₦airaland Forum

The Internet is littered with tips and tricks for winning that awkward yet endlessly amusing staple of childhood life: the staring contest. Last year the Dali Museum even made an app that lets people have a competition with a virtual Salvador Dalí. But if you’re wondering exactly how the school-to-prison pipeline works, an incident in Ohio in which a judge has upheld a school suspension of a black boy who was having a staring contest with a white girl who was a classmate might provide some insight
Last week Patrick Dinkelacker, a judge in the Hamilton County Common Pleas court, upheld the September 2014 suspension of the 12-year-old from St. Gabriel Consolidated School in the town of Glendale, about 20 minutes north of Cincinnati.

“My son stared at a girl who was engaged in a staring game,” Candice Tolbert, the boy’s mother, told Fox19. “She giggled the entire time,” said Tolbert. She also expressed concern over allegedly inconsistent application of the school’s discipline policies.

“The same girl that accused my son of this act of perception of intimidation, aggressively poured milk on someone else’s lunch. When she did that, there was no penalties for that. She received nothing for that,” Tolbert told the station.

Tolbert and her husband filed suit against the school in an effort to get the one-day suspension removed from their son’s academic record. The girl said that she “felt fearful” during the staring contest, according to court documents. The day after the contest took place, the girl’s parents contacted school officials about how their daughter was scared of the boy. The administrators talked to the boy, and he subsequently wrote an apology letter to the girl.
“I never knew she was scared because she was laughing,” the boy wrote in the letter, according to Fox19. “I understand I done the wrong thing that will never happen again. I will start to think before I do so I am not in this situation,” he added. Tolbert and her husband were not notified that there was an issue until the day after their son wrote the apology. 

According to Fox19, the school’s handbook states: “The principal is the final recourse in all disciplinary matters and may waive any and all rules at his/her discretion for just cause.” The school administration has refused requests for comment, and a statement from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati seems to support the actions of the administrators, as well as the court ruling.

“Judge Patrick Dinkelacker listened to the plaintiff’s arguments yesterday, rejected them, and dismissed the complaint against the school. We aren’t going to comment any further on particular issues concerning our students,” reads the statement.

In recent years black children have been escorted out of class by police for wearing the wrong shoes to school and suspended for holding up three fingers in a photo. As seen in the cases of Florida teen Kiera Wilmot and Texas teen Ahmad Mohamad, disciplinary action and law enforcement involvement might happen when black kids choose to demonstrate their scientific knowledge. Indeed, black students are three times more likely than their white peers to be suspended, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights. 

What's driving the boom in suspensions? According to research, black children may not be seen as innocent in the eyes of teachers or other parents.

A paper published in 2014 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that black children "as young as 10 may not be viewed in the same light of childhood innocence as their white peers, but are instead more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime."

To address the problem, in January 2014 Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and then attorney general, Eric Holder released a 35-page document of guidelines on school discipline. The effort was designed to help teachers and principals pay more attention to the social and emotional needs of students and reduce their reliance on suspension and expulsion as a punishment.

"A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct,” Holder said in a statement at the time.
The "Belief Statement" on the website of St. Gabriel Consolidated School indicates that the staff is aware of the need to treat students equitably. “We believe each child has the right and ability to learn,” and “We believe that cultural diversity is good.” However it seems Candice Tolbert is no longer convinced that the school has her son's best interests in mind.

“We invested academically into our son [for] the betterment of his education,“ Tolbert told radio host Joe Madison on his Sirius XM show, "The Black Eagle," on Tuesday morning. “At the end, they want to brand him and mark him,” Tolbert continued.

