Teacher allegedly called students ‘murderers’ for raising livestock

A Florida teacher stands to lose his job after school officials said he bullied and harassed Future Farmers of America students who are raising livestock to be sold for slaughter.

Middle school teacher Thomas Roger Allison Jr., 53, has been placed on unpaid leave from Horizon Academy at Marion Oaks near Ocala for calling the students who are raising livestock “murderers,” according to a Marion County school district letter documenting the case.

In a written recommendation for termination, Superintendent of Schools Heidi Maier said that Allison “has engaged in a repeated, egregious pattern of mistreating, ridiculing, insulting, intimidating, embarrassing bullying and abusing FFA students, crushing their dreams and causing them to feel that they must discontinue FFA activities to enjoy a peaceful school environment.”

The Ocala Star-Banner reports Allison is also accused of harassing the group’s teacher adviser and encouraging his honors science students to harass FAA members.

A district investigation revealed that Allison is on a quest to end the animal agriculture program because of his animal rights beliefs. Maier said he’s also made it harder for FFA students to get good grades in his science class.

Allison told investigators he won’t stop speaking out on animal slaughter, and said he is innocent. He is on unpaid leave pending a hearing before the school board.

“I love working in Marion County and love my students,” he said. “I will fight for my job.”

Allison was named as one of the five finalist for 2016 Golden Apple teacher of the year honors.

Maier ordered the investigation on March 28. It looked into dozens of accusations from teachers, students and parents. The investigation lasted 10 days and resulted in a scathing report.

Allison told students that he was obtaining his certification in agriculture so that he could take the agriculture teacher’s job and stop animal projects, the report states. “This has upset and confused the FFA students, who do not want their academics to suffer because of their involvement with animal projects.”

One agriculture student told investigators that Allison makes her feel like she is doing something wrong.

According to the report, even after Allison was made aware of the investigation, he continued “addressing students antagonistically and cruelly, thus failing in his obligation not to harass or discriminate against any student.”

Donald Trump`s first 100 days: A chaotic discovery of power

From the resounding setbacks in Congress to the stunning policy flip-flops, Donald Trump has certainly been confronted with a steep learning curve in his opening months at the White House.

While the new US president has shown a capacity to change both his tone and his positions, Trump has struggled to convey a clearly articulated worldview.

As the symbolic milestone of his 100th day in power, which falls on Saturday, draws near, a cold, hard reality is setting in for the billionaire businessman who promised Americans he would "win, win, win" for them.

At this stage of his presidency Donald Trump is the least popular US leader in modern history (even if his core supporters still fully support him).

The 70-year-old Trump, whose election victory unleashed a political shockwave around the world, is still clinging to the take-no-prisoners, unpredictable, impulsive style that made him a property mogul and reality TV star.

But the onetime anti-establishment candidate who promised to "drain the swamp" in Washington appears to have recognised -- with a mix of naivete and craftiness -- that he has one of the most difficult jobs in the world.

In just his first few weeks in office Trump suffered some crippling blows -- the federal courts halted his proposed travel ban, and Congress failed to move ahead on health care reform.

"Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated," Trump said during his efforts to see Obamacare -- his Democratic predecessor`s signature domestic policy achievement -- repealed and replaced.

"After listening for 10 minutes, I realised it`s not so easy," Trump said after talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping about North Korea. The demands and constraints of the Oval Office -- where every word uttered counts -- are quite different from the daily stump speeches Trump made on the campaign trail.

Who to turn to for advice? Whose advice to heed? What kind of relationship to build with Congress, even when it`s nominally controlled by one`s own party? How much latitude to afford the usually powerful State and Defense Departments?

All of his predecessors have said it: moving into the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a shock to the system.

"There`s just something about this job as president every president faces -- you know, that you think one thing going in and then the pressures of the job or the realities of the world, you know, are different than you thought," George W Bush said recently.

Aside from his unwavering penchant for morning tweetstorms, often influenced by the ebb and flow of headlines on Fox News, Trump has changed.

In the choice of his teams as well as in some negotiations, a sort of "presidentialisation" seems to be unfolding -- albeit haltingly.

Trump, who was elevated to the highest office in the United States with no prior political, diplomatic or military experience, says his ever-evolving approach works.

