Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalMissouri School District Sued After Banning Book For Mentioning Gender Identity
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Missouri on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against a school district that banned a book with a nonbinary character from elementary schools after a single parent complained.
The Independence School District (ISD) in Independence, Missouri, a city of 120,000 about 10 miles away from Kansas City, banned “Cats vs. Robots #1: This is War” by Lewis Peterson and Margaret Stohl, which has three pages describing a nonbinary character. The board has repeatedly said there is no way to appeal or reverse the ban.
The lawsuit alleges that the district’s policy of removing books without notice or opportunity to appeal violates students’ rights to free speech and due process. It is asking the district to revoke this policy.
“Equity in our education system is further eroded when the government sets policies that require challenged books to automatically be pulled from shelves without notice or an opportunity to appeal the final decision, denying students their First Amendment and Due Process rights,” Gillian Wilcox, the deputy director for litigation at the ACLU of Missouri, said in a statement.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/missouri-school-book-ban_n_639222fce4b019c696202fe9
ONE parent? Seriously? 
Motive Revealed in Murdaugh's Alleged Murder of Wife and Son
After months of speculation, South Carolina prosecutors are showing how they plan to prove that Alex Murdaugh murdered his wife and child last June—a crime they say was a deliberate attempt to turn the spotlight away from his financial ruin.
Part of a motion filed Thursday by the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office doubled down on what was already known: That the former attorney allegedly engaged in a 15-year scheme to swindle upwards of $8.7 million away from his clients and law firm in an attempt to maintain his “fantasy persona of wealth, respectability, and prominence alive.”
But the document went on to connect the dots in a sprawling family and community murder saga for the first time.
Faced with “a perfect storm that was going to expose the real Alex Murdaugh to the world—and which would mean facing real accountability for his life,” prosecutors allege that the disgraced scion murdered his 52-year-old wife Margaret and his 22-year-old son Paul on Jun 7, 2021, to change the narrative and gain sympathy.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/alex-murdaugh-allegedly-murdered-his-wife-and-son-to-distract-from-his-financial-problems?ref=home
verrrrrry interesting.......und sleazy, as Arte Johnson might have said.
Meet the 18-year-old who just became the youngest Black mayor in the country
An 18-year-old college freshman is now the youngest Black mayor in U.S. history after beating out his opponent for the position in a small Arkansas town.
Jaylen Smith, a recent graduate of Earle High School, said although he was “confident” he’d win the runoff election Tuesday, he was still shocked when he received news of the victory. He will be the mayor of Earle, a town of just under 2,000 people, according to 2020 census data, near Memphis, Tennessee.
“I felt so grateful! I had the craziest facial reaction when I won! It was such a blessing,” Smith told NBC News, adding that his parents are proud of him and have supported his campaign “every step of the way.”
Smith received 218 votes while his opponent, Nemi Matthews Sr., won 139, according to The Hill. Smith said he decided to run for mayor at the start of his senior year, with the encouragement of his fellow student government association members. He said he fully understands the historic significance of his win. “It feels awesome. Generations and generations of people will read about this historical moment,” he said.
Now, as mayor-elect, Smith said he plans to focus on transportation, public safety and bringing a major grocery store to the city. Increasing residents’ access to food sources is a cause Smith said he’s especially passionate about.
“We had one a long time ago, but it closed,” Smith lamented about the now-closed grocery store. “Our seniors don’t have transportation to get to and from West Memphis to get food. So it would be better to have a grocery store here in town.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/meet-18-year-old-just-became-youngest-black-mayor-country-rcna60644
Congratulations, young man! Proud of you!
Study: Federal magistrates, prosecutors misunderstand US bail law
A Reagan-era law, passed by Congress nearly four decades ago to change the federal bail system in order to address concerns over rising crime committed by arrestees released pending trial, has been wildly misunderstood and misapplied by the federal court system's magistrate judges, prosecutors, public defenders and probation officers, a new two-year national study finds.
The unprecedented look at federal pretrial detention conducted by the University of Chicago Law School's Federal Criminal Justice Clinic paints a portrait of a judicial system that has neglected the rights of especially poor arrestees and people of color. Such systemic problems are largely the result of what judges and advocates told USA TODAY is a poorly-written, war-on-drugs-era statute known as the Bail Reform Act of 1984, an over reliance on prosecutorial discretion, and risk-averse magistrate judges and federal defenders.
According to the report, in 1983, less than 24% of arrestees were jailed pretrial. By 2019, nearly 75% of them were.
