Three students from an elite private school have been expelled for posting horrifying Holocaust images on a student Web site, then lashing out at a student who objected by calling her a "hooknosed parasite" who "should be thrown into an oven with the rest of them."
The boys, one of whom is Jewish, were asked to leave Royal St. George's College, headmaster Hal Hannaford said on Tuesday, after posting "really heinous" images of the Holocaust on an MSN chat board for several private schools to post messages about 10th grade activities.
Hannaford said another four students were suspended from the Toronto all-boys, interdenominational school with an Anglican affiliation. He said the school has been quick to act and would not be playing down the seriousness of the students' actions.
"What we are not going to do is hide behind this, like it's just a few guys that did some atrocious thing out of school," Hannaford said. "While none of the student activity took place at school, as educators we felt morally and ethically bound to act."
The incident has caused an uproar among the student body and parents. The Canadian Jewish Congress has been called in to speak to some of the students and B'nai Brith Canada has invited students to speak with Holocaust survivors and view a film made by US students about anti-Semitism.
Some 200 parents representing about half the student body attended an assembly at Royal St. George's on Tuesday to talk about the incident.
"Our parents showed a great deal of concern and angst, but were really supportive," Hannaford said.
The affair began last week, when several boys, all in 10th grade, apparently hijacked the student site and created the "Gas Chamber" and "The Reichstag" cyber rooms, posting photos of Nazi rallies and Jews being tortured or persecuted.
Several girls from Branksome Hall -- a nearby, all-girls private school -- complained about the postings.
The response from the boys was "graphic, vile and truly shocking," Branksome principal Karen Murton told the Toronto Star.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS