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According to the most recent federal data available, 43 percent of public schools had a full- or part-time security officer or police officer on site during the 2013-14 school year.
"School safety and design experts say the most important steps schools can take are controlling access to classrooms, increasing visibility, and ensuring that staff members are trained and prepared for possible intruders," I wrote after the South Carolina shooting. "The district said such measures prevented Wednesday's...
After reports surfaced earlier this week, CNN finally announced Jeff Zucker as its new president on Thursday, which means everyone can officially start telling him how to fix things. We have three words (the O' counts): Soledad O'Brien.
Starting Point Is Doing Well (relatively): "Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien had its best month since launching in January, growing double digits from a year ago. In total viewers the morning program was up +36% (393k vs. 290k) and increased 44% in the key demo 25-54 (164k vs. 114k)," reports CNN on CNN's own rating...
She Does a Little Thing Called Journalism: Soledad spearing various members of the GOP has turned into a meme. Like, remember when she took apart John Sununu on Obamacare vs. Romney's health plan?
This, too, is decidedly a good thing. If there's anything to glean from Fox News's and MSNBC's dominance it's that viewers are gravitating toward partisan commentary. Getting hated on by at least one side is good!
It may not have been raised by the Bar Association, but we doubt public trust in the judiciary has been left untouched by everything that has been heard in the last 10 days. Αll interested parties issued written announcements last week aimed at defending themselves as well as questioning the accuracy of the various acc...
The attorney-general’s intervention would have reinforced all the negative views and suspicions sparked by his brother’s allegations. After all, Clerides was a supreme court judge himself and his attack on former colleagues carried more weight and gave legitimacy to his brother’s allegations that the judges had dismiss...
Meanwhile, the Chrysafinis & Polyviou law office, which represents the Bank of Cyprus and where the judges’ offspring were employed, also slammed the allegations, describing them as “groundless, in bad faith and in the final analysis, defamatory and absolutely unacceptable”.
The moral superiority and arrogance that marked these responses were symptomatic of a wider problem: judges and certain lawyers believe they are irreproachable and any questioning of their professional behaviour is absolutely unacceptable. They have no interest in how their actions are perceived by the public from whom...
Yet the facts presented cannot be dismissed so lightly. Two judges on the five-bench appeal court that overturned the guilty verdict against the bank and its executives had offspring working for the C&P law office, while a third judge’s wife was employed by one of the other defence attorneys. In the other appeal, the p...
For justice to be seen to be done, these judges should have recused themselves from the cases, but because the law does not oblige them to do so, they asked the prosecution lawyers to decide. Having declared their relatives’ employment at the law offices of the defence lawyers, they asked if the prosecution objected to...
There does not need to be a law for judges to recuse themselves from cases in which there is the slightest possibility of conflict of interest. This should be done routinely by the judge without asking the attorneys’ view, because the assumption a judge will never succumb to human weakness that would undermine the cour...
Supreme court president Myron Nikolatos may well have done nothing wrong as he has been insisting, but nobody would have been able to say a single word against him if he had recused himself from the Bank of Cyprus appeal case, instead of being instrumental in the bank’s and an executive’s acquittals. Nobody is going to...
All the controversy currently surrounding the judiciary could have been avoided if judges were capable of showing a little professional humility and recusing themselves when there was the slightest hint of conflict of interest.
A little self-regulation – and less arrogance – would have solved the problem, but the supreme court was not prepared to do this and now its trustworthiness and moral authority are being questioned by everyone.
That judges are now being viewed as no better than politicians in the professional ethics stakes might be unfair. But they only have themselves to blame.
The Marathon Bombings, Privacy and the Question "Why?"
One thing is clear amidst the shower of confusion and contradiction that bathes the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing: the legal and technological structure of a police state is in place and can be quickly activated. As if on cue, while the hunt for the bombers was ongoing, the House of Representatives obligingl...
It wasn’t a good week for freedom.
Images are always important. They frame our memories and memory is the sketch artist of our consciousness. Here’s an image. Boston — an enduring symbol of this country’s democracy, intellectual pursuit and progressive thinking — is deserted because the government won’t let people come out of their homes. Armoured vehic...
We’re not yet in a police state but we can be with a single command. Last week demonstrated that.
Bradley Manning Update: How to Commit Espionage Without Trying!
If it wasn’t clear up to now, it was made crystal clear last week. The co-defendent in the Bradley Manning trial is the Internet itself.
