A North Dakota school district could decide as early as Friday whether to reverse its decision to reject a yearbook photo of a student holding a rifle, NBC reported.

Fargo North High principal Andy Dahlen refused to publish a photo of student Josh Renville posing with a weapon, prompting Renville’s father to take the issue up with the district’s superintendent, Bob Grosz. Charlie Renville also took his campaign to social media, sharing the photo on his Facebook page with a caption calling for Dahlen to be fired. The post had been been shared more than 1,600 times as of Friday afternoon.

Renville wrote in the post, which was riddled with typographical errors, that the photo is “no different then the pictures in the school library of soldiers during anyone of our nations wars.”

He wrote that to him, the photo, in which his son wears a T-shirt adorned with the stars and stripes and strikes a moody pose next to a large American flag, represented “a kid that loves his nation, loves free speech and loves the 2nd Amendment.”

"You are home. Welcome home," Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told some of the 163 Syrian refugees who arrived at Toronto's Pearson airport late on Thursday night.

The families were part of the first dedicated Canadian government flight to relocate Syrian refugees from the Middle East. Dozens of Canadian volunteers were waiting for their arrivals, offering a warm welcome to make their transition to a new home halfway around the world a little easier.

The first family to enter the reception center was Kevork Jamkossian, a gynecologist from Aleppo, his wife Georgina Zires, a lab technician, and their 16-month-old daughter Madeleine.



"We really would like to thank you for all this hospitality and the warm welcome," Jamkossian told Trudeau through an interpreter. "We felt ourselves at home."

"We suffered a lot. Now, we feel as if we got out of hell and we came to paradise," Jamkossian said.

Santa was talking to a child at the Cleveland Centre Middlesbrough shopping centre when he noticed she couldn’t hear him. The little girl’s mother tells him “she can’t talk very well”. He asks if she can sign and that’s when the two share an adorable conversation just between the two of them!

Transcription:

Santa: Santa wants to know did you write to ask for a baby doll?
Child: Yes, I want a baby doll too.
Santa: You want it too? Do you want a video game too?
Child: No. You are able to use sign language?
Santa: Do you want a bicycle?
Child: No, I don’t want to fall.
Santa: I’m nice. Santa is nice.

YouTube





YouTube’s main headquarters in San Bruno, California mixes work and play with a massive red slide, a putting green, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, nap pods and bicycles and scooters to get around the sizable complex.

Google





Google is renowned for having not only an enviable range of employee perks, but also some incredibly creative work environments at their offices around the world. The Zurich location is particularly noteworthy with its fish tank relaxation room, ski lift work pods, slides, karaoke room and multiple game rooms.

Lego





Working at LEGO is already fun as it is, but combine the fact that you get to play with toys for a living with a really cool work environment, and you’ve got pretty sweet gig. The company’s office in Billund, Denmark includes huge grass wall graphics, a giant LEGO man, tables with built-in bonsai gardens and, of course, slides.

Zynga





Gaming company Zynga, responsible for all of those FarmVille and CityVille alerts you get from your relatives on Facebook, fills a six-floor, 556,000-square-foot building in San Francisco complete with a giant atrium, a wellness center and a food court-like cafe where employees can get three free meals a day.

It's well known that America's wealthiest have been getting even richer at the expense of the middle class. But the trend looks even starker when you look at the racial aspects. According to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, the combined wealth of those on the Forbes 400 list of America's richest dwarfs that of the nation's entire black or Latino population.



The report found that the 100 richest US citizens control about as much wealth as all of the nation's 42 million African Americans. The total wealth of the nation's 55 million Latinos stacks up to that of the 186 richest Americans.
The average white family today has net assets of $141,900, compared with just $11,000 for black families.

This can be explained in part by the rapid erosion of the black and Latino middle classes. African Americans' net worth relative to whites has fallen by more than half since 2000: The average white family today has net assets of $141,900, compared with just $11,000 for black families—about the same paltry sum as back in 1985. Latinos have seen similar declines in net worth relative to whites.

There are many reasons for this slide: Black and Latino families were disproportionately exposed to risky subprime mortgages, had smaller amounts of inherited wealth, and were more susceptible to job and wage cuts during the Great Recession. And because these families are less likely than whites to own homes and stocks, they haven't benefited as much from the subsequent recovery.

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Over the weekend, Aldrich purchased the cake and asked someone in the bakery if they could add a birthday message. Not really looking at the cake, she headed to check out when she noticed that it looked a little different. Aldrich wrote:

“I nervously laughed and headed to check out— it didn’t really matter to me that it looked so bad—I thought people would think it was funny. The cashiers at the self check out didn’t think it was so funny.”

Aldrich didn’t mind the cake’s appearance, but store employees who noticed it did — and directed her to go and get a different one. Aldrich held firm that she was keeping the cake, and then she was informed who decorated it for her. Aldrich explained:

“To my surprise, after they discussed it, one cashier put her arm on my shoulder and said ‘the girl who wrote that has Autism. Thank you for smiling and thanking her- even though she’s not supposed to write on cakes, you probably made her day.'”