14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed arrested for bringing homemade clock to school

This arrest, clearly, should never have happened. But one would like to expect at least that the Irving school, after just a cursory glance at the clock and maybe a conversation with Mohamed's engineering teacher, who had praised the project, would realize its mistake. That the school would apologize to Mohamed for humiliating and terrorizing him, acknowledge its mistake, and use it as a teaching moment to discuss racism and profiling.

That is not what has happened. Instead, even after learning that the clock was just a clock built as an educational project, the school suspended Mohamed for three days and sent out this letter to parents on Tuesday:.

Hoping to show off his tech skills to teachers at his school in Irving, Texas, by bringing in a homemade clock, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was https://www.eyeem.com/u/vinnmatguid instead arrested on suspicion of building a “hoax bomb.” When The Dallas Morning News interviewed Ahmed in his room, he was “fiddling with a cable while a soldering iron dangled from the shelf behind him.” In case his Maker cred needed any more cementing than that, note the t-shirt he was wearing when he was brought to juvenile detention.

The letter, which acknowledges no mistake whatsoever on the school's part even though by then school officials knew the clock was harmless, is infuriating to read for its tone-deafness.
It seems to imply that Mohamed was at fault for violating the "Student Code of Conduct." The letter also asks students to "immediately report any suspicious items and / or suspicious behavior," in effect asking students and parents help to perpetuate the school's practice of racist profiling, even after that profiling had been clearly demonstrated as without merit. It is appalling that school officials would still think this way even after their arrest had been exposed as a horrible mistake, but it is especially telling that they would wish to announce this fact to students' parents as well.


At Wednesday's CNN debate, Carly Fiorina did what no other Republican has been able to do: she stopped Donald Trump cold.

CNN's Jake Tapper provided the https://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/vinnmatguid opening. "In an interview last week in Rolling Stone magazine, Donald Trump said the following about you. Quote, 'Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?' Mr. Trump later said he was talking about your persona, not your appearance. Please feel free to respond what you think about his persona."
Fiorina didn't flinch. "I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said."

‘They thought it was a bomb': 9th-grader arrested after bringing a home-built clock to school

Mohamed, a self-assured kid with thick-framed glasses and a serious expression, had just started at MacArthur High School a few weeks ago. The Irving, Tex., ninth-grader has a talent for tinkering — he constructs his own radios and once built a Bluetooth speaker as a gift for his friend — and he wanted to show his new teachers what he http://gotartwork.com/Profile/juaaerec-payrones/4310/ could do. So on Sunday night, he quickly put together a homemade digital clock (“just something small,” as he casually put it to the Dallas Morning News: a circuit board and power supply connected to a digital display) and proudly offered it to his engineering teacher the next day.

But the teacher looked wary.

Yesterday, the story of a 14-year-old hoping to impress his teachers with a homemade clock who ended up in handcuffs instead turned Ahmed Mohamed into an instant celebrity. Police have decided not to file “hoax bomb” charges against Ahmed, but social networks are still seething with outrage over the egregious treatment of a person of color simply wanting to participate in technology.

Along with the outrage, however, has come an outpouring of support from technology’s biggest names.

“Ahmed, if you ever want to come by Facebook, I’d love to meet you,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post that went up on his personal page today. “Keep building.”

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, tweeted a sly joke about the potato clocks he hacked on as a kid before turning his Twitter feed into a supportive retweet storm.

Thousands of other tweets from techies have been collected at the hashtag, #IStandWithAhmed.

We at WIRED want to extend the same http://www.inprnt.com/profile/vinnmatguid/ invitation. Ahmed, if you do end up visiting Silicon Valley or San Francisco, come by our offices and hang out! We’ve got dogs and gadgets and tons of other cool things to tinker with. We’d love to build some digital clocks with you.

On Monday, teachers at the Irving Independent School District in Irving, Texas, had police arrest a 14-year-old student named  for bringing to school a simple electronic clock he had built as an engineering project. Police escorted Mohamed out of school in handcuffs — photos of the arrest show him wearing a NASA T-shirt — and accused him of trying to build a bomb.

Ahmed Mohamed swept up, 'hoax bomb' charges swept away as Irving teen's story floods social media

Irving’s police chief announced Wednesday that charges won’t be filed against Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School freshman arrested Monday after he brought what school officials and police described as a “hoax bomb” on campus.

At a joint press conference with http://vinnmatguid.swapadvd.com/profile/vinnmatguid Irving ISD, Chief Larry Boyd said the device — confiscated by an English teacher despite the teen’s insistence that it was a clock — was “certainly suspicious in nature.”

