Donnerstag, 19. April 2012

CURBING YOUTH CRIME IN NIGERIA

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Lagos establishes vocational centre for Area Boys

by Simon Utebor

Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola has inaugurated vocational centre as part of the measures to get urchins, popularly known as Area Boys, off the streets.

Governor Babatunde Fashola

Fashola said at the inauguration of the Lagos State School Leavers Modern Apprenticeship on Tuesday that the centre, apart from providing a base for young school leavers to acquire skills, would provide a base for miscreants to be trained free of charge

Represented by his deputy, Mrs. Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire, the governor explained that he built the centre with security votes.

He said he believed the state would recoup the money when they (miscreants) start to pay tax to the government as responsible people.

Fashola noted that most of the urchins dropped out of schools and did not have good parental care. According to him, the situation they found themselves forced them into taking drugs and other vices.

He said, "These youths if trained could be very useful members of the society. That is why we feel it is imperative to train these miscreants.

"This is what we have been doing to secure the state from crime. Before 2001, you could not walk on the streets of Lagos without being molested by these miscreants. We have about 17 other skill acquisition centres to arrest the situation and prevent crimes."

Fashola said the Graduate Vocational Employability Skills Training programme was designed to provide employment and vocational training for graduate apprentices.

Senator Olabiyi Durojiaye lamented that the country was currently losing over N960bn as capital flight to foreign expatriates.

He commended the state government for partnering other international skill acquisition centres to train and retrain the nation's youths.

Culled from Punch Nigeria

Dienstag, 17. April 2012

IS THIS CHILD ABUSE ?

Police handcuff Ga. kindergartner for tantrum

Associated Press – 5 hrs ago

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. (AP) — Police in Georgia handcuffed a kindergartner after the girl threw a tantrum and the police chief defended the action.

The girl's family demanded Tuesday that this central Georgia city change policy so that other children aren't treated the same way. They say the child was shaken up by being put in a cell at the police station.

Salecia Johnson, 6, was accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing furniture in an outburst Friday at Creekside Elementary School, Macon television station WMAZ-TV(http://on.wmaz.com/HPb7nr ) reported. Police said the girl knocked over a shelf that injured the principal.

The school called police. The police report says when an officer tried to calm the child in the principal's office, she resisted and was handcuffed. The girl was charged with simple assault and damage to property.

Police Chief Dray Swicord says the department's policy is to handcuff people in certain situations.

"Our policy states that any detainee transported to our station in a patrol vehicle is to be handcuffed in the back and there is no age discrimination on that rule," Milledgeville Police Chief Dray Swicordtold WMAZ.

The girl's aunt, Candace Ruff, went with the child's mother to pick her up from the police station. She Salecia was by herself in a holding cell and complained about the handcuffs.

"She said they were really tight. She said they really hurt her wrists," Ruff told the Associated Press. "She was so shaken up when we went there to pick her up."

Officials at Creekside Elementary did not immediately return calls Tuesday.

"We would not like to see this happen to another child, because it's horrifying. It's devastating," Ruff said.

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Information from: WMAZ-TV, http://www.wmaz.com/

Freitag, 13. April 2012

CHILDREN VS PLAY

National Trust Super Rangers to teach children 50 things to do outdoors

By Louise Gray | The Telegraph – 11 hours ago

The latest study by Play England showed a third of parents will not let children do ‘risky activities’ like climbing trees.

As a consequence children are growing up with little experience of the outdoors and are afraid to go for a walk in the woods or search for bugs.

In an effort to give both parents and children more confidence the Trust have created a list of ’50 things to do before you are 11 ¾’.

[Related feature: Five eco-friendly activities to do with your kids]

The checklist for under-12s includes setting up a snail race, damming a stream and making a mud pie.

Five ‘super rangers’ at National Trust properties have been chosen as experts in certain activities. Tree man is a 6ft 3" tree climbing expert who has scaled 50 metre-high trees, Captain Skim can skim a stone over 26 times, Den-Boy is an outdoor hideaway-building champion, Midas will lead treasure hunts and the Bug Catcher can identify 300 species of moth.

