(via NY POST)

A Brooklyn teacher — fired for posting snarky online comments suggesting her unruly students should drown — can go back to the classroom, a judge says.

Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Barbara Jaffe last week overturned an administrative decision to boot Christine Rubino, who taught at PS 203 in Flatlands, for posting “repulsive” comments on Facebook.

A blow to the city Department of Education, the ruling underscores the grueling process to fire teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence. Even after lengthy administrative trials, judges can reverse decisions either way, and prolong a costly battle.

HELAYNE SEIDMAN

SHE’S A CRASS ACT: Kid-hating teacher Christine Rubino is getting her job back, thanks to a state judge.

“After today, I’m thinking the beach sounds like a wonderful idea for my 5th graders. I HATE THEIR GUTS! They are all the devils spawn!” Rubino wrote on Facebook on June 23, 2010.

She made the remarks one day after a 12-year-old Harlem girl, Nicole Suriel, drowned on a school trip to a Long Island beach.

When a Facebook friend asked, “oh you would let little Kwame float away!’’ Rubino posted in reply, “Yes, I wld not throw a life jacket in for a million!!”

While “offensive” and “repulsive,” the comments were posted outside the school building and after hours, Jaffe ruled.

The judge found no evidence that Rubino, frustrated by her students’ rowdy behavior, meant them actual harm or that the comments “affected her ability to teach.”

Jaffe even gave Rubino a pass for allegedly obstructing an investigation. A friend of Rubino admitted she lied when she claimed authorship of the ugly comments, but Rubino denied asking her to do so. Rubino’s “clumsy attempt at a cover-up reflects panic, not planning,” the judge wrote.

In firing Rubino last June, hearing officer Randi Lowitt said Facebook and other social media “are becoming embedded in society.” Lowitt chided, “People post without regard to the fact that what they post has a shelf life of forever.”

Jaffe differed. “Even though [Rubino] should have known that her postings could become public,” the judge wrote, it was “reasonable” to expect that only her Facebook adult friends would see them.

Citing Rubino’s “unblemished” 15-year teaching history, Jaffe voided the termination and sent her back to the department for a “lesser penalty.”

Rubino, who made $78,885 a year, won’t go back on the payroll so fast because the department may appeal.

Rubino’s lawyer, Bryan Glass, said, “A simple warning to Ms. Rubino about her mistake would have sufficed, and it would not have been repeated. Perhaps in this time of scarce resources, the substantial time and money on this case could be better allocated by the DOE supporting its teachers in the classroom rather than demonizing and punishing its staff.”

Read more: http://trade.cc/ahpe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3DGCDpP-kfQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4igYHZ-hmGo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WUFSHzT2xuY#!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQPM6y3ZnAo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-9EYFJ4Clo

By Ray Villard

This week, the mainstream media is reporting an undersea radar image of a “saucer shaped” object on the seabed in Baltic Sea’s Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland. The discovery was made by Swedish oceanographers who say it’s nearly 200 feet across and lies 300 feet down.

The same object caused a stir last summer when it was originally spotted.

This week, the mainstream media is reporting an undersea radar image of a “saucer shaped” object on the seabed in Baltic Sea’s Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland. The discovery was made by Swedish oceanographers who say it’s nearly 200 feet across and lies 300 feet down.

The same object caused a stir last summer when it was originally spotted.

Team Ocean Explorer said this image shows 300m “drag marks” around an unidentified — possibly flying — object.

These most recent reports have renewed a firestorm of news reports and blogs saying that scientists have found something resembling a “classic flying saucer,” and that further investigation is needed. A sonar image of an “object of interest” (pictured above) shows what has an uncanny resemblance to Han Solo’s starship the Millennium Falcon from the film “Star Wars.”

The mystery was compounded later in the week by the report of a smaller disk-shaped object nearby. Both images are interpreted to show a rigid tail or drag marks more than 1000 feet-long. Some people have speculated these skid marks suggest that the object might have moved across the floor as it crashed.

Read the rest here.

Despite a continued cloudy view of the U.S. economy, some top economics bloggers are beginning to see a ray of hope on the horizon. According to a new Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation survey, 14 percent of respondents now believe the economy is “strong and growing” or “strong with uncertain growth,” an improvement over last quarter.