"I do change and I am flexible, and I`m proud of that flexibility," Trump said, shortly before authorising air strikes against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over what Washington says was a sarin attack on civilians.

On China, Russia and NATO, his about-faces have -- to some extent -- reassured some Americans, and some of Washington`s allies.

"When a president moves from being so wrong to being so right on such important questions, the sensible response is not to carp but to celebrate, however cautiously," The Washington Post said in an editorial, reminding readers of the harsh, dark tone of Trump`s inaugural address.

But his approach also includes risks.

From Syria to North Korea, what is the risk of dragging the United States into a military conflict with an unpredictable outcome, a situation Trump warned against on the campaign trail?

How would the Republican president react if a major terror attack were to happen on US soil, as it did on 9/11?Both style and substance reveal that Donald J Trump is an American president like no other before him.

In a rather disconcerting interview given to Time magazine in March, in which Trump defended his controversial, far-fetched or just plain false statements one by one, he said: "What am I going to tell you? I tend to be right."

More than three months after taking office, many of his detractors still deem the profile written by author Philip Roth for The New Yorker in late January to be a just one.

He wrote of a president "ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance... and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words."

Trump`s numerous policy pivots and resets also raise questions about the very definition of his fluid brand of "Trumpism" -- which revolves around his ubiquitous "America First" slogan, a seemingly simple idea that is nevertheless tough to explain.

The internal squabbles within the Trump White House have not helped the president move forward with articulating his long-term vision.

Within a group that includes the ultra-conservative Steve Bannon, one thing stands out: the prime positioning of his family, especially daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The successful nomination of conservative federal judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court stands as the major success of the first 100 days of the 45th president of the United States.

All too aware that he doesn`t have much to show for those days, Trump lashed out with a tweet decrying the "ridiculous standard of the first 100 days" -- one that his team has repeatedly said was vital.

Trump, who regularly talks about possibly running for re-election, has more than 1,300 days ahead of him until his first term ends.

Donald Trump gives Pentagon more flexibility on Iraq, Syria troops

The White House is giving the Pentagon greater flexibility to determine the number of US troops in Iraq and Syria, in another move by President Donald Trump to shift greater power to his military leaders.

The decision will give Defense Secretary Jim Mattis the authority to send more forces into Syria, to assist US-backed local troops as they move to retake Raqqa from the Islamic State group, which has used the city as a de facto capital.

It will also let him adjust the force numbers in Iraq, in the ongoing fight to oust IS from Mosul and stabilize it as the rebuilding begins.

The Pentagon has already been making quiet, incremental additions to the troop levels in both countries in recent months, adding hundreds of Marines in Syria to provide artillery support, and sending more advisers into Iraq to work with units closer to the fight in Mosul.

Those moves were done with White House approval, but without any formal adjustment to the longstanding troop caps that had been set by the Obama administration.

Dana White, chief spokesperson for the Pentagon, said Wednesday that Mattis has not made any changes yet to the current authorised force levels.

Under the Obama White House, military leaders chafed about micromanagement that forced commanders to get approvals for routine tactical decisions and personnel moves, and provide justification for any troops sent into war zones.

Commanders have argued that they should be able to determine troop deployments based on the military capabilities they believe are needed at any given time.

The new authority will provide greater transparency about the actual number of US forces in Iraq and Syria after several years of public confusion about the accurate totals.

Under the Obama-mandated caps, the US was limited to 503 officially deployed troops in Syria, and 5,262 in Iraq. The Pentagon, however, has closer to 7,000 in Iraq, and hundreds more than the cap in Syria, but doesn't count them because they are on temporary duty or not counted under specific personnel rules.

The change, however, could trigger concerns particularly in Iraq, where there are political sensitivities about the footprint of American and coalition troops and fears about occupation forces.

Officials worry that if they publicly acknowledge there are thousands more troops there, it could fuel opposition and problems for the Iraqi government.

Trump's decision applies only to the two countries, and so far does not affect Afghanistan, although that change has also been discussed.

"This does not represent a change in our mission in Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS," said White, using another name for the Islamic State group.

NASA's Cassini captures closest image of Saturn's atmosphere!

The US space agency NASA has released a beautiful view of Saturn's atmosphere.