The “fantastic five” are just some of the volunteers on National Trust properties offering to teach children the skills they have forgotten.

The new initiative comes after a report commissioned by the Trust found children today spend fewer than ten per cent of their playtime in wild places. Instead the younger generation spend an average of two-and-a-half hours a day watching the television.

Dame Fiona Reynolds, the Director General of the Trust, said children need to reconnect with nature by playing the games generations before them have enjoyed.

“Children today are unfamiliar with the countryside. They need to be given the confidence and the skills to go into the wood and build a den or climb a tree.”

See the full list below:

1. Climb a tree
2. Roll down a really big hill
3. Camp out in the wild
4. Build a den
5. Skim a stone
6. Run around in the rain
7. Fly a kite
8. Catch a fish with a net
9. Eat an apple straight from a tree
10. Play conkers
11. Throw some snow
12. Hunt for treasure on the beach
13. Make a mud pie
14. Dam a stream
15. Go sledging
16. Bury someone in the sand
17. Set up a snail race
18. Balance on a fallen tree
19. Swing on a rope swing
20. Make a mud slide
21. Eat blackberries growing in the wild
22. Take a look inside a tree
23. Visit an island
24. Feel like you're flying in the wind
25. Make a grass trumpet
26. Hunt for fossils and bones
27. Watch the sun wake up
28. Climb a huge hill
29. Get behind a waterfall
30. Feed a bird from your hand
31. Hunt for bugs
32. Find some frogspawn
33. Catch a butterfly in a net
34. Track wild animals
35. Discover what's in a pond
36. Call an owl
37. Check out the crazy creatures in a rock pool
38. Bring up a butterfly
39. Catch a crab
40. Go on a nature walk at night
41. Plant it, grow it, eat it
42. Go wild swimming
43. Go rafting
44. Light a fire without matches
45. Find your way with a map and compass
46. Try bouldering
47. Cook on a campfire
48. Try abseiling
49. Find a geocache
50. Canoe down a river

Mittwoch, 11. April 2012

MORE PROTECTION FOR KIDS

British firm unveils “Carkoon” – the cocoon baby seat

By Adam Parris-Long | Yahoo! Cars News – 4 hours ago

A revolutionary baby seat that deploys a protective cocoon in collisions has been unveiled by a British firm.

The Carkoon is a rear-facing baby seat that features a sliding protective shell made from Kevlar and fireproof Nomex, which is capable of keeping a child safe for up to 18 minutes in the event of a blaze. The Carkoon also contains a transmitter that alerts emergency services with the exact GPS location of the child – giving vital extra information for any rescue effort.

Added to the design is a rotating base and “quick release” handle that saves messing about with seatbelts for rapid ejection. The cocoon shell is also highly resistant to collisions and will only deploy in extreme circumstances thanks to an embedded gyroscopic magnitude sensor that detects when a vehicle is tipped back or forward.

“Initially we tried to think of a way to create a car seat that got around the many ways cars seats are attached and create uniformity manufacturers could adhere to,” Carkoon’s inventor Jullian Preston-Powers told Yahoo! Cars. “We realised that adults are protected by airbags but babies don’t have any protection from the same technology.”

The Carkoon’s air shield does not come into contact with the baby in the event of a collision and also protects them from objects in the car that turn into potentially fatal projectiles at high speeds. Despite these added benefits, the original idea for the product was to protect a baby from flames and came about after a Sussex fireman told the Brighton-based Cool Technologies about an unsuccessful attempt to save a baby from a burning car.

“We thought to ourselves; what if there isn’t a firefighter there at all? There must be a way to protect the child from fire,” said Mr Preston-Powers. “Smoke is difficult thing to deal with as well but the car seat does cocoon around the child so it prevents smoke it seeping in.

“There is nothing like anything this on the market, it is a big game-changer,” he added. “Moving to the next generation was very easy, as car seats are all the same. They are getting cheaper, made of poor quality plastic so this will change things.”

The Carkoon is currently only works with cars fitted with the Isofix safety seat system, which was made mandatory in the UK on new cars from this year onwards. The model will be priced at around £499 and is expected to hit shelves by spring 2013.