No Divorce Until You Reach Puberty

An eight-year old Saudi Arabian girl who was married off by her father to a 58-year-old man has been told she cannot divorce her husband until she reaches puberty. Lawyer Abdu Jtili said the divorce petition was filed by the unnamed girl's divorced mother in August after the marriage contract was signed by her father and the groom. "The judge has dismissed the plea because she [the mother] does not have the right to file, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty," lawyer Abdullah Jtili told the AFP news agency.
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Police Are Allegedly Assaulted By A 12-Year-Old Girl

It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn's home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on. As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, "You're a prostitute. You're coming with me." Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy." One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat. As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.
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Children forced into cell-like school seclusion rooms

A few weeks before 13-year-old Jonathan King killed himself, he told his parents that his teachers had put him in "time-out." "We thought that meant go sit in the corner and be quiet for a few minutes," Tina King said, tears washing her face as she remembered the child she called "our baby ... a good kid." But time-out in the boy's north Georgia special education school was spent in something akin to a prison cell -- a concrete room latched from the outside, its tiny window obscured by a piece of paper.
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Man throws shoes at Bush in Iraq

A man threw his shoes at President George W. Bush and was dragged away by security officials during the president's farewell trip to Iraq. The incident occurred as Bush was appearing Sunday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Bush ducked and wasn't hit by either shoe. Bush joked, saying that all he can report was that it was a size 10 shoe. then calmly took questions.
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32 graves at centre of investigation into Florida reform school

AN investigation has been opened into 32 anonymous graves at a Florida reform school after claims that young orphans and tearaways were flogged and tortured to death by guards. Former residents of the Florida School for Boys in Marianna believe that the shallow graves, which date to the 1950s and 1960s, contain the crushed skulls and broken bones of fellow inmates, and that staff meted out brutal punishments to boys as young as 8 for “crimes” such as singing or eating an extra pancake at breakfast.
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Teacher Throws Fit Over Student's Linux CD

In an age where Windows and OS X reign supreme, it's no wonder that a middle school teacher became enraged after discovering one of her students distributing what she believed to be bootlegged copies of an operating system in class. While teacher "Karen" was clearly operating under the assumption that she'd scored a minor victory for the Microsofts and other downtrodden software giants of the world, the particular operating system that she ended up disciplining her student for was a freely distributable version of Linux.
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School autopsy tours canceled

For the first time in nearly a decade, the Oakland County Medical Examiner's Office isn't offering public school tours this year after a bizarre coincidence this past spring in which a high school group from Waterford watched the autopsy of a 14-year-old girl from the same district.
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Pelahatchie Students Claim Girl Possessed By Devil

Students at a Pelahatchie high school said, for three days this week, a girl there spoke in tongues and made grave predictions for her classmates. Some of those predictions included when students would die. Pelahatchie High School students called the 16 WAPT newsroom convinced that an evil spirit had taken over Lashundra Clanton. "It was disturbing to a lot of students," Pelahatchie sophomore Rob Sparks said.
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Thinking, college degrees and unschooling curriculums (forum posts)

Thinking
Alternatives to college degrees?
Unschooling "Curriculums"

School-Free: Alternative education around the world

There doesn't seem to be much easy-to-find info on school alternatives in countries that aren't the US... So we now have a wiki dedicated to this purpose. It will probably grow slowly, and mostly based on what people can tell us from personal experience. So if you know anything about education alternatives in your country (or any country), please edit the wiki and add everything you know, as well as links to further info, etc. (Ignore the fact that it still has the default theme - I'll make it pretty later. For now info is more important.)