Older Current Events

Davyon Johnson, 11-Years Old, Saves The Lives of Two People in One Day

An 11-year-old boy from Oklahoma is being honored for his heroism after he saved a choking classmate and rescued a woman from a house fire in one day. Davyon Johnson was named an honorary member of both the sheriff's office and the police force and was recognized by the board of education in his hometown of Muskogee...

Amazon Covid Settlement Spotlights Board Focus on Workforce, Environmental, social and Governance Concerns For Corporate Boards

Amazon.com Inc.’s recent settlement with California over employee Covid-19 notifications is the latest example of how pandemic-related workforce safety has emerged as a top environmental, social and governance concern for corporate boards. The tech giant, following a state investigation, agreed to pay a $500,000 fin...

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland Directs the FBI and U.S. Attorney' Offices To Report and Investigate Parents Who Harass School Board Members

From Editor Betsy Combier: I believe that this is government censorship, and violates our First Amendment rights (The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an ind...

Profit Over Safety: Whistleblower Frances Haugen Details Facebook's Deliberate Harm

The hits keep coming for Facebook. Last night, in an interview on “60 Minutes,” a former Facebook product manager described how she had leaked internal documents to The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper had published a series of eye-opening articles dubbed “The Facebook Files,” detailing what the social media giant...

Ashley Gjovik Was Fired From Apple After Making Labor Complaints Against the Company

Ms. Gjovik says, "Speaking out feels like going up against a powerful government....In March, after the company sent an email to our management team and me that they wanted to test if toxic chemicals were present in the indoor air of our office building, I raised concerns about the safety of the building: Our office...

"My Biggest Job Was to Keep Them Safe" by Roe Wrubel,Third-Grade Teacher at NYC's PS 89, Near the World Trade Center Towers, on September 11, 2001

It was September 11, 2001, and New York City teacher Ronit “Roe” Wrubel was still figuring out the quickest route to P.S. 89, the redbrick elementary school where she’d just started teaching third grade. A brilliant blue sky, washed clean by the previous night’s thunderstorm, beckoned through the windows of her expr...

Los Angeles Magazine: Cecily Myart-Cruz’s Hostile Takeover of L.A.’s Public Schools

Traditionally, the job of UTLA is to represent the best interests of the L.A. school system’s 33,000 teachers—to ensure that they are paid properly, that they have the resources to do their jobs, and that their work conditions are safe. But under Myart-Cruz’s stewardship, which began when she assumed office in the s...

Parent Calls Police After Child is Pulled From Class For Not Wearing a Mask

A Long Island parent called the cops after their child and five other middle school students were pulled out of class for not wearing masks, police said Friday. The six students at Islip Middle School were moved to the gym by a security guard Thursday over their non-compliance with the mask rule, according to Suffol...

U.S. Education Department Investigates Five States' Mask Mandate Bans

The U.S. Department of Education sent a warning to five states on Monday that their statewide bans on mask mandates, including in schools, could violate students' civil rights. Suzanne B. Goldberg, the department's acting assistant secretary for civil rights, sent letters to state education leaders in Iowa, Oklahoma...

A Humana Inc. Medicare Advantage Health Plan for Seniors in Florida Overcharged Medicare Nearly $200 Million

A Humana Inc. health plan for seniors in Florida improperly collected nearly $200 million in 2015 by overstating how sick some patients were, according to a new federal audit, which seeks to claw back the money. The Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General's recommendation to repay, if finalized, would ...

A School District in Rhode Island Closed Meetings On CRT To The Public, Parent Nicole Solas Tries To Stop Them And Open Up The Discussions

A Rhode Island school district is banning public access to meetings where race-related proposals are considered, prompting a mother to ask the state attorney general to intervene.....Those meetings fall under the state's Open Meetings Act (OMA), lawyers for Nicole Solas told the Office of the Attorney General in a l...

Family of Henrietta Lack Sues Pharmaceutical Companies For Theft After Using Cells Without Permission

The family of Henrietta Lacks—the Virginia woman whose “immortal” cells continue to be used in medical research seven decades after they were taken from her—is suing pharmaceutical companies for what the family claims is the theft of those cells. The cells were obtained from Lacks without her consent during a biopsy...

A Landmark Civil Rights Lawsuit: Private litigation against critical race theory in Evanston public schools

Last week, a teacher in Evanston, Illinois, filed a landmark civil rights lawsuit against her school district. Her complaint: the district segregated staff by race for professional development, subjected students to race-shaming “privilege walks,” instructed teachers to take race into account in student discipline, ...