For the Kauffman Economic Outlook: A Quarterly Survey of Top Economics Bloggers of 2012, the Kauffman Foundation sent invitations to more than 200 leading economics bloggers as identified in the Palgrave’s econolog.net December 2010 rankings about their views of the economy, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Looking ahead, only 33 percent now anticipate U.S. poverty to increase in the next three years, a significant positive change from previous surveys. Respondents also believe that employment and global output will rise faster than anything else and, surprisingly, some expect a higher marginal tax rate.

When asked to identify policy options to stimulate the economy, top economics bloggers overwhelmingly supported approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, with 77 percent in agreement (25 percent strongly agreeing), and 75 percent favor opening up more domestic areas to oil and gas exploration and drilling. Other preferred policy recommendations included giving states flexibility to set their own minimum wage (67 percent agreeing) and the revenue-neutral adoption of a value added tax (58 percent agreeing). Opinion remained split on raising the top marginal income tax.

Other research highlights include:

Read the rest here.

By David Martosko

A Time magazine blogger reported Thursday that the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and most august environmental organization, accepted millions of dollars in donations from one of the nation’s biggest natural gas-drilling companies for a program lambasting coal-fired power plants as environmental evildoers.

The total take for John Muir’s conservation group? A whopping $26 million over four years from Chesapeake Energy and its subsidiaries, mostly through Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon.

The news rocked the environmental movement, sent the Sierra Club headlong into explanation mode, angered coal companies that the organization targeted with natural gas money, and had free-market advocates shaking their heads.

The episode “raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past,” wrote Time’s Bryan Walsh.

The Daily Caller asked Chesapeake Energy spokesman Jim Gipson whether his company’s donations were made with the expectation that the Sierra Club would attack the coal industry, and whether the company has subsidized other green groups that oppose generating electricity by burning coal. Gipson did not respond to the email.

The Sierra Club launched its “Beyond Coal” campaign in 2001 on a shoestring budget, aiming to shut down as many coal-fired power plants as it could. McClendon’s money appears to have helped that campaign during a critical time when it was firing on all cylinders, lobbying against new power plant construction and working to close existing facilities, all the while hammering clean-coal advocates and blaming “big coal” for mercury pollution, asthma and assorted unforgivable ecological sins.

In 2007, the natural gas industry was also engaged in trying to persuade the federal government that its product was a more environmentally benign alternative to coal. Having the Sierra Club as a compatriot didn’t hurt.

by Jonathan Tjarks

With marquee teams featuring top bill QB’s playing in two of the biggest cities in the US, anticipation for Super Bowl XLVI has reached a fever-pitch.

And if Las Vegas is correct, fans may be treated into another nail-biter similar to the New York Giants 17-14 defeat of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.

The line, with New England now only favored by 3, is the tightest in 30 years, when the San Francisco 49ers were one-point favorites over the Cincinnati Bengals in 1982.

That game, a 26-21 49ers victory that featured Joe Montana at the height of his powers, is widely remembered as one of the greatest Super Bowls in NFL history.

Now, 30 years later, Tom Brady and Eli Manning have a chance to cement their legacies next Sunday and put themselves in truly rarefied air.

Read the rest here.

By Marcus Bensasson, Maria Petrakis and Natalie Weeks

Greece’s efforts to win a second bailout from international creditors teetered in the balance as negotiations in Athens failed to clinch an agreement.

“The distance between success and failure, which could come from misfortune or misunderstanding, is very small,” Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told reporters in Athens yesterday after consultations with euro area finance ministers. “We are on razor’s edge.”

Venizelos said while agreement had been found on issues such as bank recapitalization and state asset sales, the government and the so-called troika of international creditors were still at odds over labor reforms and fiscal measures for this year. The talks with euro-area finance ministers were “very difficult,” he said.

With the country’s stability at stake, the government is racing to clinch agreement on a plan that’s been in the works since July, with talks between international monitors and Greek officials running in parallel with discussions among caretaker Prime Minister Lucas Papademos’s coalition members and Greece’s government and its private creditors.

Read the rest here.

From: The Australian

A GOVERNMENT-run research body has found that the past 110 years of ocean warming has been good for the growth of corals spanning more than 1000km of Australia’s coastline.

The findings undermine predictions that global warming will devastate coral reefs, and add to a growing body of evidence showing corals are more resilient than previously thought – up to a certain point.

The study by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, peer-reviewed findings of which were published today in the leading journal Science, examined 27 samples from six locations from the West Australian coast off Geraldton to offshore from Darwin.

At each site, scientists took cores from massive porites corals – similar to a biopsy in humans – and counted back to record their age in much the same way tree rings are counted.

