Reggie Supildo announced today something that we’ve been talking about for a while now - ITt will be coming under the maemo.org umbrella. Internet Tablet Talk, for those who don’t know, is a community-run forum where members have always been unfettered in their praise and criticism of Maemo, and of Nokia’s running of the project. And they will continue to be unfettered - as part of maemo.org.

This is very exciting - the ITt forums have always been a kind of world apart, and to be honest it’s been hard to follow what’s been going on there. There are hundreds of contributors, and dozens of new posts every day, on all matters related to Maemo and Nokia’s internet tablets.

We’ve been getting progressively closer for the past few months - ITt news items are syndicated in the Maemo news feed, and we have a recently added Karma plug-in for ITt posts. This is a logical next step. Of course, ITt will continue to be run by Reggie and Roger, and aside from retheming the site to match maemo.org, users will hopefully notice little in the operation of the site. But my hope is that ITt users will feel a little more like part of the Maemo community, once the forum is on maemo.org. This is one more piece in Maemo’s journey from a Nokia-run project to a Nokia-sponsored, community-run project.

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ul lia href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2008/11/murakami-studio.html"Murakami animation studio coming to L.A. | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times/abr/ Murakami already has a studio in New York. But he has decided that Hollywood is the place to expand his filmmaking capabilities. The new studio will operate under the umbrella of Kaikai Kiki, his production and artist-management company./li lia href="http://badatsports.com/2008/nick-caves-soundsuits/"Nick Caversquo;s Soundsuits : Bad at Sports/abr/ Often, Cave’s Soundsuits are assembled by a multigenerational, multicultural group of volunteers in his Chicago neighborhood./li lia href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3536943/Pentagon-hires-British-scientist-to-help-build-robot-soldiers-that-wont-commit-war-crimes.html"Pentagon hires British scientist to help build robot soldiers that 'won't commit war crimes' - Telegraph/abr/ By 2010 the US will have invested $4 billion in a research programme into quot;autonomous systemsquot;, the military jargon for robots, on the basis that they would not succumb to fear or the desire for vengeance that afflicts frontline soldiers./li lia href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/12/the_culture_jamming_gift.html"MAKE: Blog: The Culture Jamming gift guide at MAKE - hack, stick, throw, jam and inspire!/abr/ gift ideas for that mischief maker in your life!/li lia href="http://artlog.com/miamifairs"Artlog / Miami Art Fairs/abr/ printable map guide and details on Art Basel Miami Beach and the twenty satellite fairs/li /ul

Rihanna - F.t Jay-Z - Umbrella

Author: TooEmotioneel Keywords: none Added: December 1, 2008

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/28622?ns=guardianpageName=Society%3A+After+Savannach=Societyc3=The+Guardianc4=Child+protection+%28Society%29%2CNetherlands+%28News%29%2CSociety%2CWorld+newsc5=Society+Weekly%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CChildren+Societyc6=Aida+Edemariamc7=2008_12_01c8=1126606c9=articlec10=GUc11=Societyc12=Child+protectionc13=c14=h2=GU%2FSociety%2FChild+protection" width="1" height="1" //divpIn the very early morning of Tuesday September 21 2004, a police car on patrol through the wooded outskirts of Holten, in eastern Holland, noticed a vehicle travelling down a road closed to traffic and pulled it over. A search of the boot revealed not the contraband that might have been expected - drugs or smuggled cigarettes, perhaps - but the body of a small child, and a shovel./ppSavanna was three years old, but weighed only 10kg, as a one-year-old might. She was severely undernourished, and covered in bruises. It was later established that she had probably died the day before, when her mother, Sonja de J, then 32, stuffed her mouth with a washcloth and taped it over. Savanna had a cold and couldn't breathe through her nose. She suffocated. /ppThe lines that the case then followed will, post-Victoria Climbieacute;, post-Baby P, be familiar. Stories began to appear in the Dutch papers about a little girl from Alphen aan den Rijn, a small city near The Hague. Neighbours, friends and family spoke of ongoing abuse. The girl got hardly any food, they said. She was tied to a bed, she was hit, she was forced to have cold showers. Everyone was worried. So worried that they asked social services to intervene./ppIn fact, the family had been in close contact with social services for a long time. It emerged that Sonja de J's two older children (born in 1992 and 1993) were already in care. A younger baby was taken away after Savanna was found. Savanna herself was put on the child protection register when she was 11 months old. A family guardian - a specialist