Photo, left: Yearling Harlem Success Academy Charter School (www.harlemsuccess.org) extols the message "Every Child Can Succeed" across all aspects of the school. Founded in August 2006, Harlem Success Academy Charter School has 280 kindergartners, first and second graders on its roster, with an admirable goal of becoming a K through 8th grade charter school with 40 New York City-based locations by the 2015-2016 academic year. See Hour 4, Block A,  Kate Taylor, NYT.
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re: US killed AQIS deputy emir, shura member in January drone strikes  Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent confirmed that deputy emir Ustad Ahmad Farooq and shura member Qari ‘Imran were killed in separate strikes in January. Farooq was identified in Osama bin Laden's documents as an up and coming al Qaeda leader.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb leader congratulates jihadists on Idlib victory Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb's emir, Abdulmalek Droukdel, has released an audio message praising the head of the Al Nusrah Front, al Qaeda's official branch in Syria, for working with other Islamist and jihadist groups to capture the city of Idlib.
Islamic State launches assault on Ramadi  The Islamic State makes a push in Anbar's capital and takes control of a district as Iraqi forces and Shiite militias are reportedly preparing an offensive in the western province.
Haqqani Network promotes suicide, IED attacks, and ambushes in ‘Caravan of Heroes’  US drone strike kills four in Taliban, al Qaeda haven.   fAl Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent's spokesman said that more than 50 of its members have been killed in strikes since June 2014.
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 1, Block B:  Ann Marlowe, Hudson, in re:  ISIS devastation of unparalleled historical treasures. Lots was destroyed during WWII in what should have been safe in Berlin museums.  It’s a tough call. Elgin marbles: when purchased, belonged to a different era (an Ottoman governor) rather than Greek patrimony.  In Iraq in the last days: only museum statues were replicas; the rest has been obliterated by sledgehammers then dynamite.  UNESCO convention rests on the notion that states are responsible for antiquities within their national borders. 
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 1, Block C: Liz Peek, The Fiscal Times & Fox, in re: Mrs Clinton's announcement video: "A Verizon commercial without the substance."  / TGM: The Democratic Party is the one of redistribution – but they sure do like some rich people. LP: If you’re a lifetime Democrat, you have to be disappointed that this is the best you can come up with – close to Wall Street, major trust issues, a hawk. . .  . I've heard that some of the big Dem donors are talking to Jeb Bush; and the Clintons haven't taken care of their big donors, incl. Penny Pritzker.  NYT projection: HRC would raise $2.5 billion.
Ted Cruz opposes Common Core, according to his website. He thinks every child deserves a quality education and breezily applauds “school choice.” Rand Paul wants to abolish the Common Core, and wants more variety in education choices.  Neither seems to make education a priority.
Note to Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and other conservative candidates: voters want to hear how you are going to fix our public schools. You’ve told us what’s wrong with Common Core, but you have failed to offer an alternative. This is vital because promising better schools might help attract Hispanic voters, and also because improved education is essential for our country’s growth and health. You cannot claim to be fiscally responsible while ignoring the failure of our schools to deliver capable graduates.   Related: Jeb Bush Stands Firm on Common Core
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 1, Block D:  Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: The attempt o suppress and dominate Tibetan religious has failed.  Beijing is now obliging monasteries to promote atheism - and that sure isn’t working. Similar events in Xinjiang among Uyghurs. TGM: . .  It's in line with the better angels of Americans's natures to work for liberty.  GC:  Chinese people want foodstuffs an other goods made outside China; Beijing forbids any importation of foreign milk powder for babies.  Bad economic numbers for March; looks as though [GDP] might be – zero.  TGM: a tipping point when other nations take their mfg out of China – to Bangladesh, Jordan, Mexico, Vietnam, even the US. . . . The economy wants to slow because there's too much debt.  Xi Jinping likes to talk about the new normal" of slower growth – but e may be heading toward zero.   . .  In agriculture, people can always feed themselves; urbanites are used to constant growth and won’t know what to do. Same with bureaucrats.  You see a lot of Chinese people on the streets here – they prefer the economy in the US to the downslide in China.  Many are taking their money our of China; those who can’t are putting savings into their domestic stock market, which is booming.
Nun Sets Herself on Fire to Protest Chinese Rule in Tibet  A nun set herself on fire in the past week in a Tibetan area of western China to protest Chinese rule and to call for the return of HH the Dalai Lama from exile, according to two pro-Tibet advocacy group . . . [more]
Hour Two
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 2, Block A:  David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent, and John Fund, National Review Online, in re: Mrs Clinton's announcement: dissed, but in fact not a bad video. Last time, she was rejected in favor of amore purely progressive candidate; What Dems like about Mrs Clinton is, above all, her husband.  Looking for a progressive champion; Mrs Clinton's centrism will be pushed.
