Eideard

An eighth-grade student in North Carolina was suspended for 55 days for showing another boy a bag of oregano and claiming it was marijuana, his family said.

“It was just a joke,” the boy’s mother told FoxNews.com. “He’s embarrassed that it’s turned into such a big issue. He’s actually said he doesn’t know why he did it. But he didn’t have an illegal substance to begin with.”

The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group best known for defending the right to religious expression, has taken up the boy’s cause. John Whitehead, the institute’s president, said the suspension may violate the boy’s constitutional rights…

Under Union County Public Schools policy, students can be suspended for 10 days for possession of a real or counterfeit drug with an additional 45 days possible if the student’s behavior was egregious. Whitehead argues that oregano is clearly not an illegal drug, and the school district does not define counterfeit drugs.

Any schools left in this nation that [a] concentrate on education instead of being nannies – and [b] have a sense of humor?

The family of an HIV-positive boy sued a boarding school in Hershey, Pennsylvania after it denied admission to the 13-year-old citing safety concerns…

HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus, is medical condition that undermines the body’s immune system and can make those infected susceptible to lethal cancers and infections. HIV is a precursor to AIDS, or the Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a pandemic which has killed roughly 25 million people since its discovery in the early 1980s…

…HIV is not transmitted by day-to-day casual contact, such as through shaking hands or a casual kiss. The CDC said it is not possible to become infected from a toilet seat, a drinking fountain, a door knob, dishes, drinking glasses, food, or pets…

The child’s attorneys at the non-profit AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania sought to compare the school’s actions to the Ryan White case, in which an HIV-positive Indiana boy was expelled from middle school in the 1980s because of the infection. That case led to the Ryan White Care Act of 1990.

Federal and state laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of a real or perceived disability, including having HIV, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education…

“Like Ryan White, this young man is a motivated, intelligent kid who poses no health risk to other students, but is being denied an educational opportunity because of ignorance and fear about HIV and AIDS,” said AIDS Law Project Executive Director Ronda B. Goldfein, who is representing the boy and his mother in the lawsuit.

The boy “is an honor roll student and an avid athlete” who controls his HIV through a regimen of medication that does not impact his school schedule, according to the lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia.

The school, which was founded by industrialist Milton S. Hershey in 1909 to care for orphans, said their case is different because it is a boarding school “where children live in homes with 10 to 12 other students” on its campus “24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” McNamara said.

Ignorance, as usual, is not bliss. It is a cause and vector for backwards decisions made by foolish people who haven’t a clue – in this case – about the lack of danger or infection from someone infected by HIV. They have no understanding of the difference between HIV and AIDs. They have no perception of the effectiveness of today’s medications in controlling the effect on someone with the ailment in their system.

A student walks past riot police with paint-spattered shields during a demonstration in Bogota, Colombia

Did you think you live in the Free World?

An Oxford University student claims he was mistaken for a suicide bomber by police as he jogged around the city’s streets.

The suspect was ordered to stop running, put his hands in the air and drop everything in his hands as sub-machine guns were trained on his body. The officers carefully took off the heavily padded vest and searched it, looking for explosives and a detonator.

However, they found the Oxford University PhD student was wearing a training vest loaded with weights for added resistance when running…

Goudarz Karimi said: “They told me ‘Stop! Stop! Put your hands in the air. Drop everything you have…’

“They said they had a report of someone walking in a bomb suit. There were police cars and the street was blocked…”

He said that when they realised it was an exercise vest they advised him to remove it to prevent any another call from a terrified member of the public…

He said he feared his ethnic origin had sparked the concerns. “I am 100 per cent sure that if I was blond with Caucasian skin type, nobody would have noticed and said anything about it…

Superintendent Amanda Pearson, of Thames Valley Police, said: “Police received a call from a member of the public who was concerned about a man walking in Southfield Road, with what he thought was a vest which may have contained explosives…

“In order to stop any further calls from members of the public, the gentleman was asked to put his coat on, which he agreed to do.