social worker - was appointed and visited the family regularly. /ppIn April 2002 the then one-year-old Savanna was taken away from her mother and placed into temporary care. According to the Dutch newspaper Trouw, which went through the child protection reports, she was malnourished and neglected, and the mother was refusing to accept the advice of youth welfare services. But in July, Savanna was returned to her mother. Why, exactly, remains unclear. Then the guardian fell ill, so in November 2002 another guardian, Mieke A, was appointed. According to her lawyer, Simeon Burmeister, she visited every two weeks, and reviewed the case more often than that. Sometimes she visited in her spare time, "because she felt that the family was a real problem. But not as bad as they turned out to be"./ppThen, in May 2004, the new baby was born. In the Netherlands, a maternity nurse, or kraamverzorgster, is assigned to a family and helps out all day, for the first eight days. The nurse who went to see Sonja de J was alarmed by the way she was treating Savanna. The child seemed to be kept in her room all the time, and wasn't eating properly. She seemed bruised and cowed. So the kraamverzorgster raised the alarm. In fact, several professionals involved with the children raised their concerns and reported suspected abuse. They were not, however, aware that there was a family guardian because she had never been in touch./ppInformation obtained by the public prosecutor indicates that legal measures were immediately put in place, on May 14 2004, to take Savanna into care. However, Mieke A (who was 46 at the time, so not a novice), decided that this wasn't necessary and overruled them; a paediatrician who visited in July concurred. Two months later Savanna was dead. On October 4, 350 people marched silently through Alphen aan den Rijn in her memory. /ppFor the first time in the history of Dutch law, a guardian was charged in criminal court. Initially, says her lawyer, the charge was accessory to murder; at the last minute this was changed to negligence leading to grievous bodily harm. She should have listened to others more, said the prosecution; she should have picked up the signs that things were going horribly wrong. They did not ask for a prison sentence but for a suspended sentence of 150 hours of "work punishment". "The prosecutor tried to argue that there was a deal between mother and guardian to kill the child," says Burmeister. "The guardian did her work, but actions like this can always happen. She could not have known - she only had two hours every second week to visit the family. In these two hours they have to see everything. Maybe she didn't do her work very well but in Holland that's not a criminal offence."/ppDuring the trial, a picture emerged of a care worker who was too ready to listen to the mother. Sonja de J was known to have a borderline personality disorder - and although the guardian knew this, she seems not to have taken sufficient notice of it. But under such circumstances it would have been difficult to extrapolate a norm from brief meetings; Sonja de J could, presumably, often be quite charming./ppMieke A was interrogated by the police for six days. She was charged on March 18 2005, and was finally brought to what would become an enormously high-profile trial on May 31 2007. She was acquitted on November 16, 2007, three years after Savanna died. The court decided the death was not the guardian's fault and that she did work hard for the family. However, the judge censured her for believing her own findings to be more important than anyone else's. Sonja de J was sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter, while her boyfriend, Mario B, got two years for GBH. When they finish their sentences, they will be transferred to a secure psychiatric unit on an order that lasts until the doctors say the inmate can be released back into society. It can be indefinite. /ppChildcare services in the Netherlands now recognise two periods: before Savanna, and after Savanna. As with Victoria Climbieacute;, as will be with Baby P, the aftermath is rarely as simple as imprisonment for the perpetrators. It reverberates through systems, through countries, through professions, and through the lives of vulnerable children all over the country./ppIn the Netherlands the first evidence of a Savanna effect was a spike in the numbers of children being put on to child protection registers, or into care. As there are 15 different regional jurisdictions, there are no reliable national figures. Estimates based on anecdotal evidence veer from 5% to 40%, but Arne Theunissen, who began his career as a guardian, and is now a researcher in the department of clinical child studies at the Free University of Amsterdam, also points to the figures for Amsterdam, the largest agency in Holland. In 2004, 1,620 children were taken into care; in 2005, after Savanna, there were 2,891, an almost 75% increase. (There is also a growing demand for foster parents. According to a spokesperson for the Dutch Organisation for Foster Parents, there were 14,000 Dutch foster children in 2002 and 20,000 in 2007 - a 30% increase. "Many people say it's because of the Savanna effect," said the spokesperson, who declined to be named. "It could be. But it's more complicated than that, it has to do with the difficulties of being foster parents.")