Posted by spooneybarger
Sun, 03 May 2009 22:18:00 GMT
The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.
He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.
Polanco looked at the cuts and said they “were weak,” according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. “Carve deeper next time,” he was said to have told the boy.
“Look,” Polanco allegedly said, “you can’t even kill yourself.”
The boy’s classmates joined in, with one advising how to cut a main artery, according to the witnesses.
“See,” Polanco was quoted as saying, “even he knows how to commit suicide better than you.”
The Los Angeles school board, citing Polanco’s poor judgment, voted to fire him.
But Polanco, who contended that he had been misunderstood, kept his job. A little-known review commission overruled the board, saying that although the teacher had made the statements, he had meant no harm.
It’s remarkably difficult to fire a tenured public school teacher in California, a Times investigation has found. The path can be laborious and labyrinthine, in some cases involving years of investigation, union grievances, administrative appeals, court challenges and re-hearings.
Posted by spooneybarger
Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:28:00 GMT
Gordon Ramsay is serving customers ready-meals which are prepared in a London ‘food factory’ and sold with a mark-up of 586 per cent, it emerged today.
Posted by spooneybarger
Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:50:00 GMT
bend over, facebook has a present…
Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.
Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.
Posted by spooneybarger
Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:57:00 GMT
When the mainstream media first announced Barack Obama’s “victory” in keeping his BlackBerry, the focus was on the security of the device, and keeping the U.S. president’s e-mail communications private from spies and hackers.
The news coverage and analysis by armchair security experts thus far has failed to focus on the real threat: attacks against President Obama’s location privacy, and the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president’s real-time physical location.
Posted by spooneybarger
Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:20:00 GMT
Anyone who has failed to keep track of a winning lottery ticket for all of 12 months may want to consider the efforts of 39 bondholders who have been safekeeping valuable, tissue-thin, New York City securities since shortly after the Civil War.
Next month, one of the bonds, issued in 1868 and thought to be one of the oldest active municipal bonds in the country, will come due. And the city stands ready to retire the debt incurred when Winston Churchill’s grandfather came up with the idea of building a road to one of the nation’s first racetracks, which he had opened in what is now the Bronx.
For 135 years, New York City has been dutifully paying 7 percent annual interest on the bonds, which financed construction of the road. On March 1, the owner of one of them is entitled to come forward and collect its face value: $1,000.
Posted by spooneybarger
Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:16:00 GMT
Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island,” is serving six months’ unsupervised probation after allegedly being caught with marijuana in her car.
