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A branch of the self-declared Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a Shiite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia that has killed at least 19 people, a move that could represent a significant escalation of the extremist group's operations in the kingdom.

NPR's Leila Fadel reports from Cairo that the online statement from ISIS "named and praised the Saudi suicide bomber who detonated himself amongst a congregation of Shiite Saudis praying in a mosque in the village of al Qudaih in Qatif province."

She says it is the first time a Saudi branch of ISIS known as Najd Province has claimed responsibility for an attack inside the kingdom. Leila says Saudi Shiites are concerned that the attack represents a backlash for Saudi Arabia's military campaign against rebel (Shiite) Houthis in Yemen.

"In the statement, ISIS called Shiite Muslims impure and vowed that dark days are ahead for them. It also said attacks like this one won't stop until they drive all Shiites from the Arab peninsula," Leila reports.

According to The New York Times: "During Saudi Arabia's two-month air campaign against the Houthi movement in Yemen, which practices a form of Shiite Islam and receives backing from Saudi Arabia's regional rival, Iran, imams at Sunni mosques and commentators in Saudi Arabia have frequently rallied the public around the war, in part by repeatedly denouncing Shiites as dangerous infidels."

Al-Jazeera offers a bit of background:

"Saudi Arabia's Shia population is mostly based in two oasis districts of the Eastern Province - Qatif on the Gulf coast, and al-Ahsa, southwest of the provincial capital al-Khobar.

"Qatif and al-Ahsa have historically been the focal point of anti-government demonstrations.

"The kingdom's Shia community accounts for between 10 to 15 percent of the total population. They say they face discrimination in seeking educational opportunities or government employment and that they are referred to disparagingly in text books and by some Sunni officials and state-funded clerics."

Islamic State

suicide bombings

Saudi Arabia

It seems like a no-brainer: Offer kids a reward for showing up at school, and their attendance will shoot up. But a recent study of third-graders in a slum in India suggests that incentive schemes can do more harm than good.

The study, a working paper released by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, looked at 799 boys and girls. The kids, mostly age 9, were students in several dozen single-classroom schools run by the nonprofit Gyan Shala in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city of Ahmedabad.

I almost felt badly about what we had done. That in the end, we should not have done this reward program at all.

- Sujata Visaria, an economist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Gyan Shala's program is free and has a reputation for offering decent quality instruction in language, math and science. Still, attendance rates are no better than the average for the region. On any given day, about a quarter of students are absent. Gyan Shala's administrators believe many opt to stay home and play if, say, it's a festival day or a sibling who attends a different school is off or simply because they're not in the mood for class.

So the researchers challenged kids in about half of the classes: Over a designated 38-day period, show up for at least 32 days — that's 85 percent of the time — and get a special gift: two pencils and an eraser.

That might not sound like much. And it's not as if these kids couldn't get a pencil or eraser some other way, notes Sujata Visaria, an economist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a co-author of the study. Still, such items are a treat in the slums where these kids live, Visaria says.

And the erasers weren't run-of-the-mill. "We spent a lot of time trying to make sure what they got would be a little unusual," she says. "Not a plain, drab erasers but something colorful and shaped like an animal."

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Dear World, Your Grade For Educating Your Children Is ...

The kids could inspect sample erasers before the 38 days kicked off. The prospect of winning the prize certainly provoked interest. The students were nearly twice as likely to attend class during the 38 days. The effect was particularly pronounced among kids whose attendance level had been the lowest before the reward program began. They were now 2.3 times as likely to come to class. By comparison, kids whose attendance level had been the highest before the reward program also improved their attendance, but by somewhat less: They were 1.8 times as likely to come to class.

So far it all seemed logical, says Visaria. As an economist, she would expect a reward program to be most effective with students who don't already have some existing, intrinsic motivation for going to school — like finding class fun.

After the 38 days, rewards were handed out to those who qualified in a special ceremony in front of the rest of the class. The researchers checked back on the kids two more times. And that's when things got surprising.

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Cellphones Or School? What Makes Kids Around The World Happy

The researchers looked at three different categories:

• Kids whose attendance rate was highest in the class before the reward program. They reverted to their baseline level.

• Kids whose attendance rate was lowest but managed to up their attendance enough to win the prize. After the program was over, these kids also reverted to their lower baseline level.

• Kids whose attendance rate was lowest to start off with and who did not improve enough to qualify for the reward. In other words, they failed the challenge. More than 60 percent of the lowest attenders fell into this category. For them, the aftermath was grim. They were now only about one-fourth as likely to show up for class as they had been before the reward scheme was introduced.

What happened? Visaria speculates that for these low-attending students, the incentive program underscored how poor their attendance was. So they may have lost what little motivation they had to begin with. Other findings in the study bolstered that theory. After the reward program concluded, the kids with lower original attendance rates were less likely to feel confident about their scholastic abilities than before.

