I believe that they went too far on this case, and she should have just gotten detention or a lecture from a police officer on why damaging private property is not a good idea. This isn’t the first case like this either! In 2007, a 13 year old girl named Chelsea Fraser got arrested for writing “okay” on her desk. She was one of several students who got arrested that day. The others were arrested for putting up stickers on the wall. These are two cases where the police were asked to step in and arrest students. I believe the police shouldn’t have been involved. The principal should have just called the parents or made the students stay after school and clean the desks and walls they damaged.

 In conclusion, students should try to avoid these situations all together by not damaging property that’s not theirs. COHS students should try not to write on desks or other private property becuase of the consequences it may bring. Students never know how severe those consequences can get. From personal experience, I would recommend staying away from vandalism and graffiti becuase the consequences can be harsh. COHS students should know about this story so that they know how serious some people take vandalism. Even if the writing or drawing has no profanity or hate, people still take these situations seriously. In the end we should all learn from this story and it’s your choice whether you want avoid these types of situations or not.

Education is one of the most important factors in order for Americans to create a good future for our society. With our California budget already doing so poorly, it should not be our top priority to be improving prisons. Due to the debt, public education is being decimated. According to a recent report in the LA Times, “In late May, Governor Schwarzenegger announced revisions to his May budget proposal that include $1.6 billion in cuts to the state’s education system for the 2008-2009 school year and $4.2 billion in cuts for 2009-2010. These reductions in spending, coming on top of $11.6 billion in cuts already passed by the state government this year, will make California the last state in the US in terms of funding-per-pupil. They translate to roughly $3,000 in less money for every student in the state.” School districts across the state will be forced to delay funds for textbooks, increase class sizes, and cut seven days off the school year. Many districts are on the brink of insolvency. Arts and music programs, physical education courses, summer school, advanced placement, special education, and other vital courses will be eliminated as a result of the new round of cuts. Since 1984, California has built nearly 30 new prisons. In that time we have only opened FOUR new 4-year colleges: UC Merced, CSU San Marcos, CSU Monterey Bay, and CSU Channel Islands. In the case of the latter two institutions, those were reconverted from other government facilities.

This is significant because the costs of starting a new prison and starting a new college campus are roughly equivalent. Similar facilities costs. Similar labor costs. No, scratch that – the average starting salary of a full-time CSU professor is LESS than the average starting salary of a full-time prison guard. The reason prisons cost so much is simply because prisoners are housed 24 hrs/day. Also, schools are not required to pay every single medical bill for their students. As the costs for fixing the state’s troubled corrections system rocket higher, California is headed for a dubious milestone — for the first time the state will spend more on incarcerating inmates than on educating students in its public universities. Based on current spending trends, California’s prison budget will overtake spending on the state’s universities in five years. No other big state in the country spends close to as much on its prisons compared with universities. It doesn’t matter the size of our state. What matters is how much debt we are in. If we take away money from prisons and not schools then society would see the positive results of our increased spending on education. A  way to lessen the burden taxpayers carry for supporting prisons is the expansion of Community Corrections, or probation. This way, low-security inmates can be electronically monitored and have restrictions, while still being able to be a taxpayer and member of a working society and still pay their own bills. Some community corrections programs cost under $10 a day per inmate to support. A lot less money should be spent on prisons! Using money to comfort prisoners instead of support students is showing how important American people, who have the power to decide where our money goes, are not really thinking about the future of America.

Hasen came to their attention six months ago due to internet postings that talked about suicide bombings and other threats but they still have not confirmed that Hasen is the author. Medical records on file in Virginia and Maryland showed no disciplinary actions of formal complaints. Investigators are trying to find out if Hasan maintained contact with a radical mosque leader, named Anwar as Awlaki, from Virginia, who lives in Yemen and runs a website that promote Jihad around the world, glorifying violence against the United States of America.

