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Raquel Carreras, 14, was killed in the crash, and other teenagers were injured. Shawn Ledesma, 15, was charged with vehicular homicide last year in connection with the September 2007 accident. The Florida Highway Patrol determined that he was driving more than 70 mph in a 40 mph zone and trying to overtake another car.
The FHP says in court documents that Lesa Ledesma admitted to knowing her son was not a licensed driver, but gave him the keys anyway to pick up his friends.
I wonder if this will set any precedents. Should parents be held responsible when their underage children commit crimes?
Just another brick in the wall?
Pupils given smileys to beat online pervs – Metro.co.uk: A school has used Acid House-style smiley faces to conceal the identities of pupil pictured on its website, apparently to protect them from paedophiles.
The primary school has been accused of being alarmist for covering up the faces of the children with an icon of the Acid House dance craze of the 1990s.
Yesterday the smiley face pictures of sports teams at Cann Hall Primary School in Clacton, Essex, were removed and a message put up which read: “Our newsletter section is under going maintenance please pop back soon”
The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.
In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that “all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish.”
It added: “Offenders will be severely punished.”
Uh, OK. Sounds like it will be tougher to die here than in Brazil.
A freshman has been hit with 147 academic charges for organizing and running an online study network at Ryerson University.
Student faces Facebook consequences – TheStar.com: Study groups may be a virtual trademark of the Ivory Tower – but a virtual study group has been slammed as cheating by Ryerson University.
First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates swapped tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.
The computer engineering student has been charged with one count of academic misconduct for helping run the group – called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions after the popular Ryerson basement study room engineering students dub The Dungeon – and another 146 counts, one for each classmate who used the site.Avenir, 18, faces an expulsion hearing Tuesday before the engineering faculty appeals committee.
Could the faculty staff be a bigger bunch of Luddites? How embarrassing. If you are looking to study engineering, you might be better served by going to another University.
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Today’s Guests:
The Topics:
“It’s indisputable that autism is on the rise among children,” Senator John McCain said while campaigning recently in Texas. “The question is, What’s causing it? And we go back and forth, and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.”
With that comment, McCain marked his entry into one of the most politicized scientific issues in a generation.
McCain is correct that autism diagnoses have increased in recent decades; no one disputes that. He is on much shakier ground when talking about the preservative as a cause…
Several large-scale studies have found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism, and medical groups including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Pediatrics have publicly stated as much. In January, California reported an increase in autism cases, despite the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines…
Nothing like sucking up for votes.
CAYMAN ISLANDS – Kellogg Brown and Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven. More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq – including about 10,500 Americans – are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands. The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.
With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor. The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000. Cheney’s office at the White House referred questions to his personal lawyer, who did not return phone calls.
It is said that war is good for the economy, now you cant even count on that.
The Indian government plans to give cash incentives to the families of baby girls in an effort to limit the number of abortions of females because of a preference for sons.
Staggered payments would be made to families to “encourage them for better upbringing of girl child and to educate her”, women and child development minister Renuka Chowdhury said in a statement released late Monday…
In India, sons are typically regarded as breadwinners but girls as a burden because of the matrimonial dowry demanded by a groom’s family.
India has strict laws against sex-selective abortion, but there have been only a handful of prosecutions as medical practioners are reputed to have made it a profitable business.
Sad, but, true.
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It turned out, though, that Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a U.S. Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his domain name registrar, eNom, which is based in the United States, had disabled them. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.
Marshall said he did not understand “how Web sites owned by a British national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by U.S. law.” Worse, he said, “these days not even a judge is required for the U.S. government to censor online materials…”
Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading authority on Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name registrars are based in the United States gives the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, control “over a great deal of speech – none of which may be actually hosted in the U.S., about the U.S. or conflicting with any U.S. rights.”
“OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear,” Crawford said.
Some Domain name registrars have the same concern for Constitutional freedoms as our Telcos.
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Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee.
Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,” after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.
Lt. Kevin Navarro, commanding officer of the Chicago Police Department’s Narcotics and Gang Unit, said the ordinance will be an “important tool” to go after grocery stores, health food stores and other businesses. The bags are used by the thousand to sell small quantities of drugs at $10 or $20 a bag.
Next up: In a bold move to prevent gun related deaths, holsters will be banned. Plus, lighters will be made illegal to prevent the underage from smoking. What other brilliant ideas can you come up with to equal this obvious way to end the scourge of drugs!
For Kindle and with free ePub version. Only $9.49 Great reading.
Here is what Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said: Dvorak's writing sings with insight and clarity. Whether or not you agree with John's views, he will get you thinking and is never boring. These essays are worth the read!
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