Although some cores extended to the 18th century, they focused on the period from 1900 to 2010.

The researchers found that, contrary to their expectations, warmer waters had not negatively affected coral growth.

In fact, for their southern samples, where ocean temperatures are the coolest but have warmed the most, coral growth increased most significantly over the past 110 years.

For their northern samples, where waters are the warmest and have changed the least, coral growth still increased, but not by as much.

“Those reefs have actually been able to take advantage of the warmer conditions,” said Janice Lough, a senior AIMS research scientist and one of the study’s authors.

Read the rest here.

Ear bitten off in fast food queue (click on link for source)

The attack happened at the KFC on Renfield Street in Glasgow

A man had part of his ear bitten off in a “violent” and “unprovoked” attack by two men in a Glasgow fast food outlet.

Police said the 28-year-old man and his friend were in KFC on Renfield Street when they were confronted by three men and a woman at 23:00 on Friday.

They decided to leave the shop without getting food but were attacked by two of the men as they made their way out.

The victim had the top half of his ear bitten off and was taken to the Royal Infirmary for treatment.

The two men responsible for the attack were last seen in Bath Lane.

One was described as white, about 18, of slim build, with dark hair and wearing a grey tracksuit with yellow writing.

The other was white, about 18 to 20, of slim build and wearing a dark jacket.

He had the name ‘Scott’ tattooed on the right side of his neck.

Det Con Kieron Frost said: “This would appear to a totally unprovoked attack on the 28-year-old man who had only gone into the shop with his friend to purchase something to eat prior to returning home.

“It was a particularly violent attack which resulted in the victim losing the top half of his ear which will now require surgery.”

By David K. Randall and Edward Krudy

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stock-picking once again matters on Wall Street.

After a year in which stocks moved in near-lockstep regardless of individual merit, the herd mentality is crumbling away.

The move away from a frenzied rush in and then back out of the market is a welcome sign for stressed-out fund managers and lay investors alike.

“If I think something looks cheap I’m more prepared to own it because I think that will matter. Before, I would throw up my hands and say, ‘So what? If it’s perceived as a higher risk asset then it’s going to crater with any nasty news out of Europe,'” said Art Steinmetz, chief investment officer at OppenheimerFunds in New York.

The change reaffirms the diversification strategies that underpin trillions of dollars worth of savings meant for college tuition and retirement. When just about everything is moving in the same direction, investors have fewer ways to cushion market swoons.

In 2011, daily activity in individual stocks was less dependent on company reports than on action in European government debt markets, and the equity, currency and commodities markets traded in tandem.

Now that stocks are going their own way, it’s been good for so-called active fund managers, those who decide what individual stocks are best to hold rather than follow an index.

In January, about 70 percent of active managers outperformed the S&P 500, compared with just 23 percent in 2011, according to Bank of America/Merrill Lynch data.

“Our traders have had their best month since 2009 because of the fall-off in correlation,” said Don Bright, a director and trader at Bright Trading in Chicago. “We’re doing a lot of homework on earnings since fundamentals are driving individual stocks again.”

Read the rest here.

By Juliet Eilperin

John Doerr was crying. The billionaire venture capitalist had come to the end of his now-famous March 8, 2007, TED talk on climate change and renewable energy, and his emotions were getting the better of him. Doerr had begun by describing how his teenage daughter told him that it was up to his generation to fix global warming, since they had caused it. After detailing how the public and private sectors had so far failed at this, Doerr, who made his fortune investing early in companies that became some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names—Netscape, Amazon.com, and Google, among others—exhorted the audience and his peers (largely one and the same) to band together and transform the nation’s energy supply. “I really, really hope we multiply all of our energy, all of our talent, and all of our influence to solve this problem,” he said, falling silent as he fought back tears. “Because if we do, I can look forward to the conversation I’m going to have with my daughter in 20 years.”

As usual, Doerr’s timing was perfect. Just weeks earlier, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had won an Oscar for best documentary. (Gore is now a partner in Doerr’s green tech team at the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.) Interest in climate change had never been higher. And as the economy recovered from the dual shocks of the Internet bubble and 9/11, Doerr’s fellow Silicon Valley VCs were already looking to clean technology as the next big thing. What followed was yet another Silicon Valley gold rush, as the firms on Sand Hill Road were pulled along by the promise of new fortunes and the hope that they would be the ones to wean America off of fossil fuels. The entrepreneurs and tech investors who had transformed media and communications were ready to make Silicon Valley the Saudi Arabia of clean energy.