In one of the case’s most disturbing pre-trial hearings, Judge Col. Denise Lind ruled last week that prosecutors can offer as evidence files seized from Osama Bin Laden’s computer as well as the testimony of a Navy Seal, part of the Bin Laden assasination team, who found them. His identity will not be revealed and the ...
The ruling is important not only because it shows the almost unimaginable absurdity of the Manning case but because it reveals the true intent of the Obama Administration in pursuing it.
The hearing was about the “standard of proof” necessary to prove two charges: espionage and aiding the enemy. It also took up what kinds of evidence would be permitted in the trial to support those charges.
According to the prosecutors, Manning committed espionage and aided the enemy by giving them important intelligence and he did that by putting it on the Internet. That’s it; that’s the crime. His real intent is irrelevant. The government is arguing that, if you put something on the Internet that some nefarious rascal d...
Judge Lind ruled that to prove “espionage” you have to show that the defendent actually intended for this material to be read by the enemy; that was a defeat for the prosecution. But, she ruled, the government can pursue its theory to support the “aiding the enemy” charge.
One up and one down for Pvt. Manning. Two down for the rest of us. The Judge’s decision is important for the trial but what’s most important for all of us is what the Obama Admininstration is thinking and doing. It’s now clear that the Administration believes that these very same acts and standards apply to both crimes...
Last week the governments of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom fired a warning shot at Google and it appears they’re reloading the gun with real ammunition.
These government/corporation tiffs are frequent and their rhetorical fire normally turns into quickly dissipated smoke. This one could be different. It comes at a time when the world’s powerful are trying to decide how much privacy we people will have and what the term privacy actually means, and this squabble’s outcom...
But there’s something deeper here that transcends this conflict. Privacy is, in fact, a core component of democracy and any infringement on complete privacy is an obscene attack on the possibility of having a free and democratic society. As important as the outcome of this show-down might be, the most important and fri...
Sometimes a story breaks that touches so many issues that one is left with mouth agape. The recent news involving technology “evangelist” Adria Richards is one such story and it’s burning across all kinds of media and cutting an intense divide within the techie community. It’s about sexism, racism, techie culture, corp...
Adria Richards is a prominent writer and consultant within the technology industry. She’s not a household name in the wider world but she’s known within that demi-universe that works for technology companies, attends conferences and workshops, and posts on message boards.
It was at a conference that this controversy began.
Richards, working for an email service company called SendGrid, was attending PyCon, a huge conference dedicated to the programming language Python and to issues and matters related to it. Python is one of several computer coding languages people use to tell software what to do. It’s a mature, powerful and challenging ...
The short version of the story is that during a plenary session she was attending Richards overheard what she thought were sexual jokes being made by some men sitting behind her. By all accounts, they were silly “double entendre” jokes about “dongles” and “forking the repo” — widely used technical terms for a device (a...
The Real Threat is Already Happening!
Last week, a top U.S. government intelligence official named James Clapper warned Congress that the threat of somebody using the Internet to attack the United States is “even more pressing than an attack by global terrorist networks”. At about the same time, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, an...
This, as they say, means war.
Clapper issued his melodramatic assessment during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee. As Director of National Intelligence, he testified jointly with the heads of the CIA and FBI as part of their annual “Threat To the Nation” assessment report.
While undoubtedly important, these “threat assessment” appearances are usually a substitute for sleeping pills. The panel of Intelligence honchos parades out a list of “threats” ranked by a combination of potential harm and probability of attack. Since they began giving this report (shortly after 9/11), “Islamic fundam...
But Clapper’s ranking of “cyber terrorism” as the number one threat would wake up Rip Van Winkle.
“Attacks, which might involve cyber and financial weapons, can be deniable and unattributable,” he intoned. “Destruction can be invisible, latent and progressive.” After probably provoking a skipped heartbeat in a Senator or two, he added that he didn’t think any major attack of this type was imminent or even feasible ...
So why use such “end of the world” rhetoric to make a unfeasible threat number one?
The recent order by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, forbidding Yahoo employees from doing their Yahoo work at home, might seem justified. After all, companies tell their employees what to do and Mayer might have good reasons for this edict. But the memo and its fallout raise serious and significant questions about technology,...
Major technology corporations like Yahoo control so much of the information we have and how we exchange it that their policies find their way into our lives and help define our culture. This decision is a retrenchment in the collaborative way we work and the role of women in that collaboration. Its ironic that a woman ...
For many of us, life is like walking on a street of uneven pavement; at some point, you’re certain to stumble and fall. Marissa Mayer, in her 37 years of life, appears to have found an alternate route. Her profile reads like a fairy tale filled with corporate castles and technological blessings, begging the observer to...