As of June 30, nearly 118,000 people were federally jailed pretrial, according to federal courts data. At the same time, the amount of time presumably innocent people spent locked up awaiting trial has also increased nearly sevenfold, the report found, from an average of less than two months in jail in 1985 to nearly a year now.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/07/federal-judges-misapply-bail-law-illegally-jail-arrestees-study-says/10798949002/
Scientists Discover Oldest DNA Ever, Revealing 2 Million-Year-Old Lost World
In a major breakthrough for genetic research, scientists have recovered what is by far the oldest DNA to date. The 2-million-year-old DNA reveals an unprecedented glimpse of a unique Ice Age ecosystem that existed long ago, while also offering an eerie preview of our own future in a warming world, reports a new study.
The discovery of this lost world is based on environmental eDNA (eDNA), a mishmash of genetic detritus that represents an entire habitat, extracted from Kap København Formation, a fossil bed that sits in a polar desert in Northern Greenland. The frozen landscape and mineral conditions at the site contributed to the unrivaled preservation of this genetic material, which is a full million years older than the next oldest DNA, found in a mammoth tooth.
Since 2006, researchers led by Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge, have meticulously worked to collect and analyze samples from Kap København. Now, the team unveils a “reconstructed ecosystem [that] has no modern analogue,” home to mastodons, reindeer, geese, horseshoe crabs, corals, and other lifeforms that lived around an open boreal forest that flourished when this part of Greenland was 11 to 19°C warmer than it is today, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.
“It was super exciting when we recovered the DNA of a very different ecosystem,” Willerslev said in a press briefing on Tuesday that included several other study co-authors. “Obviously, it's important that we can go much further back in time, but it's also the time we can go back to. This is a time where it was significantly warmer” and featured “a climate which is very similar to what we expect to face with global warming.”
“Therefore, of course it gives some kind of idea or impression of how nature can respond to increasing temperatures,” he continued. “The great surprise is that this ecosystem that we see is an ecosystem with no modern analogue. It's a mixture between Arctic and temperate species and you don’t see that anywhere today.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88q3xa/scientists-discover-oldest-dna-ever-revealing-2-million-year-old-lost-world
This is so cool I can't even begin to process it.
Loudoun schools should have prevented sexual assault, grand jury report finds
Just one day after a grand jury found the Loudoun County school district to bear “the brunt of the blame” in the sexual assault of a high school student last year, Loudoun County Superintendent Scott Ziegler was fired Tuesday night, according to WJLA sources.
Ziegler was reportedly fired Tuesday night in a closed-door meeting after a number of parents complained about his performance to the school board. Loudoun County parents told WJLA they were “alarmed about how Ziegler and school administrators handled two sexual assaults that happened at two different schools last year.”
A special grand jury investigation report released Monday, Dec. 5 accused school leaders of practicing “intentional institutional amnesia” and perpetuating a “culture of fear” to prevent key details from becoming public. It also said officials “failed at every juncture” to prevent the situation from escalating.
The grand jury claimed Ziegler lied during a June 2021 school board meeting when he said he didn’t know about any record of assaults that had occurred in the school’s restrooms. The jury cited internal emails that suggested otherwise.
“We believe that throughout this ordeal LCPS administrators were looking out for their own interests instead of the best interest of LCPS. This invariably led to a stunning lack of openness, transparency, and accountability,” the report stated.
https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/loudoun-schools-should-have-prevented-sexual-assault-grand-jury-report-finds/
Deion Sanders' Rocky Mountain high is a low for Black colleges
Say this much for Deion Sanders: He didn’t slink away under cover of darkness, quiet quit on the season or reach for another dog-eared page from the opportunist’s playbook.
Instead, the 55-year-old coach gathered up his Jackson State Tigers players one last time over the weekend and told them that, indeed, the breaking news was true – that the University of Colorado had hired him away. “It’s not about a bag,” he told the somber room. “I’ve been making money a long time and ain’t nowhere near broke. It is about an opportunity.”
As good ol’ fashion Mississippi scandals go, only the case swirling around Brett Favre tops this. Coach Prime, as he redubbed himself, is a singular phenomenon in sports, the great athlete who is also a great coach. He talks a good game too – rhyming like a preacher, turning podiums into pulpits, framing his coaching odyssey as a divine calling. “Usually, a coach is elevated or terminated,” he said of his new position in Colorado. If he sounds like a cleric, that’s because it’s one of many positions Sanders has occupied in his dizzyingly peripatetic career.
When Sanders arrived at Jackson in the fall of 2020, he didn’t just vow to turn around a program that had been a loser for much of the past decade. He said he’d flip the field for historically black colleges and universities to make “HBCUs” like Jackson State as attractive as predominantly white institutions like Colorado. And he was promising the moon at a time when the social justice movement had turned HBCUs into a cause for reparations.