Never mind the fact that green technology had been struggling to achieve critical mass for decades. “You had folks who came in with the hubris to say, ‘I know these guys have been working on this for 50 years,’” says Andrew Beebe, chief commercial officer for Suntech, the Chinese solar manufacturer. “‘But I’ve got $50 million and I can blow the doors off this thing.’”

In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late 2009 and late 2011. Avarice, altruism, and policy had aligned to fuel a spectacular boom.

Anyone who has heard the name Solyndra knows how this all panned out. Due to a confluence of factors—including fluctuating silicon prices, newly cheap natural gas, the 2008 financial crisis, China’s ascendant solar industry, and certain technological realities—the clean-tech bubble has burst, leaving us with a traditional energy infrastructure still overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels. The fallout has hit almost every niche in the clean-tech sector—wind, biofuels, electric cars, and fuel cells—but none more dramatically than solar.

Read the rest here.

By Alexandra Robbins

Medical marijuana is set to arrive in DC this summer. But the drug is already a much bigger part of upper-middle-class life here than you might think.

At 8 o’clock on a chilly autumn weeknight, Sara makes her way across DC’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood to deliver a cutely wrapped package to the home of a high-powered attorney.

Despite the drugs in her car, she doesn’t look nervous, even when she makes an illegal left turn a few blocks after she passes a police van. “Can I do this?” she says. “Is this legal? I can’t tell. I’m doing it!”

Nearing the lawyer’s home, she says, “If you don’t look or act nervous, no one will know.” She explains how she regularly brings her deliveries through security at law firms and government agencies: “I look and act professional, I smile, I’m friendly, and you think I’m a legitimate business owner.”

Fit, pretty, and just shy of 40, Sara’s not what most people picture when they think of a drug dealer. In her Banana Republic sweater and Joe’s Jeans, she seems more like a delivery girl for a high-end bakery.

She uses a pseudonym that plays off baking and marijuana—we’ll call her Sara Leaf—and is one of a handful of women known as the Nancy Botwins of Washington, after Mary-Louise Parker’s character on Showtime’s Weeds, a suburban single mom who deals pot to support her family.

Two years ago, Sara quit her marketing job “because I was sick of the grind, spending 2½ hours commuting to do something I didn’t love anymore.” Finding herself with a lot of time, she parlayed a talent for baking into a new job.

Now she bakes marijuana into brownies, cookies, candy, and other treats and sells them—often to people who are chronically or terminally ill and who take the edibles to ease pain and alleviate side effects from chemotherapy and other treatments.

Sara doesn’t consider herself a drug dealer, though. When I ask what she calls herself, she pauses. “A gourmet cook? A baker? It’s a good question,” she says. “The reason I do what I do is to help people. My husband jokes that I’m a ‘pharmaceutical redistributor.’ ”

The distinctions should soon grow even hazier. The DC Council passed a measure in 2010 that legalized medical marijuana for people with certain conditions. According to the DC Department of Health, which will oversee the new medical-marijuana program, dispensaries could open this summer. As the program nears readiness, it has become clear that our area—in the federal government’s back yard—is probably the most complicated place in the country in which to regulate medical marijuana.

Legal or not, the plant already plays a big role in Washington. A 2011 report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that about 14 percent of DC residents over age 12 and about 10 percent in Maryland and Virginia had used pot in the past year. The marijuana use cuts across racial and socioeconomic lines.

“This is a town where I could probably kill 200 major careers if I wanted to be a complete prick,” says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), which is headquartered on K Street. “Politicians, members of Congress and the Senate, many of their principals—legislative directors, chiefs of staff, communications directors—people in the private sector, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Brookings, police, any number of notable journalists from television, print, radio, many brand names most Americans would recognize pretty quickly—I’ve smoked with all of them. There is more smoke in DC closets than there is sex.”

Marijuana shows up at high-society parties in DC’s tony Kalorama and on back patios at embassy functions. It’s a staple at both a guys’ poker night for well-known DC power players and a moms’ Friday-night get-together in Bethesda. About twice a month, one Georgetown businessman hosts after-hours parties at his home where pot and cocaine “are in abundance,” says an attendee. Some of the Georgetown elite, professional athletes, Redskinettes, and Playboy centerfolds have been known to stop by.

Read the rest here.