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Student Tweets that School Should Enact Budget Cuts, Starting With Principal’s Job, Gets Suspended

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Photo Credit: WNDA high-school student in upstate New York has been suspended and accused of trying to incite “a social media riot” after he suggested budget cuts for his public school – beginning with elimination of his principal’s job.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that students have a right to self-expression, as long as that expression doesn’t disrupt classwork or school activities or invade the rights of others.

And that’s where the conflict about the student’s action lies, because the Syracuse Post-Standard reports the superintendent of Cicero-North Syracuse High School accused senior Patrick Brown of using Twitter to incite “a social media riot.”

Whether the purported “social media riot” was disruptive to classwork or school activities remains unclear.

Brown was suspended for three days Thursday after starting a Twitter hashtag, #s–tCNSshouldcut, that solicited ideas for district budget cuts for next year after voters rejected a $144.7 million budget plan. The hashtag quickly became popular, and students posted ideas during the school day.

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Long-Lost Dog Tag Returned to NY WWII Vet Who Dropped it in French Barley Field

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Photo Credit: APIrving Mann has been in business long enough to be skeptical of out-of-the-blue offers that seem too good to be true.

So the founder of Mann’s Jewelers in Rochester was cautious but intrigued when an email arrived at his store from a woman wondering if he could possibly be the Irving Mann whose military tag she said she’d found a day earlier in her barley field in France.

After all, the World War II veteran didn’t recall losing a dog tag after landing in Normandy with the 90th Infantry division on D-Day and fighting across Nazi-occupied France.

“It had to be false,” thought Mann, who’d recently celebrated his 88th birthday.

“You hear of so many scams going on, that somebody’s going to fake it, do some research and say, `I would be willing to return your dog tag. However, it will cost you X number of dollars.”‘

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Where’s the Global Warming? Upstate New York Gets 3 Feet of Snow

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Photo Credit: APA Memorial Day weekend storm has dropped three feet of snow on a New York ski mountain near the Vermont border.

Whiteface Mountain spokesman Jon Lundin says 36 inches of white powder has blanketed the nearly 5,000-foot tall mountain in the Adirondacks. That has forced the Olympic Regional Development Authority to close Whiteface Veteran’s Memorial Highway on the backside of the

Lundin says the snow began lightly falling Saturday and steadily dropped Sunday, finishing in the evening.

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N.Y. Man Arrested New Gun Control Law – His Offense? Two Extra Bullets

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Photo Credit: ShutterstockGregory Dean, Jr. was pulled over in New Lebanon, N.Y., Sunday for a light on his license plate being burnt out. But what began as a simple traffic stop ended up with Dean being arrested over two bullets in his registered firearm, which put him in violation of the state’s new law, the Journal News reported.

Last month, a provision in New York’s strict gun control laws went into effect, making it illegal to have more than seven rounds in a magazine unless said firearm was being used at a range or in a competition.

The state troopers saw a .40-caliber pistol on Dean’s passenger side when they approached his window…

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Indian Point To Become First Nuclear Plant To Operate With Expired License

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Photo Credit: Mario Tama/GettyImagesOne of two reactors at the Indian Point nuclear plant north of New York City will soon be operating with an expired license.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said Monday that the situation resulted in part from a complicated license-renewal process for nuclear reactors, the Journal News reported.

Indian Point 2′s 40-year license expires on Sept. 28. NRC regional administrator Bill Dean said that’s at least a year before any decision will be made on whether to extend it for another 20 years.

Dean said the reactor can keep operating because Entergy Nuclear, its owner, filed for renewal more than five years before the expiration date.

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Lawsuit Exposes NYC Church's Two Billion Dollar Assets

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Photo Credit: Michael NagleThere has never been any doubt that Trinity Church is wealthy. But the extent of its wealth has long been a mystery; guessed at by many, known by few.

Now, however, after a lawsuit filed by a disenchanted parishioner, the church has offered an estimate of the value of its assets: more than $2 billion.

The Episcopal parish, known as Trinity Wall Street, traces its holdings to a gift of 215 acres of prime Manhattan farmland donated in 1705 by Queen Anne of England. Since then, the church has parlayed that gift into a rich portfolio of office buildings, stock investments and, soon, mixed-use residential development.

