The police in Ogun State have sent strong warning to Bishop David Oyedepo of the Living Faith Church (Winners Chapel) over his plan to reopen his church. DAILY POST recalls that Bishop Oyedepo, in a viral video, on Friday, said he had declared churches open, saying anybody against the reopening of churches will die. Oyedepo’s […]

Police warn Oyedepo over decision to reopen church

The Advocate-General (AG) to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has issued his opinion in response to several claims in France against internet giant Google, relating to the operation of its search-related advertising service Adwords. Google's Adw...

After weeks of Kiwis being urged to stay home, stay safe and wash their hands, the Cabinet will have its own hands full with a final piece of the Covid data jigsaw revealed today.There are just two new cases of Covid-19 - continuing...

In a case which may change how the Premier League chooses to structure broadcasting rights packages, on 4 October, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled in favour of a pub landlady from Portsmouth, who was using a Greek decoder to screen Premier...

ISLAMABAD: Former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has said the decisions taken by the Economic Coordination Committee and the federal cabinet led to a hike in sugar prices across the country earlier this year.The PML-N leader was talking to media outside the Federal Investigation...

The event had been scheduled to take place in October of this year, marking 75 years since the end of the second world war, but will now take place in 2021.

Islamabad : The founder of Islamabad Chamber for Small Traders and former President ICCI Shahid Rasheed Butt on Saturday lauded the decision of Prime Minister Imran Khan to restart the economy revival.The COVID-19 will affect the economy for months, maybe years, but reopening businesses cannot...

However, Stewart also voiced concerns of how the lack of a County season would affect the development of young players in the system.

Premier Doug Ford says that an announcement will be made next week on whether or not Ontario students will be able to return to the classroom this school year.

WA's multi-billion-dollar iron ore mines have kept operating throughout the coronavirus pandemic as Chinese demand continues — and experts say they could be what saves the Australian economy in the recovery.

Divestment by multinational enterprises is an important yet understudied phenomenon. The few available estimates indicate that about a fifth of all foreign affiliates are divested every five years. This working paper presents the findings from a novel cross-country firm-level dataset with financial and ownership information.

Reversing the damage is within our grasp, but it will hinge on a strong international climate agreement and policies that make polluters pay. Op Ed by Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary-General and Nick Stern, Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, The Guardian.

Climate change is a clear and undeniable challenge that requires a global response. The Paris Agreement represents the careful crafting of a collective effort of over 190 countries to meet this challenge.

This Forum took stock of the key challenges and trends in regulating money in politics; identify emerging risks and opportunities; shape a common understanding of the policy options ahead and trade-offs in enhancing fairness, integrity and transparency in decision making including in the realm of political finance; and mobilise partners to work together and promote synergies in the future agenda.

The Decision-Recommendation on the Co-operative Investigation and Risk Reduction of Chemicals revises and replaces a 1991 Decision-Recommendation of the Council. The Decision-Recommendation is composed of two parts: Part A focuses on the development of harmonised hazard and exposure assessment methodologies for chemicals and Part B focuses on risk prevention and reduction.

Renee Altakrity had her four-year-old son pulled from her arms by police during the 'Exercise My Rights' protest outside New South Wales parliament house on Saturday.

Jessica Ennis-Hill's coach hit out at UK Athletics, suggesting they may have been compromised by a lucrative sponsorship deal with Nike in their decision to stand by Mo Farah’s coach Alberto Salazar.

Track and field icon Jessica Ennis-Hill, who won heptathlon gold for Great Britain at the London 2012 Olympics, has retired from athletics. The 30-year-old had hinted at retirement after Rio 2016.

Video referees could make their decisions from Premier League grounds if clubs decide to stick with VAR when football returns after the coronavirus crisis.

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TU students demand to reconsider quarantine centre decision

September 23, 2015

As an industry, we’ve worked to established many new practices and tools for nimble design teams, from A/B testing to measuring bounce rates and CTR performance. But a lot of these methods require engineers or some amount of technical know-how to execute, and they take place only after something has been launched.

