A high school girl has been arrested by the Batam police for allegedly acting as a pimp for almost 50 other girls.
Identified as Mona, the 17-year-old girl, who is in her third year of senior high school, is believed to have arranged clients for many of her friends, including university students, tribunenews.com.
The suspect, now being detained at the Barelang police resort, kept the data and photos of the girls, including their price, in her Blackberry, police said.
Two teenagers died in a fire that destroyed Ibnu Tarwiyah Islamic Boarding School in Sukaharja village near Bogor, West Java, on Sunday evening.
Bogor Police criminal investigation unit chief Adj.Comr. Imron Ernawan said the fire started at around 6 p.m. on Sunday and took at least two hours to put out.
“Police officers finished their investigation at the scene of the fire at around 1 a.m. on Monday. They discovered the remains of two people who had been trapped in their room,” Imron said Monday as quoted by Antara state news wire.
According to Imron, the two victims were Nurfahmiyah,19, who is a student and Yulisiticariwyah, 18, who is an administrative staff member.
Imron said police would continue an investigation into the cause of the blaze, as reported by Antara news service.
"We will search the scene of the fire and ask for help from the National Police forensics laboratory today,” Imron said, adding that police had questioned four witness in relation to the fire.
Clean creatures: Two elephants bathe in a spring at the Center for Elephant Trainees (PLG) in Saree, Aceh Besar regency.Nurdin, 43, is not your usual school principal.
The school he heads is located in the Center for Elephant Trainees (PLG) in Saree, Aceh Besar regency, and has been training 48 elephants.
These creatures have to be kept away from the wild herds roaming the jungles of Aceh because of their prolonged conflict with men.
Elephants taught in this school were once enemies of the locals, damaging their plantations and even trampling on villagers to death.
“Nearly all those trained in PLG-Saree serve useful purposes like driving off wild elephants that disturb village settlements,” said Nurdin.
“Elephants are meek rather than aggressive. But sometimes they can be ferocious and violent when they feel threatened,” he added.
The elephant school in Saree village, known as PLG-Saree, was set up in 1994 within the Cut Nyak Dien Forest Park, around 70 kilometers from Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh. The park was named after Aceh’s heroine, who fought against the Dutch colonial rule. The 6,300-hectare zone is at the foot of Mt. Seulawah, one of Aceh’s active volcanoes, and is under the protection of the provincial forestry and plantations office.
Elephants trained at his school can execute 25 out of 40 instructions given by trainers, called mahot. They are taught how to walk, sit, drink, eat, raise their legs and carry out other commands. Apart from obeying such orders, some of the elephants who have completed training in PLG-Saree can also play football, sit on chairs and dance. They usually perform at different events to raise funds for the school’s operational costs.
The school has 45 instructors or mahot, a Thai word meaning trainers or handlers.
“Each elephant has its own handler. Each instructor thus controls his own student,” explained Nurdin.
As the principal of an elephant school, Nurdin faces a different set of challenges compared to people in other professions.
Training session: Wild elephants are taught various skills while at the Center.“Too many things in daily life have to be sacrificed, from time to family. If you don’t love animals, then you won’t last long as an animal handler. This job is an expression of love and devotion to nature,” he said.
Nudin never made it to his wife’s side when she gave birth to their children in hospital. His three children were born when he was a long away from home, taking his troupe of elephants to various places outside of Sumatra.
Training elephants to accept commands from men is not an easy task. Sometimes they are quick to learn but they can also be stubborn, especially the recently caught wild elephants.
“Unlike normal schools, all of us instructors and trainees attend classes in this forest,” said Satimin, a mahot at PLG-Saree. The first skill a new trainee is taught is how to lift a front leg, which takes one to two weeks to learn. During this process, the beginner is tied to a large tree. Some trainers will help control the elephant, and force it to obey.
“Sometimes we also use a tame elephant to train the novice. The skilled one will push the wild animal from behind with its head as a goad,” added Satimin. All elephants, according to him, have a hard time at the beginning. When they are already skilled, the mammals tend to be more tame and docile. A handler has a special relationship with his trainee, which will usually last its whole life.
“Every mahot will feel sad if the elephant under his care is in trouble. Some handlers consider elephants as family members, even as their children,” Satimin said with a laugh. Trained elephants will thus never be returned to the wild. They will always stay in the school area with their mahot.
Happy creature: A trainer teaches an elephant a few tricks at the centerThe elephants’ expenses are funded with the regional budget managed by Aceh’s Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA). “We need about Rp 45 million for animals’ monthly expenses, which amounts to Rp 1 million per elephant,” said Satimin.
Today, many of PLG-Saree’s graduates work as rangers patrolling the forest. They are part of the Conservation Response Unit (CRU) program for the removal of wild elephants trespassing into village settlements.
There are two CRU locations in Aceh, in Sampoinet, West Aceh, and Geumpang, Aceh Pidie.
“It’s important to involve elephants in forest patrol groups because conflict between elephants and locals is intensifying, particularly in areas where illegal logging and forest conversion occur on a large scale,” he pointed out.
National Education Minister Muhammad Nuh admits that students nowadays are not exposed enough to the teaching of moral virtues important to support students' character development.
He also said that a current lack of role models might partly contribute to this lack of development.
“We, both as educators and adults, do not adequately teach them on honesty, reliability and self-improvement,” Nuh said before thousands of participants of the National Education day commemoration at the ministry’s hall on Monday as quoted by tribunnews.com.
Commenting on the decreasing quality of annual examination results, Nuh said right now the government was deliberating the best measures needed to cope with the problems encountered during the organization of the last national examination.
Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali on Wednesday played down the seriousness of a recent attack on an Islamic boarding school in Pasuruan, East Java, saying it was just an ordinary student brawl.
“I was informed that the incident was just an ordinary brawl among students of Islamic boarding schools,” Suryadharma said Wednesday in Jakarta, as quoted by antaranews.com.
He said Tuesday’s attack had occurred because students had been mocking each other, adding that police would thoroughly investigate the case.
A caretaker of Al Ma’hadul Islam Boarding School had earlier suspected the attack may have been because its teachings were different to the majority of boarding schools in the area.
The son of a police detective opened fire at a Nebraska high school Wednesday, wounding the principal and assistant principal and forcing panicked students to take cover in the kitchen of the building just as they returned from a holiday break, authorities said.
The gunman, who had attended the school for no more than two months, fled from the scene and fatally shot himself in his car about a mile (kilometer) away.
Authorities did not know why the suspect, identified as 17-year-old Robert Butler Jr., targeted the administrators, who were hospitalized.
In a rambling Facebook post filled with expletives, Butler warned Wednesday that people would hear about the "evil" things he did and said the school drove him to violence.
Police Chief Alex Hayes provided no details on the weapon Butler used or how he obtained it. Butler's father is a detective for the Omaha Police Department.
Authorities first received reports of the shooting around 12:50 p.m. local time. The school was immediately locked down, but within two hours, students were being released in groups. Parents picked them up at a nearby church.
Hours after the shooting, Principal Curtis Case was listed in stable condition. Vice Principal Vicki Kaspar was in critical condition.