“There was no legal requirement for the gentleman to put on his jacket and he did not have to do so.”

Yes, can you imagine how this would have gone, say, in Dallas or Chicago? Har.

You can buy it at Amazon, too

A student who was arrested and held for seven days after downloading the al-Qaida training manual as part of his university research into terrorist tactics has received £20,000 in compensation and an apology from the police for being stopped and searched.

Rizwaan Sabir, 26, was studying for a master’s at the University of Nottingham in 2008 when he was detained under the Terrorism Act and accused of downloading the material for illegal use. He was arrested on 14 May after the document was found on an administrator’s computer by a member of staff.

Sabir had asked the administrator, Hisham Yezza, to print out the 140-page manual as they were collaborating on research…As soon as he was made aware of the situation, one of Sabir’s supervisors confirmed that the manual – which he had downloaded from a US government website and which can be bought at WH Smith – was relevant to his research.

After seven days and six nights in custody, he was released without charge or apology. But his lawyers later discovered Nottinghamshire police were holding an intelligence file on him, which contained false information about him and wrongly claimed he had been convicted of a terrorist offence.

…The force settled last week, paying Sabir £20,000 compensation and covering his legal fees. It apologised to Sabir for a stop and search on 4 February 2010 and agreed to delete the inaccurate intelligence information.

Sabir, now a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde researching domestic UK counter-terrorism policy, told the Guardian he was delighted at the settlement…

His solicitor, Michael Oswald of Bhatt Murphy, said the case showed how the so-called “war on terror” had perverted the rule of law over recent years.

“Clearly, the police have a difficult and important job to do in their counter-terrorism role, however, they must nonetheless act within the law and must be held to account when they do not,” he said. “Through his remarkable effort and fierce determination over the last three years, Mr Sabir has been able to do that in this case. This result is nothing more than the clear vindication that he is entitled to.”

RTFA if you feel a need to [1] read a few more details provided by Mr. Sabir; [2] you enjoy reading boilerplate bullshit rationales from police departments and incompetent university administrators.

After reports that some college students in southern China’s Guangdong Province sold their sperm to buy the latest version of the tablet computer, comes a tragic tale of a 17-year-old boy in the eastern Anhui Province who sold his kidney to buy an iPad 2.

The student, surnamed Zheng, got 22,000 yuan (US$3,393) for selling one of his kidneys. But it was a decision he soon came to regret as his health is deteriorating, Shenzhen Satellite TV reported…

On April 28, Zheng went to Chenzhou City in neighboring Hunan Province to have the kidney removed in a surgery arranged by the broker…

When he returned home with an iPad 2 and an iPhone, his furious mother contacted the police. But they could not locate the broker and his cellphone was always powered off, the TV report said.

It turned out that the Chenzhou No. 198 Hospital was not qualified to perform organ transplant surgery. Hospital officials claimed they had no knowledge about Zheng’s surgery because the department that was involved had been contracted out to a Fujian Province businessman.

The case is still under investigation, the report said.

Previously, it was reported that many university students in Guangdong had decided to donate sperm in order to raise money to buy iPads and iPhones.

Local hospitals offer 300 yuan for each sperm donation and qualified donors attend hospital 10 times for each complete procedure.

Of course, if you wander through the skid row side of many towns, you will find storefront operations buying blood from the homeless here in the States. Different commodity for different wants; but, essentially the same transaction.

What’s next?

Florida police are trying to figure out how a 5-year-old boy came into possession of a loaded handgun that he dropped inside a pre-kindergarten class.

A female pre-kindergarten teacher at Moseley Elementary School in Palatka was giving a music lesson Tuesday morning when she noticed the small, .22-caliber handgun fall out of the boy’s pocket, Assistant Police Chief James Griffith said.

The firearm did not go off, and no one was hurt.

