A new set of standards for African American history in Florida schools will teach middle schoolers how enslaved people “developed skills” that could be “applied for personal benefit”. Another guideline instructs high schoolers to be taught that a massacre led by white supremacists against Black residents in Ocoee to stop them from voting in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” Members of the Florida Board of Education have defended the standards for African American history lessons they unanimously approved, with Ron DeSantis-appointed board member MaryLynn Magar assuring the attendees at a hearing in Orlando on 19 July that “everything is there” and that “the darkest parts of our history are addressed” in the curriculum. But civil rights advocates, educators and Democratic state lawmakers have warned that elements of the guidelines present a distorted, revisionist picture of the state’s history of racism. “The notion that enslaved people benefitted from being enslaved is inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish in our education system,” Democratic state Rep Anna Eskamani told the board. State Senator Geraldine Thompson said that a recommendation suggesting that Black people sparked the Ocoee massacre is “blaming the victim”. Ms Thompson helped pass a law in 2020 that requires schools to teach lessons about the massacre. The Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, said in a statement that the standards represent “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history” for more than three decades. “Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for,” NAACP president Derrick Johnson added in a statement. “It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history. We refuse to go back.” The new standards add another victory in the DeSantis administration’s radical education overhaul and a “parents’ rights” agenda that has restricted honest lessons of race and racism in state schools, reshaped local school boards, and banned public colleges from offering classes that “distort significant events” or “teach identity politics”. Florida’s Board of Education also adopted five rules targeting LGBT+ students, including punishing transgender students and staff who use restrooms that align with their gender and add barriers to students who want their names and pronouns respected in and out of the classroom. LGBT+ advocates have accused the board and the governor’s administration of weaponizing state agencies to implement the DeSantis agenda as he mounts a national campaign, fuelled in part by what opponents have called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation adopted by several other states. That bill, which Mr DeSantis signed into law in 2022 and expanded earlier this year, has sparked fears that its broad scope could be used to effectively block discussion of LGBT+ people, history and events from state schools, and threaten schools with potential lawsuits over perceived violations. “This politically motivated war on parents, students, and educators needs to stop,” said Jennifer Solomon with Equality Florida. “Our students deserve classrooms where all families are treated with the respect they deserve and all young people are welcomed,” she said in a statement. “Let parents be parents. Let educators be educators. And stop turning our kids’ classrooms into political battlefields to score cheap points.” The African American history curriculum advanced by the board does not fully adopt the recommendations from the African American History Task Force, which urged the board to consider “contemporary issues impacting Africans and African Americans”. Education Commissioner Manny Diaz defended the standards as an “in-depth, deep dive into African American history, which is clearly American history as Governor DeSantis has said, and what Florida has done is expand it.” Under the new standards, students will be taught to simply “identify” famous Black people, but it fails to add requirements for students to learn about their contributions, challenges and stories overall. “We must do better in offering a curriculum that is both age-appropriate and truthful,” according to Democratic state Rep Dianne Hart, chair of Florida’s Legislative Black Caucus. “Education is a critical part of an individual’s personal foundation and when you chose to build a foundation on falsehoods, lies, or by simply erasing history, you’ve laid a foundation that will ultimately fail,” she said in a statement. The board’s adoption of the standards follow the board’s decision to ban the teaching of Advanced Placement African American Studies in high schools, claiming that the course “significantly lacks educational value” and “inexplicably” contradicted Florida law. A letter dated 12 January from the Florida Department of Education to the College Board, which administers AP exams, said the board is welcome to return to the agency with “lawful, historically accurate content”. Read More DeSantis campaign video crossed a line for gay right-wing pundits despite governor’s record on LGBT+ rights Florida schools remove books by John Milton and Toni Morrison and restrict Shakespeare under DeSantis rules Jury awards Florida girl burned by McDonald's Chicken McNugget $800,000 in damages Florida rulings ease concerns about drag performers at Pride parades, drag queen story hours What are the 10 largest US lottery jackpots ever won?

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Slack appears to have stopped working for millions of users around the world. Website health checker DownDetector registered thousands of reports of the office chat app not working. The outage began at around 9.45am BST, and comes just months after another significant issue with the platform. The Salesforce-owned company says that it has more than 200,000 paid customers, and is used by 77 of Fortune 100 companies. Those include many of the world’s biggest firms, such as Target, Uber and Netflix. More to follow. Read More New iPhone feature can recreate your voice perfectly after just 15 minutes Regulation ‘critical’ to curb risk posed by AI, boss of ChatGPT tells Congress Elon Musk calls working from home ‘morally wrong’

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Some female frogs will go to the extent of faking their own deaths to avoid sex with their male counterparts, a new study has revealed. Researchers in Berlin and Finland focused on the European common frog for their investigation owing to the often alarming nature of the species' mating process. The short breeding season means that several males often cling to a single female – in a pile-on that can cause the female to drown. (So, pretty understandable that they might want to avoid this.) For the research published in the Royal Society Open Science, European common frogs were collected and divided into tanks where there were two females and one male in each. Before this research, it was thought that the females couldn't defend themselves against the aggressive amorous act. However, a number of the wily participants displayed the three avoidance behaviours. A rotation technique to escape mating was a popular option – carried out by 83 per cent of the females. While nearly half of them (48 per cent) mimicked how male frogs sound to trick them into letting them go. In 33 per cent of the females, the researchers recorded a stiffening of arms and legs for two minutes, in a convincing bid to play dead. Out of the females who got mounted by a lustful male, almost half were able to escape thanks to at least one of these avoidance behaviours. “The smaller females also showed the full repertoire of behaviours more often than the larger females," the researchers noted, and younger females were more likely to pretend they were dead. However, question marks remain on whether the frogs fake their death as a conscious choice or whether it is a stress response or even a means to test the male’s strength and endurance. “I think even if we call this species a common frog and think we know it well, there are still aspects we don’t know and perhaps haven’t thought about," Dittrich explained to The Guardian. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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