The judicious application of “dumb data” can streamline your workflow and improve your designs

What many people don’t know is that there are some unexpected applications of data to consider earlier in the design process, which you, the designer, can do yourself. They’re not fancy, and you don’t need to know how to write SQL queries. The judicious application of just-enough “dumb data” can streamline your workflow and improve your designs in surprisingly useful ways.

Here are...read more
By Jocelyn Lin

The Kozhikode Corporation Council has gone back on its decision to hand over the project for renovation of Muthalakkulam grounds to Salim Group and As

Decision day looms over Ellesmere Port shale gas plan  Cheshire Live

File: Los Angeles Unified 6th-grader Jack Spiewak performs as Macbeth at Eagle Rock Elementary School. District schools can now use a major source of federal funds to incorporate the arts into academics.; Credit: Maya Sugarman/KPCC

Los Angeles Unified School District officials have cleared the way for principals to tap into a major source of funding for arts programs targeting low-income students starting this fall.

Although state and federal officials previously said national Title I dollars, allocated to help disadvantaged students improve in academics, could be used for the arts instruction, some district officials had been reluctant to move ahead. The latest decision reverses the district's long-standing practice and opens the door for Title I-funded arts instruction that helps students improve their academic performance. 

"This has been a long time coming and this really is a day of rejoicing, quite frankly, in LAUSD," said Rory Pullens, the district's executive director of arts education. 

RELATED: For Pasadena school, arts plus math is really adding up

A two-page memo issued Thursday from Pullens, Deputy Superintendent Ruth Perez and Karen Ryback, executive director of Federal and State Education Programs, confirms the arts as a core subject and allows schools with high percentages of low-income students to use Title I funds for the arts.

Those schools "may utilize arts as an integration strategy to improve academic achievement," the directive reads. However, Title I funds are not allowed "to fund programs whose primary objective is arts education," according to the memo. As an example, the funds could be tapped to help students learn a character's point of view in a lesson that requires acting out a skit. 

Title I funding, developed in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, has been used historically to increase students success in reading and math. The funds have paid for efforts like reading coaches or math tutors, supplemental software programs and professional development for teachers to improve low-performing students' test scores.

At $14 billion a year, the Title I funds make up the federal government's largest expenditure for grades K-12. The majority of LAUSD schools receive Title I dollars.

Arts advocates have long sought to get the second-largest district in the country to shift its stance on Title I arts funding, arguing that the arts have been shown in research to boost student academic performance. 

LAUSD joins just a handful of districts around the state that have committed to a district-wide Title I plan including the arts. San Diego Unified, Sacramento City Unified and Chula Vista Elementary School District are among them, according to Joe Landon, executive director of the California Alliance for Arts Education. 

Landon says beyond these districts, the decision to use Title I for the arts is largely playing out on a school-by-school basis. Some principals are using Title I funds for the arts, but they're doing so largely under the radar, some fearing that state monitors will say the funds were used incorrectly. 

"At each level, there are people that are afraid," Landon said. The reason: schools are accountable for how Title I dollars are spent and misuse could cause schools to lose a valuable funding source. Despite the state and federal directives on Title I allowing arts instruction in academics, school officials have been hesitant to make changes because Title I spending is monitored so closely. 

Landon explained that a decision to use Title I funds for the arts is momentous for schools.

"When districts begin to move," he said, "that really changes it."

Attention turns to principals, funding gatekeepers

When Los Angeles Unified brought on Pullens, attracting him from a well-known arts school in Washington, D.C., he took on the task of securing Title I funding in his early months on the job. He said budgeting would be a huge challenge in increasing access to the arts for more of the district's students. 

The deed now done, Pullens said: "This was clearly a very high priority of what we wanted to accomplish and we are just so thrilled that this has finally come to pass."

It'll now be up to school principals to decide how much of their Title I funding to allocate for arts instruction. Pullens said plans to train principals on the benefits of arts integration are underway.

While the Title I arts spending is not mandatory, he expects the new directive to free up significant funding for the district's arts efforts. He didn't have exact estimates, but pointed out that schools' Title I funds range anywhere from hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars per school. 

