Rochester, NY, United States (AHN) – Authorities are expected to confirm on Monday whether remains found in New York are those of a missing Rochester Institute of Technology student.

New York State Police were due to hold a press conference just before noon about the discovery of human remains Sunday night in the town of Cohocton in Steuben County. The body may be that of George Delany, a 21-year-old student who has been missing for more than a month.

The Leader reported that two hikers found the body in a wooded area. The Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office is performing an autopsy.

According to state police, Delany was last seen on the evening of March 12 walking away from his car in Wayland, another town in Steuben County. His car was found near the area the next day.

Delany was a junior political science major from Maryland. He lived off-campus with fellow students, who have held rallies and canvassing events since he disappeared.

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Mount Pleasant, NY, United States (AHN) – The family of Danroy “D.J.” Henry, a Pace University student who died last year, is up in arms over the decision of a police union to honor with an award the officer responsible for the fatal shooting.

“It just shows their inhumanity and their arrogance,” the mother of Henry, Angela Henry, told the New York Daily News on Thursday.

The Westchester County Police Benevolent Association named the officer who shot Henry, Aaron Hess, officer of the year earlier this month.

A spokesman for the union, Matthew Listwan, told the Journal News the award was not meant to be made public. He explained that the union “unanimously voted to present the award… as an expression of support for the dignified and professional manner in which Officer Hess has conducted himself throughout his career and this ordeal.”

The county district attorney earlier this year said that a grand jury found no reasonable cause to charge Hess in the death. The jury decided after hearing testimony from 46 civilians, including some Pace University students and Hess himself, who testified without protection of immunity from prosecution.

Hess shot Henry Oct. 17 when he and fellow Mount Pleasant police officers responded to a bar brawl in Thornwood.

According to police, Henry, who was black, allegedly struck officers, who are white, with his car after an officer knocked on one of the windows of his vehicle.

The family of Henry, a business management junior who played wide receiver and defensive back for the Pace football team, has asked the Justice Department to investigate the case. They say Henry was murdered after he tried to move his car from the fire lane.

Two officers, including Hess, suffered minor injuries after the shooting. Four teammates of Henry were taken into custody after the incident for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and obstruction. The quarterback of the football team, Joseph Romanick, was charged with felony criminal mischief.

But according to the four friends, they had tried to aid Henry after he was shot. One allegedly told officers he was certified in CPR but was beaten by police and threatened “he would be next” when he insisted. All four were cleared of charges last month following a motion from the district attorney to dismiss the allegations against them.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – According to a statement by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Cathie Black, the publishing executive who became New York City schools chancellor, is resigning from the position after three months in office.

Once referred to as the “First Lady of American Magazines,” Black was appointed the city’s first female schools chancellor, but was met with criticism from opponents who were skeptical that her business savvy would translate into effective public leadership.

During her short time in the position, she oversaw the country’s largest school system, including 1,600 schools, more than 1 million students and 136,000 employees.

Black’s appointment by Bloomberg in November was controversial.

She left her position amidst a string of recent resignations by high-level city officials. Black replaced Joel Klein, who had been chancellor since 2002. She will be replaced by Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott.

Klein was New York City’s longest-serving chancellor.

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Lakewood, CO, United States (AHN) – Police in Colorado pepper sprayed an 8-year-old second grade boy who was having a temper tantrum.

Reportedly Aidan Elliot, 8, became enraged while at his Lakewood, Colorado elementary school on Feb. 22 and began threatening students and was spitting and throwing chairs.

However police were called to the Glennon Heights Elementary classroom when he broke a piece of wood trim off the wall and held the sharp piece of wood threateningly while brandishing it like a knife.

Teachers at the school barricaded themselves in a room away from the unruly student.

“I wanted to make something sharp if they came out because I was so mad at them,” Aidan Elliot said in a police report. “I was going to try to whack them with it.”

The report goes on to say Aidan, “was holding what looked like a sharpened one foot stick and he screamed, ‘Get away from me you f—ers.’”

Then the report goes on to say that Lakewood Police officers ordered the child “drop the stick,” and when he refused authorities sprayed him with pepper spray twice until he dropped the piece of wood.

He was then handcuffed and later treated on the scene for “a red, irritated face.”

Mandy Elliott, Aidan’s mother believes the police have handled the situation differently. Two other times police were called to the school about her son who has some issues and both times officers were able to talk to her son and calm him down.

“I do want them to get training like other local police departments in our area have for a crisis situation with children,” Mandy said Wednesday on NBC’s Today show. “I don’t think it’s right for an eight-year-old to get pepper sprayed.”

Aidan while on the program told Meredith Vieira that he doesn’t think he would have hurt his teachers and doesn’t know why he acts out. “I don’t know,” Aidan said. “That’s just the way my body goes. I can’t really control it for some reason.”

Lakewood Police spokesman Steve Davis defended the officers’ decision to use pepper spray on the boy, calling it the safest option considering the circumstances.

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Mogadishu, Somalia (AHN) – Al Shabaab militants, the al Qaeda proxy in Somalia, have ordered Somali teachers and their school children to pay a monthly contribution to help finance the group’s combat operations against the United Nations-backed government and African Union peacekeepers in the capital.

During a meeting with school principals in the Elasha Biyaha neighborhood outside the capital on Friday, militants declared Somali students must pay one dollar and as well as every teacher must pay 10% of their salary at the end of every month.

“The holy war in Somalia will continue and every Somali must take part in the war that means if you cannot come to the battle zone you have to contribute money to the holly war,” senior al Shabaab leader Sheik Fu’ad Mohamed Qalaf told school principals.

A Somali school teacher who demanded anonymity because of security reasons told All Headlines News that the latest order from al Shabaab cannot be met because of the amount of money they are demanding.

