Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.

Q: Children in our towns and cities are being robbed of safe spaces to play. Where do the children play? Where can they run around unsupervised? On most of the housing estates I visit, the answer is hardly anywhere . A community not built around children is no community at all . A place that functions socially is one in which they are drawn to play outdoors . As Jay Griffiths argues in her heartrending book Kith, children fill the "unoccupied territories", the spaces not controlled by tidy-minded adults, "the commons of mud, moss, roots and grass" . But such places are being purged from the land and their lives . "Today's children are enclosed in school and home, enclosed in cars to shuttle between them, enclosed by fear, by surveillance and poverty and enclosed in rigid schedules of time." Since the 1970s the area in which children roam without adults has decreased by almost 90% . "Childhood is losing its commons." Given all that we know about the physical and psychological impacts of this confinement , you would expect the authorities to ensure that the remaining 10% of their diminished range is designed to draw children out of their homes . Yet almost everywhere they are designed out . Housing estates are built on the playing fields and rough patches children used to inhabit, and offer almost nothing in return . In the government's masterplan for England, the national planning policy framework, children are mentioned only twice: in a catalogue of housing types . In parliament's review of these plans, they aren't mentioned at all . Young people, around whom our lives should revolve, have been airbrushed from the planning system . I spent Monday wandering around the new and newish housing developments on the east side of Northampton . I chose this area because the estates here are spacious and mostly built for families : in other words, there is no possible excuse for excluding young people . In the places built 10 or 20 years ago, there is plenty of shared space , but almost all of it is allocated to cars . (You can see the photos on my website .) Grass is confined to the roundabouts or to coffin-like gardens , in which you can't turn a cartwheel without hitting the fence . I came across one exception - a street with wide grass verges . But they sloped towards the road: dangerous and useless, a perfect waste of space . This land of missed opportunities, designed by people without a spark of joy in their hearts, reifies the idea that there is no such thing as society . Had you set out to ensure that children were neither seen nor heard, you could not have done a better job . On the last day of the holidays, which was warm and dry, across four estates I saw only one child . By comparison, the Cherry Orchard estate just completed by Bellway Homes is a children's paradise . But only by comparison . Next to the primary school, with plenty of three- and four-bedroom houses, it is designed to appeal to young families . But in the middle of the development, where a village green might have been, there' s a strange grassy sump, surrounded by a low fence . It's an empty balancing pond, to catch water during exceptional floods . Remove the fence, plant it with trees, throw in some rocks and logs, and you'd have a rough and mossy playground . But no such thing was in the plans . Other shared spaces on the estate have the charming ambience of a prison yard : paved and surrounded by garden fences almost nine feet high . There were a few children outdoors but they seemed pressed to the edges, sitting in doorways or leaning on fences . Children don't buy houses , so who cares? Throughout the country, they become prisoners of bad design, and so do adults . Without safe and engaging places in which they can come together, no tribe forms . So parents must play the games that children would otherwise play among themselves , and everyone is bored to tears . The exclusion of children arises from the same pathology that denies us decent housing . In the name of market freedom, the volume housebuilders, sitting on their land banks, are free to preside over speculative chaos , while we are free to buy dog kennels priced like palaces in placeless estates so badly designed that community is dead on arrival . Many want to design and build their own homes , but almost no plots are available , as the big builders have seized them . In Scotland the government is considering compulsory sale orders , which would pull down prices - essential when the speculative price of land has risen from 2% of the cost of a home in the 1930s to 70% today . A national housing land corporation would assemble the sites and supply the infrastructure, then sell plots to community groups, housing associations and people who want to build their own . It goes far beyond England's feeble community right-to-build measures , which lack the muscular facilitation that only public authorities can provide . But it's still not far enough . What if people were entitled to buy an option for a plot on a new estate, which they would then help to plan? Not just the houses, but the entire estate would be built for and by those who would live there . The council or land corporation would specify the number and type of homes , then the future residents - including people on the social housing waiting list - would design the layout . Their children would help to create the public spaces . Communities would start to form even before people moved in , and the estates would doubtless look nothing like those built today . To the Westminster government, this probably sounds like communism . But as countries elsewhere in Europe have found, we don't need volume house builders, except to construct high-rises . They do not assist the provision of decent, affordable homes . They impede it . What is good for them is bad for us . Bellway, its brochure reveals, asked children at the neighbouring primary school to paint a picture of a cherry orchard, and displayed the winning entries in its show home . "Why not pop over to say hello, view our wonderful development and sneak a peek?", it asks . That's the role the children were given: helping the company to sell the houses it had already built . Why can't we shape the places that shape our lives?