As KPCC reported in July, only about 70 of the district's more than 500 elementary schools were on track to provide all four art forms (dance, visual arts, music and theater) for the 2014-2015 school year — a legal requirement under the California education code. 

Cheryl Sattler, senior partner with the Florida-based consulting firm Ethica, has worked closely with about 100 school districts nationwide and estimates only two have used Title I funding for the arts.

“The urgency is to try to get kids to read," she said, "and if you have kids, for example, in the 10th grade who are reading at a 3rd or 4th-grade level, it’s really hard to think past that, because that’s the emergency.” The arts are often left out of the conversation, according to Sattler, which means they're left out of funding.

“I think the issue is that largely principals, and school improvement committees, and other folks who are worried about academic performance don’t always look to the arts and they don’t always know the research about how powerful arts can be,” she said. 

The LAUSD directive described examples of arts integration activities that schools might consider:

• Invite community members to demonstrate or share their talents with students as a prompt for a writing assignment.
• Have students create models that display mathematical data pertaining to each planet of the solar system: distance from the sun, length of day and night, length of year, and day and night surface temperatures.
• Ask students to create a small piece of dance/movement that models their understanding of geometric concepts.
• Encourage students to explore the science of sound by utilizing rubber bands, oatmeal containers, coffee cans, balloons, etc. to construct one or more of the four families of musical instruments: strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion.
• Have students write and perform a short skit to illustrate a literary character’s point of view.
• Provide a lesson on utilizing a software program to create an animated film that highlights key historical events that occurred during the Civil War (In this instance, the cost of the software program would be an appropriate Title I expenditure). 

Supporting Title I Schoolwide Program 2-19-2015

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A series of educational modules has been developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to help students in professional schools – law, public policy, medicine, journalism, and business – understand science and its role in decision making.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers a framework to guide federal, tribal, state and local agencies, community groups, and other interested and affected parties in making decisions about the Spirit Lake and Toutle River system, near Mount St. Helens in southwest Washington state.

When conducting research involving the testing of human biospecimens, investigators and their institutions should routinely consider whether and how to return individual research results on a study-specific basis through an informed decision-making process, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The goal of achieving universal health coverage by 2030 — one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — necessitates that countries strengthen their food and drug regulatory systems as a whole, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the National Science Foundation announced today the formation of a Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN) to connect social and behavioral science researchers with decision-makers who are leading the response to COVID-19. SEAN will respond to the most pressing social, behavioral, and economic questions that are being asked by federal, state, and local officials by working with appropriate experts to quickly provide actionable answers.

A new framework to help decide whether to translocate species that are threatened by climate change has been developed. The framework provides a simple method of assessing different strategies and ensuring that limited budgets are used effectively.

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Decision-making about complex environmental problems like desertification, which also have important social and economic implications, could be improved by employing methods outlined in a new study. The study outlines the steps taken by researchers on behalf of the Canary Islands government in devising a policy strategy for tackling desertification and describes a three-step methodology and participatory decision-making process.

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A framework to value marine and coastal zone ecosystem services, which acknowledges but transcends monetary value, has been proposed by researchers. Using this approach, coastal managers can integrate the different values placed on ecosystem goods and services by various stakeholders to assess how these values affect planning decisions.

A CIO talks about the need to make judicious technology spends in the good times.

Researchers have developed a new tool to help policymakers access and use data regarding the environmental impacts of consumption and production. Using the EUREAPA tool, decision makers can analyse data from a range of perspectives and create scenarios to understand the implications of changes in consumption and production.

Valuations of water quality as an ecosystem service often fail to include related services like recreation or human health, and do not consider the effects of water quality changes due to management. Researchers have now developed a template for valuation that considers multiple services and links management actions to changes in water quality and ultimate economic value.

A recent study suggests that a shift to more sustainable development, based on ecosystem services, is needed to support human health and wellbeing. Focusing on ecosystem services provided by river catchments, this study recommends that more needs to be done on a practical level to support decision-makers, in a way that recognises the relationships between different types of ecosystem services.