“We live in a very poor situation because the monthly salary we take doesn’t even cover the whole needs of our families and most of the students we have don’t pay school fees because they include orphans and some from poorer families so how they can be able to pay one dollar per month,” the anonymous teacher told AHN on Saturday.

For the past several months al Shabaab have been suffering from economical problems and that is because most of the big companies whom they used to take money by force moved from the militant hotbed Bakaara market to the government controlled- side of the capital.

Last month, al Shabaab ordered business owners in the Elasha Biyaha neighborhood to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash as contribution to their ongoing conflict against the central government. Elasha Biyaha is home to more than 1.5 million people who fled from their homes in the capital Mogadishu.

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Bergen, Germany (AHN) – 71% of teachers feel that a secure internet “parent portal,” where parents could see details about their child’s schooling, would improve school-to-parent communication.

In the survey conducted by itslearning on teachers in France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the U.S., 75% of the 5,805 teachers surveyed said parental involvement is important to student’s education. However 44% said they didn’t have the time or means to communicate with parents as much as they would like.

“Teachers agree that involving parents is critical, but they aren’t able to communicate with parents effectively,” says Morten Fahlvik, Research Manager at itslearning.

Teachers currently communicate with parents with 46% of them using email reach their students’ parents at least once a month; 37% use texts/SMSs and 24% still send letters.

School Boards and technology companies are currently experimenting with different online tools to make the teacher parent communication relationship more seamless.

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Mogadishu, Somalia (AHN) – Somalia’s fragile transitional government has disclosed it has finalized a job creation program for youths in a bid to protect them from falling into crimes such as extremism.

Aweys Sheik Haddad, director general for Somali labor, youth and sports ministry, announced the program Thursday afternoon during a ceremony marking World Tuberculosis Day.

Haddad said the program will teach job skills for young men to prevent them from being recruited as fighters by the rebel Islamist group Al-Shabaab.

He said the program will be in two phases, first to teach the youths job skills and then to find job opportunities for them.

“I am very hopeful that this tangible initiative will yield positive results of decreasing the number of Somali youths exploited as combatants by the terrorist Al-Shabaab group,” Haddad told the ceremony.

He denied as “baseless propaganda” reports that the Somali government also recruits children as soldiers. However all participants in Somalia’s armed conflicts, including the transitional federal government, the regional semi-autonomous states, moderate Islamists and the al Qaeda-linked militants are known to recruit child soldiers.

Former warlords also used to recruit children, mostly those from poorer families and orphans.

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Saint Albans, WV, United States (AHN) – A 74-year-old grandmother punched a man who had exposed himself near a school.

Joan William son was picking up her granddaughter Lexi, from George C. Weimer elementary school when she was startled by the man’s actions.

“He was right in front of my car, and masturbating,” she said. “I mean, exposed, and drinking out of a peroxide bottle.”

Williamson said she’d noticed him before acting suspicious and hanging around the school for several weeks.

However this time she hit him and he ran.

Police said the man is Jett Wilcher, 34, and they were able to catch him with Williamson’s help. She took off in her car and followed Wilcher as he tried to get away.

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Mogadishu, Somalia (NewsBahn) – At least 50 former buccaneers from various districts in the semiautonomous Somali state of Puntland on Thursday ended a months-long training workshop in the capital Garowe.

A well-organized ceremony intended to mark the conclusion of the rehabilitation course for the former pirates was held in the presence of government officials and civil society groups.

The program, which was the third held in Puntland, was jointly conducted by the justice ministry and a local NGO, NCA, that operates in the regional Somali state.

The chairperson of NCA, Yusuf Abdulkadir Hersi, addressed the closing ceremony. He said that for many years young men worked as pirates off Somalia’s lawless coasts, but that the program had given them awareness and taught job skills.

“It’s shame on us to watch our boys working as buccaneers, we have to try our best to swerve them from this bad experience, I mean the act of piracy,” Hersi stated.

He said that the 50 young former pirates were collected from five districts in the northeastern region where the largest number of Somali buccaneers are based.

Puntland’s deputy minister for justice, Mahmoud Said Hussein, told the audience that his administration will continue such programs in a bid to uproot pirate-related acts in his region and the rest of Somalia.

Since the country descended into chaos 20 years ago, the unprotected waters of Somalia have become some of the most dangerous seas in the world because of rampant piracy.

Scores of commercial ships and luxury boats are seized by pirates every year.

Although the Puntland region is peaceful in comparison with the troubled south-central Somalia, it is a hotbed of buccaneers, drug dealers and human traffickers.

Correspondent Shafi’i Mohyaddin Abokar contributed this report.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The White House and social networking site Facebook joined forces Thursday to battle bullying.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michele Obama opened a White House conference on bullying, while Facebook launched two new safety measures that will allow members of the site to privately report content to parents, teachers and other support groups.

Obama recalled that with his big ears and a funny name, he was also bullied during his student days. His audience of about 150 students, parents, teachers and advocates of anti-bullying included the kin of two 11-year old boys who killed themselves over the last two years due to bullying.

The president said that to disseminate government efforts to stop bullying, a new website, StopBullying.gov, will be launched. The portal is a step further by Washington to protect students from bullying based on race, ethnicity, disability or sexuality after the Education Department sent educators in October a letter that it is their legal duty to protect students from bullying.

Among Facebook’s planned safety features is the relaunch of the improved Safety Center in a few weeks that will have educational videos, articles and other online content to help adults address the bullying problem.

The Obamas, in a video posted on the safety page, encouraged Facebook members to join in battling bullying, online and offline. The president said that while bullying was long considered an inevitable part of growing up, it could be grow into something more harmful because technology allows bullies to follow their victims from schools to phone and computers.

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