Dad is held as ecstasy kills girl, 15

Brian Dodgeon, education expert and 60 years old, was arrested after a 15-year-old girl named Issy Reilly-Jones died when she took 2 ecstasy pills at a party hosted by Dodgeon's 14-year-old daughter.

Apparently the kids were drinking when Dodgeon's daughter told her friends that her dad had some weed somewhere. Dodgeon himself was not home when this occurred.  When the kids went looking for the weed, they found some pills stashed away in a room and ''passed them around like sweets''. Issy died from heart failure after taking the ecstacy and 3 other kids were taking to the hospital with convulsions. Their condition is stable at this time.

Brian Dodgeon was arrested on suspicion of drug possession and child abandonment.

Original Article:
---http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3545346/Dad-is-held-as-ecstasy-kills-teenage-girl-Issy-Reilly-Jones-15.html





My take on this:
I honestly can not believe how an education expert, and especially at that age, can leave his 14-year-old to party at home whithout him being there. I also can not believe how he can allow himself to be in possession of, or use, these kinds of drugs especially when he has kids this age. He should've known better. In my opinion this guy deserves to go to jail. Of course you can say that it's the kids' fault for trying out pills they know are dangerous, but then again they are teenagers who do experiment when they get the chance or are forced to by peer pressure, but I think it's clear that if this guy would've been the rolemodel he should've been none of this would've happened.

What's eating you?

Even though people tend to wash themselves regularly and tidey their homes the UK seems to be under attack from a plague of bedbugs.


According to pest control experts Rentokil the mite population has increased by 38% over the past year.

Rob Dunn, professor of biology at North Carolina University, however, says that a lot of these parasites and bacteria are working with us rahter than against us and he tries to explain how this works exactly in his new book The Wild Life Of Our Bodies.

He explains what creatures are living where on our bodies and tells us why they are there in the first place. Skin, mouth, eyebrows, lungs, colon, ankle and feet seem to be the most attractive areas for parasites and bacteria.

---Original Article:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3542887/Body-is-full-of-worms-mites-fungi.html



My take on this:
I was aware of the fact that there are many creatures living on- and in our bodies, but I had no clue that there were this many! Thank God that they're not all bad or harmful. It actually seems that most of them are either neutral or beneficial to us, but they sometimes have 'nasty' side effects such as smelly feet... An interesting article to read, but I probably wouldn't want to read the entire book on this subject.

Catholic and Muslim pupils find they have a lot in common

In order to increase mutual understanding between young Muslim and Catholic children, 10 pairs of contrasting schools decided to set up a linking project which allows children of different ethnical background and religion to get to know eachother in a playful way. William Austin junior school (mostly Muslim) and St. Joseph's (mostly Catholic) are two schools attending the project. The pupils from William Austin write letters to pupils from St. Joseph's visa versa. Then they set up small meetings between the pupils where they playfully get to see that there are a lot of similarities between them inspite of the fact that they are from different ethnical and religious backgrounds.

The students seem to be as delighted as they are surprised to the fact that they have more in common than they would've thought. Some even kept in touch after the project and became friends.

This Schools Linking Project is an initiative to bind neighbourhoods and schools together even though differences in religion and culture are vast and seems to have potential. ''I want to teach my students that it doesn't matter where you are from. You are here now and you choose to live here so let's celebrate being part of this country.'' - Penny Lasham, a teacher from a nearby school.

---Original Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/12/school-twinning-catholic-muslim

My take on this:

I think this Schools Linkin Project is a great initiative to improve mutual understanding between the two dominant religions and might prove to be a good start to break down barriers between children, or adults for that matter, created by differences in ethnical background or religion. It might seem like a small step to some, but it is immense to these pupils. Every great initiative has to start somewhere right? And I believe this is, indeed, the right place to start when trying to combat these issues.

Private schools line up to become free

Private schools are lining up to become free schools, which are subsidized by the government, so that more people can get the opportunity to benefit from the large variety of educational systems they have to offer.

The National Union of Teachers' general secretary, Kevin Courtney, says it is ''incredible'' that the the Department for Education slashes the budget of already existing state schools and yet somehow finds that they have enough money to turn private schools into free schools.

David Mann, head of a future free school, claims that creating these new free schools will help raise the quality level of education by creating some competitiveness between the already existing state schools, which do not have a high level of education according to Mann, and the new free schools.

Original Article:
--- http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/12/private-schools-conversion



My take on this:

I think that granting more people access to non-standard ways of education, by taking away the insane prices private schools charge and making them free instead, is a good idea since it grants more freedom in choice of education for parents. However, it seems that the already existing state schools have to suffer for the new free schools to work and personally I don't think that making one group suffer to make another one flourish is a fair trade-off. This decision should only be made if it has more pros than cons and at the moment it seems as though the pros and cons are equally distributed.