers interviewed said their primary mission was to keep the school safe. The difference, Kupchik said, was who those officers felt they needed to protect the school from.

SROs who worked with low-income students and students of color "define the threat as students themselves," Kupchik said. "Whereas the SROs who work in wealthier, whiter school areas define the threat as something external that can happen to the children."

"It's an external threat for the more privileged kids," Kupchik said. "As opposed to students in the schools with more students of color, low-income students, where they're seen as the threats themselves."

One such student arrested was an 11-year-old Black student with disabilities in Riverside County, California. CBS News is referring to him only as "C.B." to protect his privacy.

Police alleged he threw a rock at a staffer, though a police report said she was uninjured. The next day, he was handcuffed after refusing to go to the principal's office over the incident.

A lawsuit filed on C.B.'s behalf alleges his arrest was part of a pattern: police getting involved for "low-level and disability-related behaviors" that could be handled by teachers or administrators.

POLICE HANDLING SCHOOL DISCIPLINE, NOT SCHOOL STAFF

Gerardi said she couldn't understand why her son was handcuffed face down on the floor.

She said school staff called saying her son was having a hard time that day. She later got a text asking her to come pick him up.

What she saw when she arrived shocked her.

"At that point, I had no idea why [he was handcuffed]," she said. "I couldn't fathom in my mind what could possibly have occurred to make handcuffing a 7-year-old face down on the floor necessary."

She said the school staff knew her son had been struggling. He was in a treatment program where he received special support. He had an IEP on file, which documented his needs.

Yet when teachers disciplined her son for repeatedly tapping his pencil — something she said he does out of anxiety — the situation escalated. He spit on a teacher, and the police officer was called. The boy ended up in handcuffs.

"I have a real hard time understanding that these adults don't have a better solution than to do this," she said. "The long-term effects, the trauma of putting a child in a completely powerless situation, even physically over their body and causing them harm based on a behavior is ludicrous to me."

After his mother arrived, the officer allowed her to take him home.

"It was a very rude awakening, because when I arrived there and I picked my son up off the floor, he was limp, completely limp," she said. "He was just exhausted. I didn't know what had happened, but after I saw the video, it was very apparent that his little body just couldn't take being put in that position for that length of time. He had his chest against the floor, his hands behind his back. This man's applying pressure against his back."

Alex Heroy, attorney for Gerardi's family, said the police shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place.

"A lot of officers don't want to be the first line when it comes to a mental health crisis," Heroy said. "They don't have as much training as the teachers in the school, for example, so they shouldn't insert themselves for one, and they really should be there for support."

The officer in that arrest defended his actions.

The officer "knew nothing about [the child] prior to the day in question, including his age or medical history," his attorney said in a statement sent to CBS News.

"Unequivocally, he never intended to cause any harm to [the child] and did the best he could with the knowledge and training he possessed at the time, seeking only to help [the child] and diffuse the situation safely for everyone, including [the child]," the statement said.

The child's school district declined to comment, saying the case had been settled.

The child wasn't charged with a crime, despite what the officer repeatedly said during the incident.

FEDERAL REACTION

Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, said schools should do everything they can to prevent young kids from ending up arrested in school.

CBS News shared the results of its analysis of the Education Department data with Lhamon. Though she said there could be times in which arresting a 7-year-old is acceptable, she said it should not be the norm.

"That should not be the way we expect to treat our students," Lhamon said. "And if you find yourself there as a school community, you should be evaluating hard whether you needed to and what steps you can take to make sure you don't find yourself there again."

When asked if the Department of Education is doing enough to prevent arrests like the North Carolina child's, she said, "You're never doing enough if a child is harmed."

"When we send a child to law enforcement, we are sending a very deleterious governmental message," Lhamon said. "That's scary. I want very much for that to be minimized and for it to take place only in those circumstances where it's absolutely necessary."

Lhamon called the video of the North Carolina child's arrest "enormously distressing" and said it was something she'd never forget.

"There's very little that I saw in that video that is acceptable, and there's very little on that video that is consistent with federal civil rights obligations," she said.

The U.S. Department of Education issued new guidance on school discipline in July, requiring school officials to evaluate a student with disabilities before disciplining them.

Department of Education spokespeople said the agency wants schools to be responsible for the actions of their SROs, even if those officers are employees of a local police department.

"They are responsible for the actions of school resource officers that they employ and that they contract with in their schools, and that the civil rights obligation extends to them," Lhamon said.

Lhamon described the disproportionate impact on children with disabilities and children of color as "deeply distressing."

"It's a deep, deep concern for all of us," Lhamon said. "And it has been over a distressingly long period of time that we see students with disabilities disproportionately referred to law enforcement. We see students of color disproportionately referred to law enforcement."

TRAINING NEEDED

An SRO's training can be critical, according to Applin. He helped change the way Atlanta SROs interact with children.

After being in the top 10 nationally in elementary arrest rates, Georgia changed its approach in 2018. They trained their SROs to focus on helping students to reach graduation, rather than making arrests.