A: A place that functions socially is one in which they are drawn to play outdoors
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Q: Student arrested after teacher takes smartphone: Do our devices own us? Last Tuesday, a ninth-grader at John F  Kennedy High School in Paterson, N.J , was caught on video throwing his 62-year-old teacher to the ground and wrestling with him in order to retrieve his cellphone , which the teacher had confiscated . Teachers at the school allow cellphones to be used for educational purposes in the classroom , but they may take them and hold them until the end of class if a student appears to be using his phone for any other purpose . Granted , the boy may have demonstrated problems controlling his impulses in other settings, too , but the video of his attack has resulted in national attention . And that's because it isn't the first dramatic example of how attached to our phones we have become . Last year, a Houston woman was shot by a mugger when she refused to hand over her cellphone . She survived , and she later asserted that she had done the right thing . In 2013, a 22-year-old man was killed by a train when he tried to retrieve the cellphone he had dropped on the tracks . Without giving a great deal of thought to the psychological implications, our species has deployed mobile technology very quickly, in a very widespread manner . One reason is that the marketplace embraced smartphones in an astounding way  -- as if our phones and their apps are a lock-and-key fit with our psyches . According to one source, there are 7 billion mobile devices on earth, one for almost each person . What is "in" our cellphones that would lead people to attack others or risk death to keep them? I would argue that the phones absorb and record our thoughts and intentions so dramatically that we become unconsciously convinced they are "parts of us." Why else would so many people hesitate even to leave a room without taking their cellphones with them? Why would they interrupt meetings and family time to check them? Why would young people be opting to spend their money on newer, faster ones, instead of on clothing? Why would there be so much interest in personalizing the sounds they make, the apps they hold and the cases that hold them? I contend we have already crossed the Rubicon, almost irrevocably incorporating technology into our psyches in a way that makes us part flesh and blood, part hardware . The fact that the hardware is outside our bodies(for now) does not mean the integration has not occurred . We are psychologically magnetized to our devices . That's why some people will fight for them, and even die for them . The selfie has become so ubiquitous that it no longer seems bizarre to see someone smiling into a cellphone or sticking out her tongue or making a sad face -- acting-- and then snapping a photo . And these images are then sent not only to her supposed "friends," who may number in the hundreds, but also to her unconscious mind -- reinforcing the idea that she is what her cellphone records her to be . Take away the cellphone and, in some measure, she believes she disappears . She feels she dies a little bit, or more than a little bit, psychologically . The business of selling "selfie sticks"-- telescoping rods that hold a cellphone far enough away to facilitate a really good shot-- is robust enough to make many retailers place large kiosks of them near the checkout register . Cellphones, you might say, are growing arms . Ours apparently aren't long enough . This is just the beginning . Cellphones will soon be able to determine whether you are looking at the content on their screens, rather than looking away . They will demand attention . The extent to which we own them versus them owning us will be increasingly in doubt . Make no mistake : While technology can be good when harnessed for the good (raising money for charity occurs to me) , there will be hell to pay for giving so little thought to the downside . That downside likely includes an epidemic of narcissism in young people, increased rates of anxiety and dramatically decreased feelings of autonomy . Because to the extent that one's self-image is outsourced to a mobile device, it is no more deeply rooted than that . Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum bring you the news that matters to you!