The image was captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during its first Grand Finale dive past the planet on April 26, 2017.

The unprocessed image shows features in Saturn's atmosphere from closer than ever before.

Cassini spacecrfat is a joint mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

The 22-foot-tall (6.7 meter) spacecraft was launched in 1997 and began orbiting Saturn in 2004.

The spacecraft is running low on fuel, and will make a death plunge into Saturn's surface on September 15, 2017.

Good luck with that: Public editor maintains ESPN will not stick to sports, whether viewers like it or not

After news broke Wednesday that ESPN would be cutting around 100 people, mostly on-air personalities, it wasn’t long before people pointed to the sports network’s continual detours into liberal politics as a probable cause.

ESPN Public Editor Jim Brady chimed in to clarify that the layoffs were a matter of economics, plain and simple; although he did acknowledge the network’s drift to one side of the political spectrum. Hmm … wonder which side?

It was just two weeks ago that Brady published a nearly 3,000-word essay concluding that “ESPN has made it clear: It’s not sticking to sports.”

Grad students who called professor a rape apologist in letter to campus paper taken to school

William A. Jacobson, a law professor at Cornell Law School and contributor to Legal Insurrection, called on the Cornell Daily Sun to apologize and publish a retraction after the paper printed a letter to the editor from seven graduate students alleging that the chair of the chemistry department was a rape apologist, a misogynist, and unfit to serve as chair.

“How can graduate students at risk for sexual assault and bias feel safe knowing the man handling sexual harassment complaints is a rape apologist?” they wrote.

 Jacobson accuses the letter writers of taking several of Collum’s words and tweets out of context as part of a smear campaign in which the paper is complicit for not contacting Collum for rebuttal.

Jacobson notes that the students accused Collum of tweeting his support for “rape apologist” Michael Cernovich and then deleting the tweet, a charge Jacobson answered with a screen shot and this explanation:

… the sequence showed that rather than endorsing Cernovich’s 2012 date rape tweet as the letter suggests, Prof. Collum rejected the message in that tweet when called to his attention.

One or more of the letter writers surely were aware of this sequence because the first named writer, Kevin Hines, posted about the tweet and deletion on his own Facebook account contemporaneously with the deletion.

The students also took selected bits of this quote by Collum — “In an effort to stem a perceived epidemic of sexual violence against women, the Department of Education sent strong messages to universities” — to accuse him of “pushing the myth that rape on college campuses is a ‘perceived’ threat.”

“By selectively choosing one sentence from a 135-page document, stripping out the footnote, and ignoring other language in the same section,” Jacobson writes, the students managed to present him as a campus rape denier.

“I wrote to each of the original letter writers raising each of the points raised above and asking for a response. As of this writing, I have received no response,” Jacobson adds, asking the Daily Sun to consider that the original accusations will appear in search engines forever.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren accidentally BUSTS Dem narrative on charter schools

Sen. Elizabeth Warren offered her congratulations today to the 2017 National Teacher of the Year, but there’s a catch…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is so giddy that this year’s National Teacher of the Year hails from her home state of Massachusetts.

“No surprise here that MA has the best teacher in the US,” she tweeted. “Congrats to 2017 National Teacher of the Year Sydney Chaffee from Codman Academy!”

One problem. The good lady senator left out something very important. Codman Academy is a charter school. And Democrats like Sen. Warren hate charter schools.

She voted against the expansion of charter schools in a 2016 election, explaining her opposition to Boston Magazine:

I will be voting no on Question 2. Many charter schools in Massachusetts are producing extraordinary results for our students, and we should celebrate the hard work of those teachers and spread what’s working to other schools.

But after hearing more from both sides, I am very concerned about what this specific proposal means for hundreds of thousands of children across our Commonwealth, especially those living in districts with tight budgets where every dime matters. Education is about creating opportunity for all our children, not about leaving many behind.

Charter Schools Are GOOD For Children. Of course, what Warren and her fellow Democrats won’t tell you is that in Massachusetts, charter schools are doing exceedingly well. In supporting expanding charter schools in the state, the Brookings Institution wrote: “This research shows that charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes. The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores.”

Of course, Twitter was quick to note the problem.

 And what has the Massachusetts Teachers Union said about Chaffee’s win? Nothing. Not one peep.