Visaria says this result was not just unexpected and cautionary but disheartening. She and her fellow researchers had been prepared for the possibility that the reward program would not prove particularly helpful, or that any positive effects would not last. But they never expected it to leave children worse off.

"I almost felt badly about what we had done," she says. "That in the end, we should not have done this reward program at all."

school attendance

Education

India

Just a few years ago, downtown Hamilton, Mo. looked a lot like a thousand other forgotten, rural towns. Abandoned, forlorn buildings marred the main drag.

But in recent years, an explosively fast-growing start-up business in rural north western Missouri has shaken up a staid industry, producing a YouTube star and revitalizing a town with a proud retail history.

That's why Dean Hales, who's lived here 77 years, is so delighted now.

"I've lived here most all my life, I can't hardly believe what I'm seeing," he says. "When you've got people coming from all over the world to a little town of 1,800 people, you've got something pretty special. And we do have."

They've got Missouri Star Quilt Company. Just seven years after its launch, fifteen freshly-remodeled buildings in Hamilton now house fabric, sewing machines and customers.

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Missouri Star Quilt Co. co-founder Alan Doan explores a long-vacant space the company is remodeling in downtown Hamilton. This building was formally owned by J.C. Penny, who got his first retail job in the shop downstairs in the 1890s, and made it his 500th J.C. Penny's store in the 1920s. Frank Morris/KCUR hide caption

itoggle caption Frank Morris/KCUR

Missouri Star Quilt Co. co-founder Alan Doan explores a long-vacant space the company is remodeling in downtown Hamilton. This building was formally owned by J.C. Penny, who got his first retail job in the shop downstairs in the 1890s, and made it his 500th J.C. Penny's store in the 1920s.

Frank Morris/KCUR

Della Badger drove here from Victorville, Calif.

"I just looked on my map and asked Siri, How do I get to Hamilton, Missouri," she says. "But, it was my dream to get here and see Jenny."

Badger's talking about someone she knew only through YouTube, Jenny Doan, of Missouri Star Quilt Company.

Doan's how-to quilting videos have drawn millions of views.

"It's some crazy thing like that," Doan laughs. "I can't hardly use the bathroom in a restaurant without someone saying, 'I love your tutorials!' "

Jenny Doan's DIY quilt tutorials have drawn more than 50 million views.

Doan says it's because she takes an easy-going approach to what traditionally can be a daunting and tedious craft.

"Quilting has always been something that's like, for the elite," she says. "It's kind of a hard thing to do, you know, everything has to be cut perfectly. And I'm like, 'Just whack up, we're going to put it together, this is going to be awesome!' "

She says women from around the world visit Hamilton, or write to thank her for getting them into quilting.

"This has absolutely been the sweetest, most serendipitous thing that has ever happened to me," Doan adds.

And this business would not have happened if she had been a better financial planner.

"My parents have always been bad with money," says Alan Doan, Jenny's son.

He says the recession cost his folks most of their savings, and threatened to take their house.

"Me and my sister were looking at it and said, 'We've got to put something together, so that mom can make a little extra cash,' " Alan says.

So in the fall of 2008, Alan and his sister took out loans and set their mom up with a business sewing other people's quilts together. Customers kept asking for fabric, so Alan built a website to sell it.

"World, we're open! And you expect somebody to care, right? And so we launched the website," Alan says. "I still have my Facebook post, I went and looked at it the other day, it's like, 'Hey I launched this quilt shop for mom, you guys should check it out.' It's [got] like, two likes."

Economy

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Michel Martin, Going There

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Doan was selling, or trying to sell, a relatively new product: pre-cut fabric. The pieces come bundled together from the factory in a pack with different, complementary, prints, making it much easier and faster to make good looking quilts.

But one year in, business was terrible.

Jenny says, "Alan came to me and said, 'Mom, are you interested in doing tutorials?' I said, 'Sure honey, what's a tutorial?' I mean, had no idea. I had never been on YouTube.' "

Well, the videos, featuring pre-cut fabrics, eventually took off. Sales exploded and now Missouri Star Quilt employs more than 180 people to sew, staff stores and, like Mindy Loyd, ship thousands of packages a day from the company's huge new warehouse.

"This one's going to Australia," Lloyd says. "Isn't that neat?"

Alan's savviness helped build the foundation of a large business.

"We had to learn how to do this from like watching YouTube videos on how Amazon does it, or something, right? We built this warehouse, and I just called all the smart people I knew and said, 'How do we do this?' " he says.

Success has pushed the company into publishing, even food service. They're renovating more buildings and by mid-summer they plan to double the number of quilt shops in Hamilton, and even add a "man's land" to give their customer's husbands something to do.