School officers questioned Ahmed about the device and why Ahmed had brought it to school. Boyd said Ahmed was then handcuffed “for his safety and for the safety of the officers” and taken to a juvenile detention center. He was later released to his parents, Boyd said.

“The follow-up investigation revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment, and there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm,” Boyd said, describing the incident as a “naive accident.”

Asked if the teen’s religious beliefs factored into his arrest, Boyd said the reaction “would have been the same” under any circumstances.

“We live in an age where you can’t take things like that to school,” he said. “Of course we’ve seen across our country horrific things happen, so we have to err on the side of caution.”

The chief touted the “outstanding relationship” he’s had with the Muslim community in Irving. He said he talked to members of the Muslim community this morning and plans to meet with Ahmed's father later today.

Speaking at an afternoon news conference outside the family’s home, Ahmed’s father said he’s proud of his son and wowed by his skills.

“He fixed my phone, my car, my computer,” Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed said. “He is a very smart, brilliant kid.”

Mohamed said he’s lived in America for 30 years, but this was a new experience for him.

“That is not America,” Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed said of his son’s humiliation after being handcuffed in front of his classmates.

But Mohamed said he’s also been touched https://sketchfab.com/vinnmatguid by the outpouring of support for his son.

“What is happening is touching the heart of everyone with children,” he said. “And that is America.”

Ahmed, himself, also spoke, saying he was saddened by the initial reaction his invention provoked but amazed at what has followed.

“It made me really happy to see all these people support me,” he said.

The teen said he hasn’t spoken to anyone from MacArthur High, where he was suspended until Thursday.

“I’m thinking about transferring from MacArthur to any other school,” Ahmed said.

Migrant crisis: UN 'shocked' over clashes in Hungary

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said he is "shocked" after Hungarian police fired tear gas and water cannon to force migrants back from its border.

Mr Ban said such treatment of asylum seekers was "unacceptable".
Hundreds of migrants were involved http://www.professionalontheweb.com/p/w/juaaerec+payrones/78522 in the clashes at the border between Hungary and Serbia on Wednesday, trying to break through a razor-wire fence.
Many of them want to reach Germany, amid divisions within the European Union over how to deal with the crisis.
Hungary defended its action, saying that 20 police officers were injured as migrants tried to break through a gate, and a spokesman accused migrants of using children as "human shields".
At least two migrants were also injured, Hungarian and Serbian officials said.

Hungary closed its entire border with Serbia on Tuesday after making it illegal to enter the country or damage the border fence. The country's courts have started fast-track trials of arrested migrants.

More than 200,000 people have already crossed into Hungary this year to enter the EU's Schengen zone, which normally allows people to travel between member countries without restrictions.

BBC correspondents covering the migrant crisis

In other developments:

    EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos is due to visit refugee centres in Bicske, Hungary, and Rosenheim, Germany
    Top Austrian, Croatian and Slovenian officials will hold talks to discuss in detail the passage of migrants into Austria
    A steady stream of migrants has already been crossing into Croatia from Serbia
    One of the main motivations driving https://1x.com/member/vinnmatguid/about/ Syrians towards Europe is to find a better life and education for their children, the Save the Children says. Its report says more than two million children inside Syria are unable to attend schools

'Brutal' treatment'

On Wednesday, there were chaotic scenes near the Hungarian town of Horgos, with fires burning and police vehicles and ambulances arriving on the Serbian side of the border, across from massed ranks of riot police on the other side.

14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed arrested

Police in Texas have arrested a 14-year-old boy for building a clock. Ahmed Mohamed, who lives in Irving and has a keen interest in robotics and engineering, put the device together on Sunday night. When he took it to school the next day, he was pulled https://offenekommune.de/user/vinnmatguid/about out of class, interviewed by police officers, and taken in handcuffs to juvenile detention, after being told by teachers that his creation looked like a bomb.

Ahmed told The Dallas Morning News that he showed his clock — a simple device, created from a circuit board and a power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front — to his engineering teacher first, who advised him not to show any other staff members at MacArthur High School. He originally kept it in his bag during English class, but his teacher heard it beep during the lesson — when Ahmed showed her his home-made clock at the end of class, she took it away from him. In sixth period, the school principal came for Ahmed with a police officer in tow, arresting him and marching him out of school. The schoolboy says he was interrogated by five officers, who asked why he was trying to make a bomb, and was threatened with expulsion by his Principal unless he made a written statement.

