ATLANTA — In an unexpectedly harsh sentence after a polarizing six-year ordeal, eight of the 10 educators convicted of racketeering in one of the nation’s largest public school cheating scandals were sentenced to prison terms of up to seven years Tuesday after they refused to take sentencing deals that were predicated on their acceptance of responsibility and a waiver of their right to appeal.
As a result, the sentences, meted out after a raucous court hearing, offered a conflicted, inconclusive coda to a scandal that has brought shame and soul-searching to Atlanta and its 50,000-student public school system. Some were furious with the sentences, and some were pleased.

ATLANTA — Admitting that he was “not comfortable” with the seven-year prison terms he had handed down two weeks earlier, the judge in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating case on Thursday called three former administrators back to his courtroom to cut their prison terms to three years each.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — An Indonesian court on Thursday found a Canadian educator and an Indonesian teaching assistant at one of the country’s most prestigious international schools guilty of sexually assaulting three kindergarten students, after a high-profile trial in which defense lawyers and the school asserted that the entire case had been fabricated.

ATLANTA — After nearly two weeks of public uproar, University of Mississippi officials said Thursday that they had ended negotiations about reversing the decision to oust the school’s chancellor, Daniel W. Jones, whose forceful stands for racial tolerance helped remake perceptions of the campus.
The close of the talks came after Dr. Jones rejected an offer from the board of trustees of the State Institutions of Higher Learning: remain chancellor until June 2017 and then retire, without his “performance or effectiveness up to that date” having an effect on whether he could receive another extension.

PARIS — A secondary school in northeastern France has sent a 15-year-old student home twice in the last two weeks for wearing a long skirt that the principal judged was “an ostentatious sign” of the girl’s Muslim faith.
A law adopted in 2004 forbids elementary and secondary school students to wear visible signs of their religious affiliation to school, including skullcaps for Jews, noticeable crosses for Christians and head scarves for Muslims. School officials, though, are increasingly construing the ban to apply to articles of clothing like long skirts and headbands, in ways that appear to vary from school to school.

Labour Day, also called International Workers’ Day or May Day, has its origins in the late 19th century labor movement. One of the most significant contributors to Labour Day was the Haymarket Massacre.

The University of Cape Town decided Wednesday to remove a statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, which has set off protests by students who say it symbolizes an institutional racism that prevails in South Africadecades after the end of apartheid. A special council set up by the university to decide the issue said the statue would be taken down and stored pending a decision from the heritage authorities on a location. Born in 1853, Rhodes made his fortune with his De Beers mining company and used his wealth to help expand Britain’s empire in Africa, especially in present-day Zimbabwe, originally named Rhodesia in his honor.

(TBKTSG) - Nhiều ngôi trường cấp 1 ở các vùng làng quê Nhật Bản chỉ có vài học sinh, thậm chí không đủ thành lập một đội bóng. Bộ Giáo dục nước này lo ngại trẻ em sẽ không phát triển được các kỹ năng xã hội cần thiết trong một môi trường có ít học sinh như vậy.

(Reuters) - South Korea condemned on Monday Japan's approval of textbooks that it said distorted history by claiming disputed islands, summoning Japan's ambassador and warning that the approval was a sign Japan was prepared to repeat its colonial wartime past.
South Korea's foreign ministry said the book approval was "yet another provocation that distorts, reduces, and omits clear historic facts to strengthen its unjust claims to what is clearly our territory".
South Korea controls the disputed islands, called Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese, which have been the focus of a long dispute. South Korea sees Japan's claims as stemming from its colonial past.

Nhiều hồ sơ xin học bổng của ứng viên Thái Lan đã sáng tác lên những câu chuyện quá hoàn hảo để gây ấn tượng với các cán bộ tuyển sinh đại học Mỹ.