But the boy, along with the gun, were promptly brought to school administrators. They alerted school security and police at 9:25 a.m., having determined that there was no immediate danger to the school, which is in Palatka in northeastern Florida.

“The boy is both initially a suspect in this thing, but also a victim,” said Griffith. “This is very rare.”

The boy told authorities that he found the firearm inside the vehicle that he had come to school in — one which Griffith said belonged to the youngster’s stepfather. Neither the boy nor stepfather have been named, the assistant chief said, in order to protect the identity of the child, who is a minor…

“There was nothing that transpired, as far as threats, showing the weapon off, anything like that,” Griffith said. “At this point, we are trying to determine where the child got the gun from, and if any adult was negligent in allowing him to gain access (to it).”

Phew! Folks are lucky he didn’t accidentally fire the gun, showing it off or something like that.

Depending on whether or not it was a well-made piece, they’re all lucky that a handgun like this – with rimfire cartridges – didn’t fire when it hit the floor.

Reuters Picture used by permission

Student lecturing riot police during a demonstration in Turkey.

A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do.

It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted its expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.

The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.

Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months…

Afifi, the son of an Islamic-American community leader who died a year ago in Egypt, is one of only a few people known to have found a government-tracking device on their vehicle…

Well, he’s one of only a few people who found one of the Feds’ tracking devices on his vehicle – who made it public.

Brian Alseth from the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington state contacted Afifi after seeing pictures of the tracking device posted online and told him the ACLU had been waiting for a case like this to challenge the ruling allowing the government to do this.

“This is the kind of thing we like to throw lawyers at,” Afifi said Alseth told him.

“It seems very frightening that the FBI have placed a surveillance-tracking device on the car of a 20-year-old American citizen who has done nothing more than being half-Egyptian,” Alseth told Wired.com…

Afifi’s encounter with the FBI ended with the agents telling him not to worry.

“We have all the information we needed,” they told him. “You don’t need to call your lawyer. Don’t worry, you’re boring. “

They shook his hand and left.

RTFA. Long, occasionally humorous – and you have to understand the FBI does face-to-face interviews as much to try to intimidate activists or the innocent bystander equally often. It’s part of political cop 101. It gets the word around “they’re watching – oooh!”

They press further? Tell ‘em to talk to your lawyer and make an appointment. That fulfills legal requirements.

A student who set up a Facebook page to complain about her teacher – and was later suspended – had every right to do so under the First Amendment, a federal magistrate has ruled.

The ruling not only allows Katherine “Katie” Evans’ suit against the principal to move forward, it could set a precedent in cases involving speech and social networking on the Internet, experts say.

The courts are in the early stages of exploring the limits of free speech within social networking, said Howard Simon, the executive director of the Florida ACLU, which filed the suit on Evans’ behalf.

“It’s one of the main things that we wanted to establish in this case, that the First Amendment has a life in the social networking technology as it applies to the Internet and other forms of communication,” Simon said.

In 2007, Evans, then a senior at Pembroke Pines Charter High School, created a Facebook page where she vented about “the worst teacher I’ve ever met.”

But instead of other students expressing their dislike of the teacher, most defended the teacher and attacked Evans. A couple days later, Evans took the page down.

But after Principal Peter Bayer found out about it, he bumped Evan from her Advanced Placement classes, putting her in classes with less prestige, and suspended her for three days.

In late 2008, Evans filed suit against the principal, asking that the suspension be ruled unconstitutional and reversed, that the documents be removed from her file at the school and that she receive reimbursement for attorney fees.

“Evans’ speech falls under the wide umbrella of protected speech,” Judge Garber wrote. “It was an opinion of a student about a teacher, that was published off-campus, did not cause any disruption on-campus, and was not lewd, vulgar, threatening, or advocating illegal or dangerous behavior.”

RTFA. Lots of useful detail supporting free speech within sane rules. The young lass didn’t break those rules, e.g., threatening harm, etc.; But, the school principal certainly did.