Irving police might still charge Ahmed with making a "hoax bomb." Police spokesperson James McLellan said Ahmed "kept maintaining it was a clock" when he was brought in for interrogation, but that he offered "no broader explanation." When asked by The Dallas Morning News what broader explanation Ahmed could have given for a clock that was actually a clock, McLellan said the creation "could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car." A police report released on Tuesday cites three MacArthur High teachers as complainants against Ahmed for the "hoax bomb."

Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, Ahmed's father, says his child suffered because of prejudice against Muslims. "Because his name is Mohamed and because of September 11th," Mohamed told The Dallas Morning News, "I think my son got mistreated." The Council on American-Islamic Relations is already investigating Ahmed's case, with Alia Salem, the director of the council's North Texas chapter, saying that it seemed "pretty egregious."

Ahmed said he was a member of his middle school's robotics club, and had tried to find a similar group in his high school. Now the 14-year-old — born in the same year that the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took place — says http://pictify.saatchigallery.com/user/vinnmatguid he'll no longer bring any of his inventions into school. A picture reportedly taken by Ahmed's sister shows him in handcuffs at the juvenile detention center, sporting a NASA T-shirt and an understandably confused expression. Ahmed was fingerprinted, before being allowed to return home, but is still serving a three-day suspension

Many in the maker and tech community have already rallied around him. A hashtag — #IStandWithAhmed — rapidly rose to become one of Twitter's top trending topics, and support has come from a number of sources, including a JPL engineer who offered Ahmed the chance to see a Mars rover whenever he wants. Ahmed's father says his son "just wants to invent good things for mankind" — we can hope that the police reaction won't dissuade the talented young creator from making good on his dream..

Ahmed Mohamed says he's going to the White House — and then he's transferring schools

Two days after his arrest for bringing a homemade clock to school, Ahmed Mohamed appeared at a press conference today to address https://www.moterus.es/motero/vinnmatguid/acerca-de his supporters. The 14-year-old student at MacArthur High School in Irving, TX, thanked his many fans on social media, who include Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, among many others. At his press conference, Ahmed said he planned to take the president up on his offer to visit him at the White House — and said he also plans to transfer to another school.

Ahmed looked upbeat during his roughly 6-minute appearance, smiling as he recounted the absurd series of events that led him his arrest. Police have decided not to press charges after determining the clock was not a bomb, as they had originally assumed. But he remains suspended until Thursday for — again — bringing a homemade clock to school. Asked about his other inventions, he said he had previously built a pair of Bluetooth speakers ("but they're gone now; I kind of messed up with them") and said he was currently patenting an invention that harnesses power through neodymium magnets.

Ahmed told the crowd he'd like to appear on Shark Tank someday. In the meantime, he says, he plans to help other students who finds themselves in a similar situation. And he encouraged young people to keep working on their inventions. "Don't let people change who you are," he said. "Even if you get consequences for it."

The teenager said another teacher became aware of it when the device beeped during the lesson.

"She was like - it looks like a bomb," he said.

The homemade clock consisted of a http://www.archdevilz.nl/members/1894849 circuit board with wires leading to a digital display.

Later in the day the boy was pulled out of class, interviewed by senior teachers and four police officers, and put into juvenile detention.

The school issued a statement saying it "always ask our students and staff to immediately report if they observe any suspicious items".

Ahmed Mohamed: No charges for boy, 14, arrested over clock

Officials at MacArthur High School in Irving alerted police because they thought the device was a "hoax bomb".

Ahmed Mohamed's arrest has been sharply criticised, and the boy has received an outpouring of support including an invitation to the White House.

Ahmed told reporters it was "very sad" that his teacher thought his clock was a threat.

"I built a clock to impress my teacher but  https://soundation.com/user/vinnmatguid when I showed it to her she thought it was a threat to her. I'm very sad that she got the wrong impression of it."

At the same news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Ahmed announced he plans to transfer schools.

Ahmed's father Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who is originally from Sudan, praised his son's ingenuity, saying he fixes everything around the house, including his father's phone and computer.

"He's a very smart, brilliant boy and he said he just wanted to show himself to the world," he said.

The police have rejected the claim made by Ahmed's family that he was detained because of his name.
"We have always had an outstanding relationship with the Muslim community," Irving Police Department chief Larry Boyd said on Wednesday. "Incidents like this present challenges. We want to learn how we can move forward and turn this into a positive".
The boy was placed in handcuffs and fingerprinted. He was released after it was determined there was no threat.