Amazon Illegally Fired Activist Workers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, Labor Board Finds

Amazon illegally retaliated against two of its most prominent internal critics when it fired them last year, the National Labor Relations Board has determined. The employees, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, had publicly pushed the company to reduce its impact on climate change and address concerns about its wareho...

$4.5 Billion Settlement Reached in Opioid Epidemic Deal Between 15 States and Purdue Pharma

Fifteen states have reached an agreement with Purdue Pharma, the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin, that would pave the way toward a $4.5 billion settlement of thousands of opioid cases. The states decided late Wednesday to drop their opposition to Purdue’s bankruptcy reorganization plan, in exchange fo...

An Unmarried Catholic Teacher Got Pregnant, Then Was Fired. She Sued

When a Catholic school art teacher was asked to take on extra responsibilities, she requested a raise, explaining that she was about to have a baby. Weeks later, she was fired from her New Jersey elementary school. The principal, a Roman Catholic nun, told her she was being terminated “because she was pregnant and u...

In NYC the Absent Teacher Reserve and The Rubber Room Are Both Strategies For Unlawful Denial of Tenure Job Protections

The Absent Teacher Reserve pool is a unique group of educators who are given jobs as nomad temporary substitute teachers/assistant principals/staff and are used by principals to cover absences or illness of permanent staff as if they were per diem employees, but they get their regular salary and they stay in one sch...

1,200 NYC Preschoolers with Disabilities Went Without Seats in Preschool Special Education Classes Last Year

Data released by the DOE show that at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, 1,215 preschoolers with disabilities were waiting for seats in legally mandated preschool special education classes in violation of their legal rights. While the City and State have been expanding seats in general education prekindergarten ...

They Kept Schools Running as Covid Raged: ‘We Had to Be Here’....Staff Members Who Stayed

During the worst weeks of the pandemic last spring, when many New Yorkers stopped leaving their homes altogether, Theresa DiCristi did what she always does. She set her alarm for 2:30 a.m. and climbed onto a deserted Long Island Railroad car from her small town long before the sun rose. She would arrive by 5:30 at P...

Teachers and Parents Are Angry About The Woke Revolution and Their "Critical Race Theory"

Teacher Paul Rossi and Brearley parent Andrew Gutmann do not agree with the wokeism movement, nor the U.S. government's support of what they see is against the right to free speech and other Constitutional rights. President Biden’s Department of Education has just released the text of a proposed new rule establishin...

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo's Toxic Reign

New York State is in the grip of massive corruption. The Cuomo family is implicated in many scandals over the past decade, including the 2014 shutdown of the Moreland Commission, a public corruption watchdog panel he himself set up, but closed once members got too close to Governor Andrew Cuomo's own fraud and decei...

Boston Public Schools Cancel New Advanced Classes For High Performing Students Because of Racial Inequalities

The program known as Advanced Work Classes was intended to serve high-performing students in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Students are encouraged to study their subjects in a deeper and non-traditional manner. School officials became concerned when a report showed that the program was disproportionately serv...

OP-ED: Cancel Culture Activists Disrupt Democracy in America

“Cancel culture” — sometimes referred to as “call-out culture” — is a form of ostracism in which people are thrust or locked out of social or professional circles, either in the real world or in the realm of online social media. Those who are the targets of this ostracism are said to be “canceled.” Such cancellation...

Too Many Parents and Decision Makers Treat Teachers Like They Don't Matter

(CNN)Julie Davis, 49, was an inspirational third grade teacher, a "mother to everyone," who attended her students' extracurriculars and donated to children in need. About three weeks after a student at her North Carolina school tested positive for Covid-19, Davis fell ill. This mother and grandmother died certain, h...

Chicago Teachers Join Parents in Rejecting In-Person Learning Until Buildings Are Safe and Pandemic is Under Control

As CPS educators mourned the COVID death of another school clerk forced back into unsafe working conditions this fall, rank and file CTU members across the city are rejecting CPS' effort to force thousands more back into unsafe buildings beginning this Monday. That includes CTU members who are parents — and who have...

New York City Public Schools' Year in Review: 2020 Highlights of A School Year Disrupted By the Pandemic

The novel coronavirus pandemic has upended almost every aspect of life in 2020 but nowhere has suffered so many disruptions quite like New York City schools. From the sudden shift to remote learning, the city’s teacher union threatening to strike, to the twice-delayed reopening of schools for in-person classes.....T...