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 2, Block B: David M Drucker, Washington Examiner Senior Congressional correspondent, and John Fund, National Review Online, in re:
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 2, Block C: Eli Lake, Bloomberg View, in re:  Saudis Consider Local Force for Yemen Fight
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 2, Block D:  Olivier Guitta, GlobalStrat director, in re: Why France is tough on Iran  No French diplomat or politician has since forgotten about this bloody history. 
Now that a framework deal has been agreed between Iran and the P5+1, one can only imagine how bad it would have been if it were not for the French. No one should be surprised that France is tough on Iran when it comes to nuclear negotiations. Indeed, when asked after the 9/11 attacks by President George W Bush what he thought about a rapprochement with Iran, French President Jacques Chirac replied: “Don’t even think about it. These people are lunatics! Don’t think there are moderates with whom you can negotiate.” This statement was not made in a vacuum, rather, it  pretty much sums up France’s view of the mullahs's regime since 1979.  
Hour Three
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 3, Block A:  Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal editorial board & host of OpinionJournal.com; in re: http://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-journal-the-uninspired-clinton-campaign-machine/51CE5B1B-CFBE-4B12-A7F0-80D412CA4D57.html    http://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-journal-new-mexico-ends-policing-for-profit/31370EE4-A9EC-4FB7-A2FF-62B7048E2B76.html
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 3, Block B:  Julie Bykowicz, Bloomberg Politics, in re: Why Hillary Clinton Can't Win the Fundraising Expectations Game. As Hillary Clinton begins her second presidential bid, and the business of paying for it, her supporters predict that she'll be deemed a fundraising failure no matter how much money she collects.   [more]
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 3, Block C: James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, in re: http://www.wsj.com/articles/hospital-next-right-1428951623?tesla=y
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 3, Block D: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, in re: Hillary: Go Big—or Else   Clinton is going to be surrounded by soap-opera coverage. The way around it: Stick to issues. But shed the caution and make the issues big.
Hour Four
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 4, Block A:  Kate Taylor, NYT, in re: In its devotion to accountability, Success Academy, New York City’s polarizing charter school network, may have no peer.  Though it serves primarily poor, mostly black and Hispanic students, Success is a testing dynamo, outscoring schools in many wealthy suburbs, let alone their urban counterparts. Those kinds of numbers have helped Success, led by Eva S. Moskowitz, to expand to become the city’s largest charter network.
In a rare look inside the network, the chronicle of a system driven by the relentless pursuit of better results. Rules are explicit and expectations precise. Incentives are offered, such as candy for good behavior, and Nerf guns and basketballs for high scores on practice tests. For those deemed not trying hard enough, there is “effort academy,” which is part detention, part study hall.
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 4, Block B:  Jed Babbin, EpicTimes, in re: To absolutely no one's surprise, Hillary is in. And it's all about her "accomplishments," of which there are none that benefit the nation, especially national security.  Clinton Declares for Iron Throne | London Center for Policy Research
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 4, Block C:  Paul Gregory, Hoover, in re:  That the JIT has yet to interview Russian and separatist officials and officers having intimate and invaluable information about the shooting down of MH17 seem to suggest a reluctance, if not cowardice, to bring the real perpetrators of the disaster to justice. Putin and the Kremlin need not worry. Even if the JIT got its act together and started to move up the ladder, Putin could grant Strelkov and Bezler, et al., either parliamentary immunity or an unexplained disappearance. [more]
..  ..  ..
The Joint Investigation Team (JIT), composed of investigators from Belgium, Australia, Ukraine, Malaysia and the Netherlands, is charged with bringing the “perpetrators of the attack on MH17 (Malaysian Airlines Flight 17) to justice.”
The JIT has issued a YouTube video that traces the path of the BUK missile that allegedly shot down MH17 from its entry from Russia into eastern Ukraine, to its location near the crash site, and to its hasty retreat back into Russia. The JIT released the video to encourage eyewitnesses to come forward to testify. Insofar as such witnesses would be from occupied eastern Ukraine, the JIT has offered them a witness protection program.
Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin’s foreign propaganda arm, released a skeptical account of the JIT video, citing the lack of “verifiable evidence made publicly available” other than the Russian defense ministry’s own evidence of “Ukrainian surface-to-air batteries and warplanes in the area on the day of the Boeing shooting.” No matter what, the Kremlin will not give up its account that Ukraine was responsible.
The JIT release contains videos of the BUK as it entered east Ukraine on a Volvo lorry, sat parked for the night at “hotel,” preceded through various towns on its way to Torez, and then made its hasty exit back across the Russian border after the crash.  The video also contains transcripts of intercepted conversations between the crew (code named Bibliotekar, or “librarian”) and various controllers discussing the location of the BUK, where to park it, and confirmation the day after what they called “yesterday’s mess” that “the truck is in Russia.”