Under the hashtag "#IstandwithAhmed," thousands of Twitter users praised the boy's initiative and questioned why he was detained including Nasa scientists, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and US President Barack Obama.

"Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great," Mr Obama wrote on Twitter.

The Council on American-Islamic http://www.ebuga.es/vinnmatguid Relations says it is investigating the incident.

Ahmed said that he had made a clock at home and brought it to school to show his engineering teacher.

He said his engineering teacher had congratulated him but advised him "not to show any other teachers".

Muslim teen Ahmed Mohamed creates clock, shows teachers, gets arrested

(CNN)When Ahmed Mohamed https://soundation.com/user/rghomehouston went to his high school in Irving, Texas, Monday, he was so excited. A teenager with dreams of becoming an engineer, he wanted to show his teacher the digital clock he'd made from a pencil case.

The 14-year-old's day ended not with praise, but punishment, after the school called police and he was arrested.

Irving Police spokesman Officer James McLellan told the station, "We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only tell us that it was a clock."

The teenager did that because, well, it was a clock, he said.

On Wednesday, police announced the teen will not be charged.

Chief Larry Boyd said Ahmed should have been "forthcoming" by going beyond the description that what he made was a clock. But Boyd said authorities determined that the teenager did not intend to alarm anyone and the device, which the chief called "a homemade experiment," was innocuous.

Ahmed, who aspires to go to MIT, said he was pleased the charges were dropped and not bothered that police didn't apologize for arresting him. After he said he was interrogated by police without an attorney present, his lawyer, Linda Moreno, told reporters they wouldn't answer any more questions about the legal process.

Ahmed is suspended until Thursday, he said, but is thinking about transferring to another high school.

Social media reacts

Outrage over the incident -- with many saying the student was profiled because he's Muslim -- spread on social media as #IStandWithAhmed started trending worldwide on Twitter with more than 100,000 tweets Tuesday morning. The school's Facebook page is roiling with sharp criticism of the way the teen was treated, and the hashtag #engineersforahmed is gaining popularity.

President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and thousands of others are showing support for Ahmed.

"Cool clock, Ahmed," Obama tweeted. "Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great."

The President would like the teen to join him and other scientists next month for the White House's annual Astronomy Night, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday.

Ahmed said Wednesday he was going to the White House.

Clinton tweeted that "assumptions don't keep us safe" and urged the teenager to "keep building."

"I think this wouldn't even be a question if his name wasn't Ahmed Mohamed," said Alia Salem of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "He is an excited kid who is very bright and wants to share it with his teachers."

Many criticized the school on Facebook. Its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, posted his support.

"Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed," Zuckerberg wrote. "Ahmed, if you ever want to come by Facebook, I'd love to meet you. Keep building."

Kevin McKinney posted, "How did a bunch of complete idiots end up accidentally running a school? Were you all yanked out of a zoo and given paychecks? Learning centers are for teaching ... not for ruining innocent people's lives with your racism and pathetic stupidity! ... "This kid is destined to be something great if the dimwits of Irving don't ruin him first."

Mocking Irving Schools' motto, Bill Cain wrote: "'Where children come first' ... to jail in handcuffs. Way to go, Irving."

Chance Williams posted, "Ahmed Mohamed deserves a public apology from you, the school administrators, police, and teachers involved in his arrest. I hope he sues, and the school district has to pay for his college education."
A photo police provided showing the clock Ahmed made
A photo police provided showing the clock Ahmed made

Teen's father saw son surrounded by police

Texas law stipulates that a person who commits a hoax bomb offense is one who "knowingly manufactures, sells, purchases, transports, or possesses a hoax bomb with intent to use" it or intentionally causes alarm or reaction.

Ahmed's father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and has twice run for that country's presidency, told CNN Wednesday that he was upset the school did not contact him immediately to tell him about the situation.

The first he heard of it was when he received a call from police, who said his son was being charged with having a hoax bomb, Mohamed said.

He rushed to the police station, where he saw his son "surrounded by five police and he was handcuffed," the father said. Ahmed told his father he'd asked to phone him but the police told him he could not because he was under arrest, Mohamed said.

"I asked if I could talk to or speak to my son and they told me, 'No, not right now' because they were taking his fingerprints and asking him questions," Mohamed said. "I asked if I could see the thing they were calling a bomb. The police never let me even see it but I knew what my son brought to school. It was an alarm clock that he made. He wakes up with it most mornings. ..."

Police are holding the clock as evidence, Mohamed said.