The parish’s good fortune has become an issue in the historic congregation, which has been racked by infighting in recent years over whether the church should be spending more money to help the poor and spread the faith, in New York and around the world. Differences over the parish’s mission and direction last year led nearly half the 22-member vestry — an august collection of corporate executives and philanthropists — to resign or be pushed out, after at least seven of them asked, unsuccessfully, that the rector himself step down.

Over the years, the church has sold or given away much of the original 215 acres from Queen Anne, but it has 14 acres, including 5.5 million square feet of commercial real estate.

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Girls Told to Ask for Lesbian Kiss at School (+video)

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Photo Credit: mikebairdParents of children attending a Red Hook, New York, middle school are outraged after a recent anti-bullying presentation at Linden Avenue Middle School.

The workshop for 13 and 14-year-old girls focused on homosexuality and gender identity. They were also taught words such as “pansexual” and “genderqueer.”

Parents say their daughters were told to ask one another for a kiss and they say two girls were told to stand in front of the class and pretend they were lesbians on a date.

“She told me, ‘Mom we all get teased and picked on enough. Now I’m going to be called a lesbian because I had to ask another girl if I could kiss her,'” parent, Mandy Coon, told reporters.

Coon says parents were given no warning about the presentation and there was no opportunity to opt-out. Both the school principal and the district superintendent are defending the workshops and advising they will schedule more.

Watch video here:

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Police Chief, Former High School Librarian Charged in Kidnap, Rape, Torture, Murder Plot

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

A police official at a Massachusetts veterans hospital and a former New York City high school librarian were charged in a plot to kidnap, rape, torture and kill women, children and infants, authorities said Monday.

The case against Robert Christopher Asch, 61, and Richard Meltz, 65, was built by many of the same investigators who successfully prosecuted a former New York City police officer [Gilberto Valle] on kidnap conspiracy charges in a high-profile cannibalism plot case…

There was no mention of cooking or eating women in the charges unveiled Monday against Asch, a former librarian at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, and Meltz, the chief of police at the Bedford Veterans Administration Medical Center in Massachusetts. Both were ordered held without bail after an initial court appearance.

Authorities said in court papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan that the men conspired since the spring of 2011 to attack multiple victims, including the relatives of an unidentified co-conspirator who claimed in Internet communications that he wanted to solicit individuals to kidnap, rape and kill his wife, his sister-in-law and her children, and his stepdaughter. A criminal complaint said the men referred to the planned killings in communications as the “snuffing” of women, children and infants.

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New York's Assault Weapon Registration Begins

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Photo Credit: AP

Key measures of New York’s tough new gun law kicked in Monday, with owners of firearms now reclassified as assault weapons required to start registering the firearms and new limits on the number of bullets allowed in magazines.

As the new provisions took effect, New York’s affiliate of the National Rifle Association planned to file a court request for a federal injunction to immediate halt to the magazine limit.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo calls those and other provisions in the state’s new gun law common sense while dismissing criticisms he says come from “extreme fringe conservatives” who claim the government has no right to regulate guns.

“Yes, they are against it, but they are the extremists and the extremists shouldn’t win, especially on this issue when it is so important to the majority,” Cuomo said in a radio interview last week. “In politics, we have to be willing to take on the extremists, otherwise you will see paralysis.”

New York’s new gun restrictions, the first in the nation passed following December’s massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, limit state gun owners to no more than seven bullets in magazines, except at competitions or firing ranges.

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New York Parents Sue After County uses Son's Remains to Train Dogs

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Photo Credit: Clotee Pridgen Allochuku

The parents of a western New York man killed in a car crash are suing county officials after the coroner there took a piece of their son’s body for use in a dog-training exercise.

Roger Dunn, 32, died April 13, 2012, in an auto wreck in Cambria.

After his death, Niagara County Coroner Russell Jackman gave some tissue from the crash scene to a volunteer fire chief who was training a dog to sniff out human remains.

Both men later resigned and pleaded guilty to misdemeanors over their conduct. They also apologized.

Each was fined $1,000 and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and write letters of apology to the Dunns.

Read more from this story HERE.