The JIT release contains little that is new. The videos of the BUK as it moved from point to point and the intercepted phone calls have been widely circulated and commented upon. Although Russian sources heatedly dispute their authenticity, the Dutch public prosecutor has concludedthat the audio intercepts are genuine. That may be the most important new news. If these intercepts are authentic, then the intercepts among rebel officials and Moscow in the immediate aftermath of the disaster should be authentic as well.
I can appreciate the JIT’s methodical approach, but calling for eyewitnesses will only bring forward conflicting accounts and even Russian plants. If the true goal is to bring the actual perpetrators to justice, the JIT should be talking to higher-ups, whose knowledge of and participation in the catastrophe has been apparent from day one.
In my Is Putin Responsible For MH17? Five Questions For Investigators On Russian Culpability piece written last July, I offered JIT suggestions on whom to interview:
•                Interrogate Igor Strelkov (real name Girkin), the self-appointed (former) commander of the People’s Republic of Donetsk, about his social media posting a few minutes after the 4:30 PM crash of MH17 on July 18 about the shooting down of a transport plane: “This will teach them not to fly in our skies.” Ask Strelkov why he removed the announcement a few minutes later.
•                Interrogate Igor Bezler (alias Demon) about his informing Russian military intelligence colonel, Vasily Geranin, that a plane had been downed some fifteen minutes earlier.
•                Interrogate the commander of the Vostok battalion, Alexander Khodakovsky, about his instructions starting at 5:53 PM to subordinates working at the crash scene to gather and hide wreckage, to give evidence only to Strelkov’s people, to find and hide the black boxes, and that “high-level people in Moscow are very interested in this being done.”
•                Interrogate Oleg Bugrov, chief of staff of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Luhansk about his July 14 conversation with Russian military intelligence officer, “Oreon,” focusing on his statement “Now we have BUKs, we can bring planes down.”
•                Interrogate Sergei Khmury, deputy chief of Igor Strelkov, about his July 17 conversation with “Botsman,” of Russian military intelligence and rebel activist “Buryat” stating, “Thank God, BUK-M arrived today in the morning.”
These figures represent the immediate command structure both in eastern Ukraine and their counterparts in Russia as of July 17. These individuals are not hard to find. Russian citizen, Strelkov, speaks regularly at public forums since his return to Russia, claiming that he started the war in east Ukraine. Bezler has posted a YouTube video  denying he was “neutralized” by Russian intelligence and is alive and well in Poltava, Ukraine. Khodakovsky continues to command the Vostok battalion and has admitted (to Reuters) that the rebel forces have BUKs. I imagine that Ukrainian intelligence would be happy to give JIT the addresses of others conversationalists, such as Khmury, Bugrov and Geranin.
In interrogating the Strelkovs. Bezlers, Khodakovskys and Khmurys, the JIT should probe the next level of political and military command. It defies logic to think that Russian BUKs (which require trained crews and complicated logistics) appeared for the urgent purpose of  destroying Ukraine’s air advantage over eastern Ukraine without the highest level of Russian military and Kremlin approval. Such a decision was well above the pay levels of those on the scene.
The Guardian explains that the battle for compensation for the victims of MH17 will take years and will only be successful if governments take up the battle rather than leaving it to families. To quote one expert: “[The case] would need to be pursued by one country against another country [Russia] using  ….arbitration or adjudication by the International Civil Aviation Organization council and if that fails a case in the international court of justice.”
That the JIT has yet to interview Russian and separatist officials and officers having intimate and invaluable information about the shooting down of MH17 seem to suggest a reluctance, if not cowardice, to bring the real perpetrators of the disaster to justice. Putin and the Kremlin need not worry. Even if the JIT got its act together and started to move up the ladder, Putin could grant Strelkov and Bezler et al either parliamentary immunity or an unexplained disappearance.
..  ..  ..
Monday   13 April 2015  / Hour 4, Block D:   Seth Shostak, SETI & NYT, in re: Should We Keep a Low Profile in Space?  For more than a half-century, a small group of astronomers has sought intelligent company among the stars. They’ve done so by turning large radio antennas skyward, hoping to eavesdrop on signals from an advanced society. It’s a program known as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But now some researchers propose that we should do more than simply don headphones and await E.T.’s call: We should make serious efforts to encourage a response from putative aliens by deliberately transmitting our own messages. It’s a simple idea, akin to tossing a bottle into the cosmic ocean. But recent arguments for what’s termed active SETI have loosed a storm of controversy, one that has even washed into the halls of academe.
