Woman dies when a bomb she is carrying explodes in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, police say
THESSALONIKI, Greece: A woman was killed early Saturday in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki when a bomb she was carrying exploded in her hands, police said.
The 38-year-old woman apparently was carrying the bomb to place outside a nearby bank around 5 a.m., police said.
Several storefronts and vehicles were damaged by the explosion.
Police said the woman, whom they did not publicly identify, had a criminal record related to drugs and prostitution and had been involved in at least one robbery and thefts in the past. The Greek police's division for organized crime was investigating the incident, while authorities were also investigating whether the woman might have had ties to extreme leftist groups.
Greece has seen occasional bombings, as well as targeted killings, attributed to various organized crime groups. The country also has a long history of politically motivated violence dating back to the 1970s, with domestic extremist groups carrying out small-scale bombings that usually cause some damage but rarely lead to injuries.
While the groups most active in the 1980s and 1990s, whose preferred targets tended to be politicians, foreign businesses and diplomats, have been dismantled, new small groups have emerged.
Last year, a man believed to have been trying to assemble a bomb was killed when the device he was making exploded in a central Athens apartment. A woman inside the apartment was severely injured. It was unclear what their intended target might have been.
The blast had prompted Minister of Citizen Protection Michalis Chrisochoidis to warn of an emerging new generation of domestic extremists.
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Hans India
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Has the process of education – that importantly involves learning and assessing – been ethically evaluated in a comprehensive manner? While the National Education Policy 2020 has served to significantly reform the education system by focusing on foundational literacy, emphasizing teacher training and development, promoting a holistic and flexible curriculum structure for the students, and integrating better with vocational training, there is a need to look beyond the system towards the process where one looks at how the main constituents – the administrators, teachers, and students – engage with the system and realize the best possible outcomes. An ethical evaluation of the process of education would surface those loop holes that are subverting any improvement in effectiveness that reforming the system could deliver. However, while the overlooked interaction between system and process is one root cause of suboptimal educational outcomes, another aspect plagues at the very heart of ethical analysis. Often, discussions of ethics in education have taken a very narrow perspective. They have primarily been concerned with exam conduct – involving issues such as preventing cheating or academic dishonesty during (written) exams, and ways to detect plagiarism (and, now, AI-generated content) in student (assignment) submissions. News of leaked examination papers and novel modes of examination misconduct by students hits news headlines year after year, reinforcing the (narrow) ethical narrative of examination conduct. Both the nodal bodies University Grants Commission and All India Council for Technical Education have undertaken initiatives to reform their evaluation systems a few years back (around 2018-19), based on the belief that evaluation is closely linked to learning outcomes, and is the best indicator of the level of learner accomplishment. But ethics does not predominate ends over the means. There is a fundamental (ethical) flaw in the above (evaluation-focused) approach which emphasizes the ends of education (i.e., learning outcomes) over the means (i.e., the process of learning). Though educational institutes have begun emphasizing continuous learning journeys (through formative and summative assessments), it still ends up as a mere restructuring effort that instead of reducing emphasis on evaluations, increases it. Learners, who were hitherto bogged down by exam pressures towards the end of their terms would now, perhaps, be troubled through the entire term. The alarming rate at which student suicides are occurring in institutions across the country (notably, in the so-called premier institutes) renders the need to question the ethicality of the process of education not just important but also extremely urgent. Therefore, the question that we deem necessary to ask is whether the process of education that is prevalent in our country today can stand its (ethical) ground when it comes to aspects such as inclusivity, fairness, and overall student wellbeing – the factors we believe are pivotal to enhance learning outcomes. The National Achievement Survey (NAS) conducted in 2021 by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, found that levels of student learning had dipped significantly compared to their own 2017 survey. 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Universities should therefore invest in and maintain adequate computing infrastructure to ensure fairness in overcoming disparity in access that specific students might encounter owing to their economic status, gender or background. Such steps would also help with improving the overall well-being of students in equipping them to counter the muddling effect of finding themselves in an 'AI-cho chamber' where their peers are using AI tools, and social media abounds with enthusiastic 'influencers' extolling the benefits of such tools. Exhibit 2 Thus, we deem that a comprehensive shift in ethical evaluation of education system in India is largely due. Focusing merely on the ethics of exam conduct prioritizes ends over means and turns the teacher-student relationship into a cat and mouse game. By taking ethics beyond exam conduct, the education system can develop into an environment where students can shape their future and grow into capable, sensitive, and ethically grounded persons.
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