Photo Credit: Fox News
Benecia Police Department Lt. Frank Hartig said Teresa Gilmete Badger was booked into the Solano County Jail on Friday on suspicion of poisoning. The 47-year-old Badger’s arrest capped a month-and-a-half-long investigation that started with a tip from the Benicia Unified School District’s superintendent.
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Photo Credit: Fox News An American citizen who was working at an international school was shot and killed in the Libyan city of Benghazi Thursday morning by unknown assailants, a school board member told Fox News.
The State Department identified the victim as Ronald Thomas Smith II, and confirmed that he was a teacher at an international school in Benghazi.
“We can confirm that a U.S. citizen was shot and killed in Benghazi,” a State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in the statement.
“We offer our condolences to the victim’s loved ones. We are in contact with the family and are providing all appropriate consular assistance. Out of respect for the privacy of those affected, we have no further comment at this time. For questions on the investigation, I refer you to the Libyan authorities,” the statement said.
School board member Adel Mansouri said the teacher was shot around lunchtime near his home.
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Photo Credit: Daily Caller President Barack Obama allegedly used the term “tea-baggers” to describe members of the Tea Party movement in a handwritten response to a fifth-grade school teacher’s letter criticizing Obamacare.
The crude and derogatory term, which is brimming with sexual innuendo, appears in a note penned on stationery bearing the words “The White House” at the top. The man who says he received the missive is Thomas Ritter of Irving, Texas, reports the Daily Mail.
Ritter, 49, had written a letter to Obama before Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, and well before the law’s embarrassingly disastrous launch.
“This bill has caused such a divisive, derisive and toxic environment,” he wrote. “The reality is that any citizen that disagrees with your administration is targeted and ridiculed.”
“I watched you make fun of tea baggers and your press secretary make fun of Ms. Palin which was especially beneath the dignity of the White House,” wrote the Texas teacher. “Do the right thing not the political thing. Suggest a bill that Americans can support.”
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Photo Credit: Josh BarryJosh Barry, the parent of an eighth grader at the East Pennsboro Area School District in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, told the Examiner that an assignment his eldest daughter brought home from school was clear political indoctrination.
After expressing his concerns to the school, a teacher he had never met contacted a mutual friend from Facebook and spoke disparagingly about the dedicated dad.
It all started when Barry, a vigilant parent, reviewed his daughter’s paperwork and was shocked to see a highly political assignment citing a New York Times article that blamed the Republicans for the government “shutdown,” along with a worksheet that accompanied the article.
The worksheet asked in part,
“Whom do you hold most responsible for the government shutdown?”…
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Photo Credit: Candie_N (Welcome Spring)An Ohio teacher accused of instructing her gifted students to fail an exam has reportedly resigned.
Heather Campbell, 39, was in her second year teaching fifth and sixth grade students at Waggoner Road Junior High School, the Columbus Dispatch reports. District investigators said Campbell encouraged student to fail a science pretest by drawing pictures of a cat or rock or to answer the question using texting shorthand such as LOL.
The investigation was launched in September after a parent called the school when her child said Campbell asked the class to “do poorly” on the pretest. Of the 68 tests, 54 were considered “not sufficient attempts,” mostly because students scribbled or drew pictures in the short-answer response questions, the newspaper reports.
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Photo Credit: AP
His lenient punishment for the 2007 rape of Cherice Moralez, who killed herself three-years later, was handed down to him by District Judge Todd Baugh and the comments made by Baugh about Moralez sparked national outrage.
Rambold, who was 48 when he committed the crimes in 2007, left the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge at around 9.30am local time.
State prosecutors are appealing the sentence, saying Rambold should have received a minimum of two years. But barring new offenses, the former teacher has served his time and will stay out of prison pending the appeal.
Rambold was picked up at the prison by a family member and was expected to return to Billings, prison spokeswoman Linda Moodry said. He has been registered as a level 1 sex offender – meaning he’s considered a low risk to re-offend- and will remain on probation through 2028 unless the original sentence is overruled.
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Photo Credit: WNEM-TV
“Neal has plead (sic) guilty for his one criminal offense but he is not a predator,” Harriet Coe reportedly wrote. “This was an isolated incident. He understands the severity of his action and is sincere in his desire to make amends…”
John Janczewski, the father of the victim, spoke on the Glenn Beck radio program Monday about all that has happened to his family since the horrific molestation by now-former Rose City Middle School teacher Neal Erickson came to light. He said he and his wife have been threatened and attacked for speaking out against the teachers.