Part of that new SRO training involved "making a switch from being a warrior to a guardian," Applin said.

"One of the things that's stressed to my officers is that we're student focused," Applin said. "The whole idea behind why we're here is to create an environment where students can learn, teachers can teach. We're not here to criminalize our students."

Virginia has taken a different approach. Schools there arrested kids in elementary schools at five times the rate for the U.S. overall during the 2017-2018 school year, according to CBS News' analysis of Education Department data.

Donna Michaelis, who manages the Virginia Center for School and Campus Safety, said Virginia law requires school officials to report any crimes that occur at school — even minor ones like fights, vandalism, or disorderly conduct.

"In that list of criminal offenses, they are very serious things," Michaelis said. "It's not bullying. It is malicious wounding. It is kidnapping. It is threats to harm staff. They are serious crimes: threats to bomb [or] drugs."

Data from the Virginia Department of Education shows that, during the 2020-2021 school year, there were 24 bomb or other threats reported. There were nearly 700 reported threats to either students or staff.

The data doesn't contain any references to "malicious wounding" or kidnapping.

The most common offense in the data is "interference with school operations," which made up nearly 40% of the 14,000 incidents recorded in the data for that one school year.

DO SROS REALLY MAKE KIDS SAFER?

Amid the epidemic of school shootings in the US, many districts have looked to SROs to keep kids safe.

In late 2019, schools in Harford County, Maryland, added three more SROs to its elementary schools. A year later, the Michigan House voted to boost funding for school resource officers in the wake of the Oxford High School shooting that December.

And in 2022, after the Uvalde, Texas, shooting, some Fort Worth city council members argued schools needed more officers to protect kids from future attacks.

But Kupchik's research shows SROs don't make kids safer.

"There is some disagreement [among experts]," Kupchik said. "There have been some studies showing that police officers in schools can prevent some crime and misbehavior, but there are far greater numbers of studies finding the opposite, that they either have no impact or in some cases can increase crime. What they do all show consistently is that while we're not sure about any benefits, there are clear and consistent problems with putting police in schools."

Kupchik said schools with more police have more suspensions and more arrests.

"We see greater numbers of arrests and not necessarily for things like guns or drugs or what we're all afraid of," Kupchik said. "But for more minor things that are unfortunate, but perhaps don't need to result in an arrest record. Something like two kids getting in a fight after school."

Some schools have taken a similar view. Schools across the country, including those in Denver, San Francisco, Fremont, CA, and Chicago have voted to remove SROs.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis Public Schools removed SROs from their hallways. The result: a dramatic drop in student referrals to law enforcement, and a shift toward "restorative outcomes" rather than arrests.

Nearly every parent interviewed by CBS News for this story said their children were permanently traumatized by these experiences.

"The trauma from this has truly created PTSD," Gerardi said. "So, day by day, especially if he is physically hurt in any way — even accidentally — it can trigger a real PTSD response that affects the entire family. And, of course, it affects him."

Part of the problem, she said, is that he doesn't understand what happened to him.

"It was an instantaneous 'fight or flight' response, and we were there for literally years," she said. "So to try to calm his nervous system down … has taken a lot a lot of intense work. And it was terrifying. We're going we were going up against a police department, a city, and we live in a small town."

The problems only worsened when her son began running away. The very people she needed to help find him were those who harmed him: the police.

"After you go through something like this, it's hard to have trust that a sane person is going to show up that understands how to deal with a child," she said.

Other parents told CBS News similar stories. The father of one child told CBS News Colorado his child, who was arrested at age 5 and had documented disabilities, "regressed significantly" after the incident and even had to move to a residential treatment facility to receive more intensive care.

Mathies-Dinizulu said those effects can last a child's entire life.

"Children in particular, they could be incredibly resilient," Mathies-Dinizulu said. "But it's something that they will never forget. And because of that, if something traumatic or scary happens to them in the future — that type of accumulated stress from what happened at school, now it's happening again in another place."

The effects of that trauma can warp the way a child sees the world, Mathies-Dinizulu said.

"They may feel like they're not worthy, or they may feel like they're bad," she said. "Some of those symptoms of anxiety or depression or traumatic stress symptoms like flashbacks or anger and irritability might be tied to the traumatic event."

Gerardi said she hopes seeing her son's suffering will help people understand things need to change.

"This is 100% preventable," she said, "100% preventable. There's a lot of trauma and things in life that are not. This is not one of those. This could have been prevented."

[liyawritesss]

America would rather implode before admitting its wrongdoings, first and foremost

[beeseverywhen]

you’re delusional if you don’t think we should abolish what is essentially child labor just because “b-but kids can make friends at school” which they don’t even have time for anymore. School is designed to prepare you for working for a shitty boss and company, not to educate you. Kids should learn basic skills like how to read and write and basic math, but from there it should be their choice on what to learn because they want to, not for a grade.

Tell me you've never spent any time responsible for kids why don't you. This doesn't have shit to do with capitalism. It's about the kids development