A: We are psychologically magnetized to our devices That's why some people will fight for them, and even die for them
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Q: From Ferguson to immigration: Obama's divide and conquer political strategy has failed our nation. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows support for illegal immigrants at 48 percent, a historic low . This is what the president's cynical manipulation of the Hispanic community has delivered: a hardening of American attitudes . The same distancing will likely occur between blacks and whites as the demonstrations over the grand jury decisions in Ferguson and Staten Island roll on . Whereas only recently a sizable majority of blacks and whites declared themselves comfortable with the state of race relations in the country , pictures of looting and the inflammatory rhetoric of self-interested activists like Al Sharpton will inevitably sharpen racial divides . The insistent proclamations from Attorney General Eric Holder that our justice system is biased, and the president's agreement that the law "feels like it's being applied in a discriminatory fashion," do not help . Today, Obama's well-honed political tactics of dividing and conquering-- so essential to electing a virtual nobody to the Oval Office-- have come asunder . The interest groups wooed by the president have begun to turn against him . Some feel betrayed ; others understand that their demands have isolated them from their fellow countrymen . The only group still giving the president more than a 50 percent approval rating is voters under 3 . For the rest of the poor boobs not caught up in the Obama splinter sweep-- they are eager to elect a successor who might look out for them . Turns out, those forgotten folks are actually in the majority, and just voted in a Republican Senate . According to the Quinnipiac poll, 48 percent of voters think immigrants living in the U.S  illegally should be allowed to stay . That's down from 57 percent last year, and lower than ever . Moreover ,  some 35 percent of the voting public thinks undocumented aliens should be deported -- a record high, and up from 26 percent last year . That's in spite of insistent hectoring from the White House about the moral imperative of providing a legal path for those who are here illegally . Congratulations, Mr  Obama, for ramping up opposition to immigration reform . How to deal with illegal immigrants is not the only issue on which the nation's attitudes are hardening . Last August, after the shooting of Michael Brown (but before the grand jury decision in the case), a New York Times/CBS poll surveyed voters on their attitudes about race . Asked whether race relations had improved or soured during President Obama's time in office, 35 percent of respondents said they had gotten worse , while 52 percent said they had stayed the same . Only 10 percent thought the president had had a positive impact on relations - 8 percent of whites and 17 percent of blacks . That is an impressive underachievement from our first African-American president . Overall ,  78 percent of respondents, when asked about "race relations in your community," said they were "generally good." That included 82 percent of whites and 73 percent of blacks -- a strong vote of confidence, especially from a group that was much less positive about the country as a whole, with only 47 percent saying U.S  race relations were "generally good." This split suggests that people have absorbed the narrative that our country has a race problem not from their personal experience in their own communities, but from the media or our political leaders . The most compelling aspect of that story line entails racial bias in law enforcement . Many initiatives, from decriminalizing marijuana possession to de-emphasizing tactics like "stop and frisk," have been promulgated based on the fact that more blacks than whites end up on the wrong side of the law . Holder has even dumbed down school discipline measures, arguing they constitute an example of racial bias . The Manhattan Institute's Steve Malanga sheds some welcome light on this issue . According to surveys conducted by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics over the past 20 years, the number of confrontations between Americans and the police has declined, as has the use of force by law enforcement officials . Most important, perhaps, is that the declines were recorded not just for whites, but for all races . In 2002, 173,000 African-Americans reported a "use of force"; in 2011, that was down to 130,000 . Nearly 83 percent of blacks who were involved in traffic stops(the most numerous encounters) agreed with the statement,"When I was stopped by the police, the officers acted properly." That figure was up from 78 percent in 2002 . As for so-called "street stops," the Bureau reports,"In 2011, less than 1% of the 241.4 million U.S  residents age 16 or older were involved in a street stop" ; further ,  "no differences were observed in the percentage of non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, and Hispanic populations age 16 or older involved in a street stop." So much for unfair profiling . Under 3 percent of police encounters involve "street stops" of an involuntary nature ; of those stopped (likely not a happy crew), two-thirds said the cops behaved "properly and respectfully." This review does not suggest a law enforcement community reviled by the African-American community, or the country . President Obama has tried to curry favor with blacks, Hispanics, women, the young and the poor by convincing them that they suffer from injustices, that they are victimized by the one percent, by law enforcement, by corporations or insurers -- or by Republicans . Americans aren't buying it . Increasingly, they see a country victimized by an incompetent president .

A:
Today, Obama's well-honed political tactics of dividing and conquering-- so essential to electing a virtual nobody to the Oval Office-- have come asunder This is what the president's cynical manipulation of the Hispanic community has delivered: a hardening of American attitudes
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