“At one thirty in the morning on a Saturday, I was awoken to a bomb sound going off,” Janczewski said, choking back emotion. “I went to the window to find my garage was on fire and engulfed in flames, my camper and the side of my house…If I wouldn’t have woken up, we could’ve all died.”
“Whoever’s done this has no remorse,” he told the Ogemaw County Herald earlier. “They have no soul.”
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Photo Credit: Getty images In the annals of political correctness run amok in American schools, this story — if true — is easily an all-timer.
A junior-high school Spanish teacher has filed a lawsuit alleging that she was fired from P.S. 211 in the Bronx in March 2012 because of a misunderstanding over the word “negro.”
The non-tenured teacher, 65-year-old Petrona Smith, maintains that she was instructing her class about how to say the various basic colors in Spanish, reports the New York Post. The word “negro” naturally came up because “negro” is the Spanish word for “black.”
A seventh-grade student in the class took offense at the term, however, believing the word to be a racial slur. It’s not clear if Smith directed the term at the student. Whatever the case, he reported the incident to school officials.
But, wait. It gets better. Smith, a native of the West Indies, is black. And to top it all off, P.S. 211 is bilingual.
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Photo Credit: Official U.S. Navy ImageryAccording to promotional material, a United States Naval Academy professor is teaching on behalf of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a part of the US Muslim Brotherhood and where global Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi reportedly serves as a trustee. IIIT recently announced its Summer Students Program for 2013 to be held from May 26 – July 3. According to the IIIT announcement, one of the instructors for the program will be Professor Ermin Sinanovic, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland who will be teaching the following course titled “Muslim World Affairs”:
This course is meant to provide students who had little or no background on the Muslim world with a basic understanding of its contemporary history, its geopolitics, its diverse cultures, languages and ethnic groups. Also, the course introduces the key issues and developments that framed the relationship between the world of Islam and the West, such as the colonial encounter, the capitalist expansion of the West, the emergence of the nation-state and its institutions, the discovery of oil in the Middle East and its implications, the communication revolution and contemporary globalization and their impact on cultures, values and life styles; and finally the US foreign policy towards the Muslim world and its implications. This course will be covered in twelve hours. Instructor: Professor Ermin Sinanovic, US Naval Academy, Maryland.
According to his bio, Ermin Sinanovic is:
…an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. He studied for an MA and a PhD in Political Science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prof. Sinanovic obtained two BAs (one in Qur’an and Sunnah Studies, the other in Political Science) and an MA (Islamic Civilization) from the International Islamic University Malaysia. His research interests include transnational Islamic revival, Southeast Asian politics, Islamic movements, Middle East politics, Islamic political thought, and Islam and politics in general. At the Naval Academy, Prof. Sinanovic teaches courses on Southeast Asian politics, Middle East politics, and Islam and politics. He speaks Bosnian, English, Arabic, and Malay. “
One of the other instructors at the IIIT summer program will be US Muslim Brotherhood leader Louay Safi, identified in the announcement as affiliated with the College of Islamic Studies of the Qatar Foundation. In 2009 Louay Safi, also an official at the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), was at the center of a controversy when it was learned that the US Defense Department brought him to Fort Hood as an instructor and that he had been lecturing on Islam to troops in Fort Hood who were about to deploy to Afghanistan. In February 2010, the activities and lectures of Dr. Safi on all military bases were suspended pending a criminal inquiry by the U.S. military. A shooting took place at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas on November 5, 2009 in which a single gunman killed 13 people and over 30 people were injured in the worst shooting ever to take place on an American military base. The only suspect in the shooting is Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old U.S. Army major serving as a psychiatrist. Dr. Safi has also been recently identified as a leading member of the Syrian National Council, a Syrian opposition group dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Photo Credit: MAURO CATEBA veteran Chicago teacher is suing the school district after he was suspended and charged with possessing tools that school officials said violated their weapons policy.
Doug Bartlett, a second grade teacher at Washington Irving Elementary School, was suspended for four days after administrators determined the tools he used for visual aids endangered students.
In 2011 Bartlett was teaching a mandated course on “tools.” He showed students several tools that he used in his classroom including wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, a box cutter, and a small pocketknife. He explained how the tools were used and kept the items secured in a tool box.
“The visual aids were used in an effort to facilitate student understanding and remembrance of the curriculum,” the lawsuit states. “As he displayed the box cutter and pocketknife, Plaintiff specifically described the proper use of these tools. Neither of these items was made available to the students.”
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