“Now we’re looking to go to other schools," said Tolbert. She also expressed fears that transferring might not be so simple for her son who is "a young black male coming to another school with his suspension on his record

After the yelling, shouting and shoving that engulfed the Super Eagles camp in Belgium on Tuesday, skipper Vincent Enyeama still heart-broken has opened up on the disgrace meted out to him by security men that resulted in his clothes being torn.
The altercation between coach Sunday Oliseh and Enyeama graced the headlines as the Eagles prepare to face Congo in one of their two friendlies ahead of a World Cup qualifier. The Eagles play Congo today and would face the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon on Sunday.
Writing on his  Instagram page ‘vinny 2908’, Enyeama regretted the disgrace of being thrown out naked by security men.
‘’After 13 years of national service, having this smile on my face and this passion in my heart. Through the billows, the waves of the ocean, the tears of defeat, the sound of rejoicing from victory chants. Now the thought of being stripped naked and security agents throwing me out breaks me completely.
“I will take anything but not insult to my dead mother.”
Sports Vanguard gathered coach Sunday Oliseh has since appointed Ahmed Musa as captain to replace Enyeama who kicked against it. But before the issue got out of hand, NFF President Melvin Amaju Pinnick quelled the situation. Enyeama was later re-admitted to the Eagles camp

Abuja (AFP) - Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday warned there was no longer any hiding place for the corrupt, as he hailed British and Swiss support for the recovery of stolen public funds.

"Switzerland and Britain have been very helpful indeed in the recovery of our assets. But we must build on what we have started," he told both countries' ambassadors separately in Abuja.

"It is also important to send a signal to the elite that it is no longer business as usual," he said, according to a statement from his office.

Buhari has vowed to recover "mind-boggling" amounts of stolen oil money and bring those responsible to book, as part of a drive against corruption and to replenish depleted government coffers.

The arrest in London last week of the country's former oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke on suspicion of bribery and money laundering has shocked Nigeria's political establishment.

She was one of five people arrested on Friday as part of a probe into international corruption dating back to 2013, when she was a serving minister under president Goodluck Jonathan.

Magistrates in London on Monday granted police permission to retain for six months £27,000 ($41,000/36,500 euros) in cash seized during her arrest.

Alison-Madueke -- the first woman to hold the post of oil minister and the rotating presidency of the global oil cartel OPEC -- has previously been accused of involvement in large-scale fraud.

She has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.

On her watch, it was alleged the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) failed to remit $20 billion in revenue to the central bank.

Nigerian authorities had received "much help" from Britain, Switzerland and other nations to track down stolen public funds "by officials of past administrations", Buhari said.

But he called for "the processes of investigation, prosecution and repatriation of Nigerian funds stolen by corrupt public officials and their accomplices" to be speeded up.

Switzerland in March said it would return about $380 million linked to Nigeria's former military ruler Sani Abacha that was placed in several overseas accounts controlled by his family.

Some $500 million in Swiss bank accounts had already been returned.

Abacha, in power from 1993 until his death in 1998, is suspected of having siphoned off $2.2 billion from Nigeria's central bank in what the United States has called "brazen acts of kleptocracy

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for key discoveries about a cosmic particle that whizzes through space at nearly the speed of light, passing easily through Earth and even your body.

Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada were honored for showing that these tiny particles, called neutrinos, have mass. That's the quality we typically experience as weight.

"The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in awarding the prize.

The work dispelled the long-held notion that neutrinos had no mass.

Neutrinos come in three types, or "flavors," and what the scientists actually showed is that neutrinos spontaneously shift between types. That in turn means they must have mass.


Kajita, 56, is director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at the University of Tokyo. McDonald, 72, is a professor emeritus at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

McDonald told reporters in Stockholm by phone that the discovery helped scientists fit neutrinos into theories of fundamental physics.

Kajita, who initially told a news conference at his university that "my mind has gone completely blank. I don't know what to say," went on to stress that many people had contributed to his work.

"The universe where we live in is still full of unknowns," he said. "A major discovery cannot be achieved in a day or two. It takes a lot of people and a long time."

The existence of neutrinos was first proven in 1956. They come from a variety of sources in the cosmos, on Earth and in Earth's atmosphere. Most that reach Earth were created by nuclear reactions inside the sun. Trillions pass through your body every second