On November 9^th, in a blog posting written by Anwar al Awlaki titled “Nidal Hassan did the right thing”, calls Hasan a “man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving an army that is fighting against his own people.” He also called Nidal Hassan a “hero”.  According to the website made by Anwar al Awlaki, Anwar al Awlaki served as an Imam or a Muslim religious leader or chief in Denver, San Diego and falls Church, Virginia. Major Hasan attended the Falls Church mosque when Awlaki was there. Those who worked with Nidal Hasan claim that he gradually became more radical in his disapproval of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Senator Joseph Lieberman said, “If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have a zero tolerance”

None of the students have been individually subpoenaed. The prosecutor’s office — led by Anita Alvarez, said it’s just being thorough, and wants to determine if students may have skewed their findings to get a good grade. Northwestern’s lawyers have filed a motion to squash the subpoenas, and the judge may act on that Tuesday when a hearing is set to hear arguments about whether there should be a new trial in the case. In the prosecution’s response, they argue that Protess and his students aren’t journalists and therefore aren’t protected by reporters’ privilege. John Lavine, the dean of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, considers that argument chilling. He continues to express his resistance for the trial. Protess and his students spent three academic years investigating the case of Anthony McKinney, a man serving a life sentence for killing a security guard in 1978. After interviewing witnesses and inspecting documents, they’re convinced that McKinney is innocent. Several of the witnesses told the students that they involved McKinney in the murder only after they were beaten by police. Northwestern’s legal clinic filed a petition in search for a new trial. Prosecutors approved, and a hearing was warranted, but also required all the students’ notes and unpublished memos. The school continues to argue with the prosecutors. Protess and his students call that claim ridiculous — especially since the prosecutor’s office has never asked for such records before relating to investigations by the Medill Innocence Project, founded by Protess in 1999.

Legal experts also said it’s a rare request. “It’s extremely unusual to go after that kind of background material about the investigators because none of that is legally relevant to guilt or innocence,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Arlington Student Press Law Center. “It is worrisome that the response of the justice system is not to interview the witnesses, but to investigate the investigators.” Protess and his students have investigated nearly a dozen high-profile cases, several involving men on death row — including the Ford Heights Four, who were exonerated by DNA evidence in a double murder, and Anthony Porter, who was exonerated roughly 48 hours before he was to be executed. In some of the cases, Protess’ students found that police had bullied or coerced false confessions, and Illinois has paid out tens of millions of dollars to some of those who were wrongly convicted. But in two different cases they investigated in the last five years, students who did not find convincing evidence of prisoners’ guilt still got A’s in his class, Protess said, so students had no reason to manipulate their findings in the McKinney case. Meanwhile, prosecutors have declined to release records of the police officers who were involved in McKinney’s case. Benn, the former Protess student, said he thinks the prosecutors’ motives are clear. “The attorney’s office is simply trying to save itself from the embarrassment of students finding another innocent man convicted of murder,” he said.

Yet the proud, calculating and violently independent Mr. Mohammed has never neatly fit the sort of Al Qaeda group leader.  He has little use for the high-minded serious of some of his associates, and for years before the Sept. 11 attacks, he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to his leader Bin Laden.  He was born in Pakistan but raised in Kuwait. Mr. Mohammed became important to Al Qaeda’s operation in large part because of his background.  He had an engineering degree from an American university, spoke sufficient English and had a deeper understanding of the West than any of Mr. Bin Laden’s other members. As Pakistanis in Kuwait, his family would have been considered second-class citizens, but they had the means to send him to the United States for his education.  He later transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he earned a mechanical engineering degree in 1986.    Over the next decade, he plotted dozens of attacks against Western targets.  At his martial tribunal in 2007, Mr. Mohammed recited a litany of conspiracies he said he had had a hand in, including shooting plots against President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.  

Now he is facing trial in New York for the mass murder of 3,000 people and I think he should be punished because he was the master planner of this attack or else Bin Laden would have never thought of this in the first place. This shows us that many people make civilians as their target to get their demand.