If it wasn’t so harmful, it would be funny: a marketing battle between the two technology giants Microsoft and Google over who lacks integrity and is exploitative. It’s been going on for a while and with every thrust and block the thing becomes more grotesque and more revealing.
First, by way of introduction, well…you don’t need an introduction.
If you’re using Windows, your computer lives Microsoft. If you don’t, you use a Microsoft product (like Word or some smaller program you don’t notice on your desktop) or someone sends you stuff using one. You can’t escape MicrosSoft if you use a computer.
Google is to your Internet life what Microsoft is to your workspace. Even if you don’t use its increasingly popular Gmail program, you have used Google Search at some point. So prominent is our use of this resource that, in English, “google it” is now an accepted phrase. No, there is no Google-less life in this country...
So a marketing duel between these two fills the air with the very loud clanging of the very large swords.
In the madness of our media-fed consciousness, the greatest threat to an informative news story is time. Given enough time, and the dysfunctional and disinformative way the mainstream media cover news, even the most important and revealing story quickly dies out.
That is, unless we who use alternative media keep that story alive.
So it is with the death of the remarkable technologist Aaron Swartz. It’s been only a month since Aaron apparently killed himself in his apartment here in Brooklyn and yet the story has pretty much disappeared from mainstream news. The threat is not only that the legacy of this remarkable young technologist will also d...
During the brief spasm of mainstream coverage, the most prominent line being circulated was that he was a casualty of the sloppiness, pettiness and bullying of a federal government that went too far in its prosecution of him. The truth is that Aaron Swartz was a target of a deliberately vicious, sadistic government cam...
To talk that talk, it’s important to be clear about what actually happened.
After a sun-filled Friday, clouds will start to build in from the southwest through the evening hours. Temperatures overnight will drop to near freezing south, near 30 north.
As early as Saturday morning, flurries will start to fall in western VT and the higher elevations of western Mass, including the Berkshires. As this system continues to move from west to east, winds will shift out of the southwest, ushering in warmer temperatures, allowing most of the precipitation to fall as rain as t...
However, as early as halftime, showers should be on their way out. Between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. is when the back edge of the rain will clear the area and move farther off the coast. As much as a quarter to a half an inch of rain is expected into southern New England with a dusting to a few inches of snow in northern Vermo...
For you Christmas Eve and Hanukkah plans, skies will clear overnight with temperatures dropping just below freezing, so we could see some patches of black ice, so be careful on your travels Saturday evening into Sunday morning. Christmas Day brings plenty of sunshine with high temperatures much more seasonable for this...
As everyone gets back to work after the holiday weekend, Monday starts off dry with another system knocking on our doorsteps by the evening. Tuesday brings a slight warm-up before a cool-down for Wednesday. Then, Thursday brings another round of rain/snow showers, dry out Friday before we get ready for the new year. Ne...
Angela Bassett, Jennifer Lopez, producers Lauren Shuler Donner and Gale Anne Hurd, director Mimi Leder and PMK/HBH publicist Catherine Olim are among those who will serve as judges for the LMN Student Filmmaker Competition. The nationwide contest is being launched by Lifetime Movie Network, The Hollywood Reporter, New ...
The competition, which will honor outstanding short films produced by female film students from throughout the country, is open to all female film students, including executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors. The intention is to "encourage and discover the next generation of female filmmake...
"In 2005, women comprised 17% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors working on the top 250 domestic-grossing films," LMN executive vp and GM Louise Henry Bryson said. "This is the same percentage of women employed in these roles in 1998. Through this competition, we hop...
In addition to the aforementioned judges, a representative from each of the partner organizations also will serve as judges.
The first- and second-place winners will have the opportunity to screen their films at a special program curated by NYWIFT at the 2007 Hamptons International Film Festival in October and be honored with a reception afterward. They also will be invited to attend the 2007 Women in Entertainment Power 100 Breakfast hosted...
The winning films will be featured on-air on LMN and will be shown in their entirety on LMN's Web site. Additionally, the first- and second-place winners as well as two runners-up will receive cash prizes and have the opportunity to meet with representatives of WMA.
"Throughout the history of film, there have been women making their mark behind the camera, but not in numbers commensurate with their representation in other areas of the business," THR vp and executive editor Paula Parisi said. "We're proud to be part of Lifetime's efforts to bring more talented women to the attentio...