And once again Sanders walked the talk, losing just five games out of 32, setting scoring records and selling out stadiums all the while. He lured away top recruits (starting with his quarterback son, Shedeur), prompted fellow NFL alums Eddie George and Hue Jackson to join him in the HBCU coaching ranks. He had ESPN covering the Tigers with intensity that’s typically reserved for the Dallas Cowboys or the Alabama Crimson Tide.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/dec/06/deion-sanders-jackson-state-colorado-hbcus-college-football
I could be wrong, but I think Neon Deion just made the biggest mistake of his career.
Deion Sanders' Rocky Mountain high is a low for Black colleges
Say this much for Deion Sanders: He didn’t slink away under cover of darkness, quiet quit on the season or reach for another dog-eared page from the opportunist’s playbook.
Instead, the 55-year-old coach gathered up his Jackson State Tigers players one last time over the weekend and told them that, indeed, the breaking news was true – that the University of Colorado had hired him away. “It’s not about a bag,” he told the somber room. “I’ve been making money a long time and ain’t nowhere near broke. It is about an opportunity.”
As good ol’ fashion Mississippi scandals go, only the case swirling around Brett Favre tops this. Coach Prime, as he redubbed himself, is a singular phenomenon in sports, the great athlete who is also a great coach. He talks a good game too – rhyming like a preacher, turning podiums into pulpits, framing his coaching odyssey as a divine calling. “Usually, a coach is elevated or terminated,” he said of his new position in Colorado. If he sounds like a cleric, that’s because it’s one of many positions Sanders has occupied in his dizzyingly peripatetic career.
When Sanders arrived at Jackson in the fall of 2020, he didn’t just vow to turn around a program that had been a loser for much of the past decade. He said he’d flip the field for historically black colleges and universities to make “HBCUs” like Jackson State as attractive as predominantly white institutions like Colorado. And he was promising the moon at a time when the social justice movement had turned HBCUs into a cause for reparations.
And once again Sanders walked the talk, losing just five games out of 32, setting scoring records and selling out stadiums all the while. He lured away top recruits (starting with his quarterback son, Shedeur), prompted fellow NFL alums Eddie George and Hue Jackson to join him in the HBCU coaching ranks. He had ESPN covering the Tigers with intensity that’s typically reserved for the Dallas Cowboys or the Alabama Crimson Tide.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/dec/06/deion-sanders-jackson-state-colorado-hbcus-college-football
I could be wrong, but I think Neon Deion just made the biggest mistake of his career.
Heroic Georgia dog fights off coyote pack preying on flock of sheep
If anyone has earned the title of very good boy, it’s Casper, a 20-month-old Great Pyrenees from Decatur, Georgia, who single-handedly killed eight coyotes trying to prey on his owner’s sheep.
Last week, a pack of 11 coyotes attacked the flock of farmer John Wierwiller, according to a report from a local television station, WAGA-TV. Casper defended the sheep furiously in a fight that left some of his skin and part of his tail torn off, Wierwiller said.
The heroic sheepdog killed eight of the coyotes and chased the three remaining off the field of battle, but he didn’t immediately come home, so Wierwiller put out a call for help in finding Casper on social media, CBS News reported. Two days later, Casper returned on his own to the household for which he was willing to put his life on the line.
“He was kinda looking at me like, ‘Boss, stop looking at how bad I look, just take care of me,’” Wierwiller said. “It looked like a coyote grabbed his skin and peeled it right off.”
Wierwiller wrote on Facebook that he took Casper to emergency veterinarians in critical condition. The vets closed an open neck wound, and were hopeful that treatment would limit the potential for infection.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/dec/06/casper-georgia-dog-protects-sheep-coyotes
Give that pupper a steak!
What we know about the attack on two North Carolina power substations
A gunfire attack on two electrical substations in rural North Carolina has left tens of thousands of people without power, schools closed, a curfew imposed, and authorities investigating what they say was an intentional, criminal attack.
As the outages continued into Monday, questions persisted about who carried out the attack and what could have been their motive in knocking out power to Moore County and its 100,000 residents.
"What happened here Saturday night was a criminal act, and federal, state and local law enforcement are actively working to bring those responsible to justice," said Gov. Roy Cooper at a Monday press conference.
"Protecting critical infrastructure like our power system must be a top priority. This kind of attack raises a new level of threat," Cooper said. "We will be evaluating ways to work with our utility providers and our state and federal officials to make sure that we harden our infrastructure where that's necessary and work to prevent future damage."
The outage began shortly after 7 p.m. Saturday night near Carthage, N.C., and soon spread to encompass the majority of the county. The damage to the substations could run into the millions of dollars, officials said. About 35,000 customers remained without power Monday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us, and the utility company warned that outages could last through Thursday.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/05/1140775417/north-carolina-substation-attack-what-we-know
IOW, not a damn thing
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