A reporter at a news conference Wednesday asked Chief Boyd about the allegations that Ahmed was told he could not call his father and was interrogated alone for some time at the station.

"I'm not aware of that," the chief said, adding that the incident isn't being investigated.

Boyd was also asked if the teen's religious or ethnic identity played a role in how he was treated. The chief said it did not, and he praised the department's relationship with Irving's Muslim community.

However, he said, "We live in an age where you can't take things like that to school."

'People think Muslims are terrorists'

"My son is a very brilliant boy," Mohamed said. "We need people like him in this country."

The teen has never been in trouble, the father said, saying he thinks this is a case of Islamophobia. "My son's name is Mohamed -- people just think Muslims are terrorists but we are peaceful, we are not that way."

"We live in the land of opportunity to grow and help and the people who did this to my son, they do not see him that way," Mohamed continued. "My son said over and over that this was an alarm clock and my son only brought it to school to ask for help from his teachers, to show that he can do this amazing thing and maybe get appreciation and to show him (he can become) something bigger in the world -- an inventor."

Mohamed said it wasn't until after the fact that he received a call and an email from the school, telling him about Ahmed's arrest and informing him that his son had been suspended for three days.

The father and others were meeting Wednesday with attorneys to decide what steps, if any, they might take next, Mohamed said.

At the Wednesday news conference, a spokeswoman for the Irving Independent School District told reporters that the way the teen's experience has been described in media reports is "unbalanced."

She declined to explain why, citing the need to protect a student's privacy.

The statement she made was posted on the district's site Wednesday. When the family gives written permission to discuss the incident, the school will offer more information, she said.

Earlier in the day, MacArthur High School provided a statement to CNN in which it said it was cooperating with authorities and said privacy laws prohibited it from sharing details about student discipline. "We can assure everyone that school administrators are handling the situation in accordance with the Irving ISD Student Code of Conduct and applicable laws."

Mohamed isn't sure if his son will go back to school Thursday. He's afraid the police will keep his invention and he's worried about his son being called names.

But he's happy about the widespread outpouring of support. His family started the hashtag #Thankyouforstandingwithme.

"It gives him hope," the teen's father said. "Right now he is trying to just stay positive and is listening to the news about him and reading about people's comments him on social media. It's really too much for him to take in right now, but long term it will be good for him. He doesn't want to show he is a victim."

It was an English teacher who got spooked and reported Ahmed to the principal, the police said.

"We always ask our students and staff to immediately report if they observe any suspicious items and/or suspicious behavior," the school's statement reads. "If something is out of the ordinary, the information should be reported immediately to a school administrator and/or the police so it can be addressed right away. We will always take necessary precautions to protect our students and keep our school community as safe as possible."

A reporter spoke with the boy in his bedroom, which is full of equipment that allows him to tinker and create.

"Here in high school, none of the teachers know what I can do," Ahmed told the paper while he soldered metal and played around with a cable.

A middle school robotics club member, the teen has won awards for his inventions.

He recalled showing one teacher the clock and her telling him that she thought it was "nice" but he shouldn't show other instructors, according to the paper. The teen put the clock in his bookbag but an alarm beeped in the middle of sixth period and Ahmed showed the teacher what he had, the newspaper reported.

"She was like, it looks like a bomb," he said.

"I told her, 'It doesn't look like a bomb to me.'"

When Ahmed was called out of class, he said he was brought into a room with four police officers, one of whom said, "Yup. That's who I thought it was."

Ahmed told the Dallas Morning News that he felt aware of what he looked like and his name as the officers fired questions at him.

He recalled that one officer said to him, "So you tried to make a bomb?"

He disputed that and kept telling them he'd created a clock.

Meanwhile, the teen's defenders continue to slam the school and police.

"I really hope you guys are absolutely ashamed for possibly ruining the ingenuity of one bright kid who made a CLOCK for crying out loud. What kind of education does your professors have?" David Velez wrote on the school's Facebook page. "It sounds like they are the ones that need to be going back to school!"

"I built a clock to impress my teacher but when I showed it to her, she thought it was a threat to her," Ahmed told reporters Wednesday. "It was really sad that she took the wrong impression of it."

Ahmed talked to the media gathered http://www.ebuga.es/rghomehouston on his front yard and appeared to wear the same NASA T-shirt he had on in a picture taken as he was being arrested. In the image, he looks confused and upset as he's being led out of school in handcuffs.

"They arrested me and they told me that I committed the crime of a hoax bomb, a fake bomb," the freshman later explained to  after authorities released him.