The competition runs through July 16, with the winners to be announced in October. For more information, visit LMN.tv/studentfilmmakers.
Separately on Tuesday, the recipients of the 2007 Women in Film Foundation's Film Finishing Fund were announced. The fund supports filmmakers "who make thoughtful and provocative films by or about women" with cash awards ranging from $1,000-$5,000.
This year's honorees are Leyla Leidecker, Cynthia Wade, Becky Smith, Ermena Vinluan, Beth Murphy, Lulu Fries'dat, Ginny Martin, Nicole Quinn, Ilana Trachtman and Linda Pattillo.
Our practice offers designed clinical nutrition, massage therapy, chiropractic and reflexology. The focus is on maintaining and regaining health naturally, safely and painlessly utilizing chiropractic adjustments, organic whole food nutrition and herbal and homeopathic remedies and massage therapy. Our goal is to promo...
The remains of a sperm whale that washed ashore in one of Montevideo's beaches were finally hauled in a truck for burial in a municipal dump where a huge hole was drilled for the 16 meters long cetacean.
The dead sperm whale weighing an estimated 25 tons and normally at home in deep waters, was found Saturday on the Carrasco beach, an upper class area of Uruguay's capital. Officials said the whale showed no signs of injuries but samples were taken of some of the organs for forensic studies.
During two days navy and municipal workers with heavy equipment tried to remove the whale from the shore to dry sand from where on Monday she finally was lifted with a crane, after much work to a truck.
Over the weekend hundreds of curious onlookers gathered to look and picture the marine mammal despite an overpowering smell hanging over the beach in the residential neighborhood.
Apparently it was a male, thirty years old. The sperm whale is the largest of the toothed whales and lives on average sixty years according to officials from Uruguay's fisheries department, Dinara.
The sperm whale are large, they rarely come to the coast since they are deep water mammals. I have no memory of other sperm whales shoring in Montevideo. I believe there are no records either said marine biologist Rodrigo García director of the Organization for the Conservation of Cetaceans, OCC.
Garcia added that these samples have been very much hunted in the past because they have 'espermaceti' in their heads, which is rich in oil, fatty acids and wax.
As to the causes of death, Garcia said there were no evidence of injuries or blows which could give us an idea. But we must take into account that these animals are extremely acoustic, such as dolphins, and are most sensitive to any impact of this kind.
Southern right whales are common along the Uruguayan Atlantic coast from July to October and easily sighted as they wonder close to the shore.
Tags: Montevideo, sperm whale, Uruguay, whales.
Send it to Nigeria to help with the fish exports!
Virginia Wimmer defrauded five people of thousands of dollars, Suffolk County police said.
The Craigslist ad listed a room for rent in Bayport for $600 a month. The landlady even offered a signed receipt for the security deposit.
But before people could move in, the landlady's excuses began. The room wasn't ready. It was no longer available. And she refused to return the prospective renters' deposits, police said.
Virginia Wimmer, 40, pulled the scam again and again, Suffolk police said on Tuesday, raking in more than $3,000 from at least five prospective renters in the past year.
Police arrested Wimmer, of Bayport, on Monday, charging her with felony first-degree scheme to defraud, authorities said.
Wimmer also goes by the name Virginia Montemurro, according to police., In 2017, she left her job as a math teacher at Connetquot High School in Bohemia after 18 years, school officials said.
According to the court complaint, Wimmer admitted that regarding her prospective renters, she "never rented the room or returned their money."
Wimmer's attorney, Peter Mayer, responded on Tuesday to the statement saying, "That's what they said she said. She pled not guilty today."
Wimmer was arraigned Tuesday in First District Court in Central Islip, and bail was set at $5,000 cash or $10,000 bond.
Jessica Oscarsson said she thought something was suspicious when she put down a $600 cash deposit in April to rent a room from Wimmer and an extra $100 to paint it.
"She didn't ask me any questions … where I worked, no proof of income, no references," said Oscarsson, 29, of Shirley.
But Oscarsson and her fiancee were expecting a baby soon, and they needed to find a place quickly. Then came several disagreements with Wimmer, Oscarsson said, and a strange late-night phone call from the landlady asking for more money. Weeks went by, Oscarsson said, until she realized Wimmer was not going to rent her ...
So she spoke to the Suffolk County police. They told her the disagreement with Wimmer was a civil matter but when Oscarsson asked if police would investigate if there were more victims, they replied yes, she said.
Next, she took to social media, posting her story on Facebook and asking for more victims to come forward. A handful did but others chose not to, she said.

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