/ppIn Britain, says Kieron Hatton, head of the Centre for Social Work at the University of Portsmouth, the trend was already going that way. The Climbieacute; case simply "reinforced a trend towards risk-aversion in social work caused by inquiries over previous years. Social work in the UK is quite risk-averse - in fact, it's too risk-averse." As for Baby P, the Observer reported last week that there had been as much as a three-fold increase in applications for child protection orders in the previous fortnight. Where the Inner London Court would normally expect to receive between two and three applications a day for children to be placed in care, staff said they were receiving between eight and 10 applications a day. According to the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass), there was a 26.4% increase in applications for all forms of child protection orders made between November 10 and November 20 across England this year, compared with the same period in 2007. Usually a case like this has a mostly local effect, says Anthony Douglas, chief executive of Cafcass. This time,"There is some sign of a genuine national effect, and all local authorities are reviewing their cases, and putting in early applications when they hadn't before."/ppJos Aalders is a volunteer ombudsman for children in the Netherlands. He can be controversial (rather like members of Fathers4Justice, he has been known to dress up as Zorro) but he is nevertheless trusted by countless families, who contact him with complaints about children and the social services. He says that these have risen by about 30%. "The trend has become that it is better to place a child into care then to take any risk whatsoever. And since complaints about abuse can be anonymous and come from anyone, children are taken away too soon in some cases. There is a case at the moment of a baby that was taken from his parents the day after the birth. The parents have very low IQs but they take care of themselves, work, have friends and family to help them. They did not even get a chance to do it right, the child was taken away immediately. I think that's typical of what is going on in child services."/ppMirjam, 36, who worked as a family guardian in a city near Amsterdam for 10 years before resigning a couple of months ago, agrees. (She wouldn't give her last name or place of work; she was unusual, however, in that she is willing to talk.) "I felt there was a lot of fear in how people acted in the months afterwards. Everyone was so afraid it could happen on their watch. Cases proceeded faster; children would be put on the child protection register sooner. And for a while there would be a request every Friday to go and get a child that needed to be taken away from their parents before the weekend." It wasn't just the guardians. Everyone was being more careful, starting with the person reporting abuse, through to the agency registering the complaints and the guardian's employers. /pp"Better safe than sorry is the trend now," says Ton Moolenaar, a social worker for 30 years who now chairs a group for youth welfare workers. "And children aren't placed back with their parents as easily as before." He points out that the large spike in numbers seems to be over. But other "Savanna effects" have endured. "For one thing, the emphasis on the safety of the child is more than it was before. We used to work with a threefold principle: try to intervene as little as possible, try to get children back home as soon as possible and try to let them stay near their homes when they are temporarily taken into care. Only after all of that would we start actually taking a kid away from home and really placing them into care." (Because state care is not necessarily the best solution; in fact, Hatton says bluntly, of the UK, "our care system isn't that great. The outcomes in other countries, such as Denmark and Germany, are much better." )/pp"Because of this," continues Moolenaar, "there are more safety precautions. We have to fill in long lists about the parents, the children, the interaction between the parents and between the parents and the children, which are then reviewed by behavioural scientists. It is very formal and has lead to a bigger workload. The underlying principle is fine though, it is all about the safety of the child."/ppBut, as happened with the Climbieacute; case, where new computer systems meant social workers spent more time staring at a screen than visiting clients, and were progressively being robbed of independent judgment, these new requirements have unintended consequences. According to the spokeswoman for the Dutch Organisation for Foster Parents, welfare workers now "check and double-check everything, have to put it past the team, can't confirm anything. And even though being careful is good, this means the children who are already in a very difficult situation have even more insecurity. They don't know what will happen to them and because social services don't dare to decide, they are left in limbo for longer."