Category: Randomness

Prison Inmates Defeat Harvard Students In A Debate

  
Criminal justice reform will likely be one of the big topics in the 2016 presidential campaign. Candidates should perhaps look into the Bard Prison Initiative. The program may provide a productive template for rehabilitating convicted felons by offering college-level courses.

According to The Wall Street Journal, inmates at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility took part in the Bard Prison Initiative, and the outcome was a win in a war of words over Ivy League students. Three men from the prison won a debate against undergraduates from Harvard College.

The two teams debated the issue of public schools having the ability to deny enrollment to undocumented students. Though they disagreed with the premise, the inmates had to defend the idea. After nearly an hour of back-and-forth, judges awarded the victory to the inmates.

“They caught us off guard,” said Harvard junior Anais Carell.

The prison debaters were not allowed to use the internet for research and could only rely on written texts such as books and magazines. Prison administrators had to approve every material the prisoners were able to use which could take weeks. Even with that disadvantage, the Bard team has also defeated West Point and the University of Vermont.

Source | AllHipHop

U.S. Military Responsible For Bombing Doctors Without Borders Hospital In Afghanistan

A heavily-armed U.S. gunship designed to provide added firepower to special operations forces was responsible for shooting and killing 22 people at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan over the weekend, Pentagon officials said Monday. 

The attack occurred in the middle of the night Saturday, when Afghan troops—together with a U.S. special forces team training and advising them—were on the ground near the hospital in Kunduz, the first major Afghan city to fall to the Taliban since the war began in 2001. 

The top U.S. general in Afghanistan said Monday the airstrike was requested by Afghan troops who had come under fire, contradicting earlier statements from Pentagon officials that the strike was ordered to protect U.S. forces on the ground.

[Afghan response to hospital bombing is muted, even sympathetic]
The new details of the attack, and the continuing dispute over what exactly happened, heightened the controversy over the strike. In the two days since the incident, U.S. officials have struggled to explain how a U.S. aircraft wound up attacking a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders. On Monday, the medical humanitarian group said the United States was squarely responsible.

Read more on this travesty at Freedom of Speech 21st Century