In the state of California the use of marijuana is legal and this law is taken advantage of by people of all kinds. A man can go into a dispensary, tell a lie about some random health condition that may or may not be life threatening, and in a short while he could have a supply of marijuana for, really, as long as you want. Local addicts are benefiting from these dispensaries but local dime baggers are not. Because it’s so easy to LEGALLY buy marijuana most people don’t feel the need nor want to put forth the effort to buy ILLEGALLY. So how do dime baggers succeed in their business making tactics? Well most begin to decrease their price of marijuana and some even start to make home deliveries instead of meeting in shady parking-lots. Dime baggers also become more reliable and seem to flake on you less and less. But even with improvements, dime baggers don’t stand a chance and the Federal Government succeeds in their business making profits.

As always, federal decisions have lots of unintended consequences, and many of them are good. As dispensaries wipe out the common pot dealers, teen drug use will fall dramatically. Instead of buying drugs from a shady dealer, they will have to struggle with methods they use to obtain other illegal substances: begging their older peers, stealing from their parents and waiting outside a dispensary until they find a creepy guy gullible enough to accept a 20 dollar bribe. So unless and until these dispensaries go belly-up, the dime baggers don’t stand a chance.

To me this story shows not only stupidity on the man’s part but also on the police’s.  The fact that the man wasn’t given a warning, or a fine or even banned from the store but instead arrested is one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard. When the police have enough time to go around arresting a 44 year-old idiotic man, we should start rethinking if it’s best to take away money for things like schools and state workers salaries.  It’s not only unnecessary to arrest somebody for theft of an item worth six dollars, but it’s unnecessary to arrest an adult for the theft of an item worth six dollars.  If it was a teen that needed to learn a lesson, that’s understandable, but a 44 year-old man with the money to pay for it?  The jails are too crowded and most of us can find a more serious offense occurring in your own backyard.  Police shouldn’t be spending their time and our money dealing with something that a store owner could most likely deal with himself.

Though both the man and the police were wrong, the store owners could have avoided this mess altogether.  Unless the man is getting out of control and the police are really needed, just handle your business and keep the police uninvolved.  It was a situation that could have been avoided by all three parties.  In other news, the economy is so bad that stores sell a mechanical pencil for six dollars?

UC Davis Health System is fighting the flu with a new policy that requires faculty, staff, students, and even vendors to get the flu shot or wear a mask.  The policy requires them to get a shot by Dec. 1, or wear that mask covering their mouth and nose while at work or school to prevent the spread of infection.

Allan Seifkin, Medical Director of UC Davis Health System says, “This could be the worst flu season in modern history.  Seasonal flu combined with H1N1 (swine flu) makes the full impact of this particular flu season difficult to anticipate. We are taking every reasonable precaution as early as possible.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 220,000 people are hospitalized each year due to seasonal flu and for 36,000 the flu is fatal.  UC Davis Health System is now offering free seasonal flu shots to staff and students.  However, the seasonal flu vaccine will not provide protection against H1N1 (swine flu) influenza, which is an especially deadly new strain of the flu infection. They will also offer free masks to those who are not vaccinated by Dec. 1.

“Reducing flu cases this year means that it will be important to get vaccinations for both types of flu viruses, beginning with the vaccine that is currently available,” said Siefkin. “We will be following the CDC guidelines for distributing the H1N1 vaccine as soon as it is here.”

“The new policy, along with our many other flu-prevention efforts, are intended to keep our team healthy,” said Siefkin. “We want to be here to care for our patients and to continue offering the high-quality services that our community relies on, from out level 1 trauma center and nationally designated cancer center to our children’s hospital and other specialty programs.”

It is a good idea to wash your hands thoroughly and frequently, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer with you in your backpack at all times.  Do your part to keep America healthy by going to get vaccinated today!