The Doans aren't the first people from Hamilton to make it big in retail.

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Alan Doan likes the fact that Missouri Star Quilt Co. is following in the footsteps of fellow Hamilton native J.C. Penny, but Doan's never been into an actual J.C. Penny store. Frank Morris/KCUR hide caption

itoggle caption Frank Morris/KCUR

Alan Doan likes the fact that Missouri Star Quilt Co. is following in the footsteps of fellow Hamilton native J.C. Penny, but Doan's never been into an actual J.C. Penny store.

Frank Morris/KCUR

James Cash Penny Jr. landed his first sales job here almost 120 years ago. Penny left Hamilton a teenager, but came years later, and opened his 500th J.C. Penny store here.

It's not likely the Missouri Star Quilt Company can match that, but it has so far transformed this once sleepy little town into a quilting mecca.

hamilton, mo.

missouri star quilt company

quilt

YouTube

Missouri

On a sunny day in the remote Chienge district of Zambia, hundreds gathered for a celebration that was the first of its kind. There was singing, laughing and no shortage of dancing. The village chiefs and government officials came dressed in their finest clothes while volunteers sported bright green T-shirts that read, "We use a toilet ... do you?"

The daylong event celebrated a milestone in Zambia, where the practice of defecating in the open is all too common. In April, Chienge, in the northernmost province of Luapula, became the first district in Zambia to be declared free of open defecation by the government. According to UNICEF, it's also the first district in southern Africa to fully abandon the practice. That means every household has at least one private latrine and a place to wash your hands.

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"It means the community has decided they don't accept [defecating] in the bush or outside," says Philippa Crooks, a UNICEF volunteer from Australia, who helped run the campaign in the district of some 40 villages and 134,000 people.

An estimated 6.6 million people in Zambia alone don't have a proper toilet, and 4.8 million people live without clean water, according to UNICEF. Residents often drink water from nearby a river and lakes, which have been contaminated with feces. And because hand-washing isn't a regular practice in every district, bacteria from human waste can end up in people's food, spreading diarrhea and cholera. There, the two diseases are among the major causes of death in children under age 5.

Zambia wants to make the entire country "open-defecation-free" within the next five years. And Chienge is a role model. Since the initiative began more than a year ago, Crooks says, the district has not recorded a single case of cholera.

The residents are happy about using toilets, says Leonard Mukosha, national coordinator of the Community-Led Total Sanitation program in Zambia. He recalls what he heard from a boy about 12 years old.

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"Before, he would go into the bush [to use the bathroom] with fear because he would think of snakes," Mukosha says. "And during the rainy season, sometimes you go and suddenly it starts raining. Now, least, he's able to go to the toilet [indoors] so there are no surprises there."

Over the past year, Mukosha and other health workers have been working with village chiefs and "champions" — those selected as community role models — to teach villagers about the importance of using toilets and washing hands with soap.

The goal is to help the community realize that "open defecation is very risky and that it strips the dignity from people," says Mukosha. "You show them how the feces left in bushes get back to them. You create a sense of disgust when they realize so much money is being wasted to treat diseases that are preventable."

Both Mukosha and Crooks say that despite defecation being a taboo subject in the communities, the village chiefs and champions met little resistance. They say, it's because the residents already have a tradition of keeping their villages and homes clean.

"Historically that's how the people have been," Mukosha says. "If you go to the district you'll find that lots of the villages are clean, and what was just lacking was the presence of toilets. So we made clear to them that you cannot claim to be completely clean [and] then use the bushes as a toilet — that does not mean cleanliness."

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Floating Toilets That Clean Themselves Grow On A Lake

Those caught defecating in the open can face penalties in the form of community work — cleaning government offices or gathering crops for orphans and disadvantaged people. But Mukosha says the district has rarely had to use the penalties.

What the campaign doesn't do is hand out toilets. The Zambian government used to just donate cement slabs to villages, "and it never moved the country anywhere," says Mukosha. "We only reached about 20 percent of the people, and everyone else was waiting for the material."

Instead, the volunteers work with the villages to build pit latrines using locally available materials. The pit latrines are simple to construct: a hole in the ground for the actual latrine with a cleanable slab over it. Then poles and mud bricks for walls, straw for the roof and empty bottles and jugs for the hand-washing station.

"You can see that people have a lot of pride in their toilets, and they just keep them very, very clean," Crooks tells Goats and Soda.

Mukosha says they plan to make at least five more districts open-defecation-free by the end of this year, as well as to provide better and more efficient toilets.

And part of the strategy is to celebrate the toilet era every year and set new goals as the people of Zambia climb what he calls the "sanitation ladder."

Zambia

toilets

cholera