/ppThe second major factor was the chilling effect the criminal trial had on guardians, who could not believe that things could come to that. "I, and many colleagues, protested in Utrecht," says Piet Bleeker, 34, who has worked as a family guardian for five years in Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands."It was a horrendous incident, but criminal prosecution for mistakes made in your job is quite disturbing. We did not want to be seen as criminals. I sat in the court during the case and it was horrible. The guardian got the blame for everything, while so many others were involved. I do understand it; she was the one responsible for placing Savanna in care or not in the end. But it was still hard to watch. Afterwards I ran through all my own cases in my mind. What child could be at risk, where did I have even the remotest doubt?"/ppIt was already difficult to find people willing to work as family guardians, but the prosecution, and vituperative media coverage of it, made it much harder. Sarah, 25, a social worker from Zwolle, was in training during the case. "The negative attention did get to us at school. You read about a case like this in the paper and it's about life and death. Plus the fact that the social worker was brought to court. As a 22-year-old you don't easily choose to go into that field. We discussed it often and me and my friends were just more reluctant to specialise as family guardians."/ppA similar thing has happened here in the UK over the past few weeks. "We've had to do quite a lot of work with students to talk them through it," says Hatton, who blames the singling-out of social workers in media reports in particular. "We try to help the students understand that once they go into practice they'll be encouraged to enhance their training, that really people who are newly qualified shouldn't be working on very complex child protection cases." The problem is though, as he well knows, that there are so many vacancies, and such large caseloads, that this is often inevitable - which, of course, increases the chances of naive or bad decisions, and the cycle starting again./ppSince Savanna, the Netherlands has put various safeguards in place, many of which could be instructive here too. According to Jos Andriessen of the MOgroep, an umbrella agency for the 15 separate youth welfare agencies, there are to be fewer children assigned to each guardian; 15-17 by halfway through next year, down from 25. Decisions must be made by a team, rather by individuals. Risk-analysis is now a priority. There is now a 24-hour crisis number that people can ring. By 2010 there should be disciplinary board for social workers, so incidents can be referred there, instead of to the criminal courts. Agencies are cooperating more effectively and are clearer about each other's responsibilities./ppHowever, Theunissen believes they could go further. At the moment, the decision to remove a child from its family is overseen by a judge. He believes that the same rigour should be applied to the decision not to remove a child because "the decision to do nothing is as important as the decision to do something". In the UK, Douglas believes that in the most serious cases, where social workers are concerned but unable to prove anything, it should be possible to turn to methods used by the police - hidden cameras, for example. "It's a high-risk decision, because lots of organisations would cite human rights issues. But without identifying real dangerousness you won't get anywhere."/ppBut in the end, as Theunissen puts it, "however professional you are, you can never be sure what's going on in the night, behind the doors". It does not help to demonise those whose job it is to find out - rather, there should be collective investigations, collective decisions, and an earned trust, in the idealism of those who work with the most vulnerable children in society. "I never doubted my job," says Bleeker. "I never wanted to quit. I don't know many people who did. There is a lot of bad publicity; I still get it sometimes, people being almost aggressive when you say where you work. Then I take a deep breath and I sit down to explain my work to them. There is so much good in it, but we can't talk about cases, everything is confidential, so it's hard to explain. People in this field can't let it go easily. You can't just quit and leave your 15 cases"./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/childprotection"Child protection/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/netherlands"Netherlands/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/nSP3iuzQicoZHBWDju0qQFPscV0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/nSP3iuzQicoZHBWDju0qQFPscV0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p