Why is this? Why has the sending of dispatches to worlds many trillions of miles distant suddenly become a hot-button issue? The simple answer is that there’s now a perception that advertising our existence could be a mortal threat to the planet.  The reasoning is this: While no one has yet offered decisive proof for life beyond Earth, in the past two years astronomers have learned that tens of billions of habitable planets suffuse our galaxy. Consequently, to believe that only Earth has spawned intelligence is to insist that our world is the site of a miracle. That point of view rarely appeals to scientists.
The aliens could very well be out there. And that realization has spurred a call by some for broadcasts intended to elicit a communication from at least the nearest other star systems. But we know nothing of the aliens’ possible motives or behavior. Therefore, it’s conceivable that betraying our existence might prompt aggressive action from space.
Broadcasting is likened to “shouting in the jungle” — not a good idea when you don’t know what’s out there. The British physicist Stephen Hawking alluded to this danger by noting that on Earth, when less advanced societies drew the attention of those more advanced, the consequences for the former were seldom agreeable.
It’s a worry we never used to have. Victorian-era scientists toyed with plans to use lanterns and burning pools of oil to contact postulated Martians. In the 1970s, NASA bolted greeting cards onto spacecraft that will leave our solar system and wander the vast reaches between the stars. The Pioneer and Voyager probes carry plaques and records with information about what humans look like and where Earth is, as well as a small sampling of our culture.  Those messages move at the speed of rockets. But in 1974, a three-minute encoded pictogram was transmitted using the large radio antenna at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It moves at the speed of light, 20,000 times faster. More recent radio transmissions include a Beatles song beamed by NASA to the North Star, a Doritos advertisement launched to a planetary system in the Big Dipper, and a series of broadcasts sent to nearby stars using an antenna in Crimea.
When most people believed that aliens were no more than easy black hats for Hollywood, the idiosyncratic nature of these messages could be easily dismissed. But if cosmic company is a legitimate possibility, shouldn’t we offer up something more edifying than pop music and snack food? A deliberate transmission should represent all of humanity — not short-circuit the important question of who will speak for Earth. Consequently, recent conferences on the merits of active SETI have sought the advice of social scientists. Among their worries is whether to be up front about humanity’s seamy side: Should we tell the extraterrestrials about war and injustice?
Personally, I think this concern is overwrought. Any society that can pick up our radio messages will be at a level of development at least centuries beyond our own. They would be no more incensed by our bad behavior than historians who learned that Babylonians attacked one another with spears. It seems naïve to imagine that, by shielding aliens from the less flattering aspects of humanity, we would somehow lessen any incentive to do us harm. If there’s a danger, mincing words is unlikely to eliminate it.
A better approach is to note that the nearest intelligent extraterrestrials are likely to be at least dozens of light-years away. Even assuming that active SETI provokes a reply, it won’t be breezy conversation. Simple back-and-forth exchanges would take decades. This suggests that we should abandon the “greeting card” format of previous signaling schemes, and offer the aliens Big Data.
For example, we could transmit the contents of the Internet. Such a large corpus — with its text, pictures, videos and sounds — would allow clever extraterrestrials to decipher much about our society, and even formulate questions that could be answered with the material in hand. Sending the web on its way would take months if a radio transmitter were used. A powerful laser, conveying bits much like an optical fiber, could launch these data in a few days.
Sending messages — even big ones — is technically feasible. However, there’s still the highly controversial matter of whether [or not] to broadcast at all. Who decides? One could simply let the public weigh in, but doing so wouldn’t address the security issue. Even if a majority is comfortable with a transmission, how does that mitigate the possible danger?
The inability to gauge this peril prompts some critics to argue that, given the possibly existential threat posed by active SETI, we should choose the side of caution. We should simply forbid powerful transmissions to the skies. Indeed, a small consortium of academics in California has drafted a petition urging this.
It’s a wary approach. It’s also poor insurance. Any extraterrestrials with technology advanced enough to threaten us will surely have antennas larger than our own, instruments that can pick up the television and radio signals broadcast willy-nilly since World War II. We are already shouting into the jungle, albeit with less volume than a deliberate signal. But the dangerous creatures may have good hearing.
Additionally, if we forbid high-powered transmitters aimed at the sky, we shut out such obvious future technologies as better radars for aviation and tracking dangerous asteroids. Do we really want to hamstring our descendants this way?
A decision to engage in active SETI has not been made. The benefit — learning our place in the cosmos — is only hypothetical, and so is the danger. But I, for one, would hesitate to let a paranoia based on nothing more than conjecture shackle the activities of our children and our children’s children. The universe beckons, and we can do better than to declare that future generations should endlessly tremble at the sight of the stars.
Seth Shostak is the director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, and a host of the radio program “Big Picture Science.”
..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..