The Barren River Area Safe Space is an important asset to our community, and we are privileged it exists because of the important programs it offers.

The domestic violence shelter, for example, offers financial literacy awareness programs to prepare people for life after they leave the shelter.

BRASS started the program to address housing difficulties, like credit problems, faced by women who leave the shelter.

One example of the program’s usefulness is a woman at the shelter named La-Natasha, who dreamed of going into real estate but lost all of the money she had in a real estate scam.

After completing BRASS’ budgeting class, La-Natasha is optimistic about her options.

It not only helps people regain their self-esteem, it also helps them prepare for the future.

BRASS also offers several other worthwhile programs like the Financial Freedom Project through a $25,000 grant from CitiFinancial.

The funds are used to remove barriers victims of domestic violence face when attempting to become independent, which include child care, transportation, job training and safe and affordable housing.

Helping make battered women more self-sufficient is a key goal of BRASS.

BRASS also administers Bowling Green’s Kentucky Domestic Violence Association Individual Investment Program. Participants in this program open Individual Development Accounts to save to buy homes, start small businesses or get college educations. The IDA program provides matching funds for every dollar saved up a designated amount.

We are fortunate to have an organization like BRASS in this community. Giving abused and battered women hope and the tools for a better and more normal life is invaluable.

Another view: U.S. must learn from Canadian terror suspects

By The Dallas Morning News

Picture the Murrah federal building after Timothy McVeigh blasted it to kingdom come with a fertilizer bomb.

Now imagine bombs that powerful, or even stronger, deployed against the Canadian parliament and other Ontario landmarks. According to Canadian police, that’s what Islamist terrorists arrested over the weekend planned to do with fertilizer – three times the amount McVeigh used – they were allegedly trying to procure.

The bombshell that did go off was the revelation that most of the 17 Muslim suspects arrested in the plot, including five juveniles, were Canadian citizens, apparently acting on their own initiative. According to a classified Canadian Security Intelligence Service report leaked early last week, law enforcement authorities say the next phase in the terror war involves an increasing number of &#8220home-grown” Islamic radicals.

&#8220The implications of this shift are important,” said the report, in what is surely an understatement. It’s one thing to work to deport foreign-born radicals, or to keep them from entering Britain, Canada or the United States (where the recent arrest of two American Muslims in Georgia has been tied to the alleged Canadian plot). It is quite another when those planning terror attacks hold citizenship here and fit in socially in ways that foreigners do not.

Even more frightening is the warning in the Canadian security report that terror organizers are actively seeking out Western converts to Islam &#8220for their familiarity with the West and relative ease at moving through Western society.” This means that none of us – Muslim and non-Muslim – can afford to turn a blind eye to radical Islamist speech. One of the Canadian terror suspects is reportedly a fire-breathing Islamist whose lectures at a Toronto mosque radicalized middle-class young Canadians in his circle – some of whom now face charges along with their mentor. According to the Toronto Star, the Wahhabist rhetoric of the oldest suspect, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, alarmed members of the center’s board, but they tolerated it.

Among Muslims and broader society both, benign tolerance of radicalism has got to stop – before many more innocent lives are lost.