PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Four white Philadelphia teachers filed federal race-bias lawsuits that accuse a black principal of creating a hostile work environment and suggesting they were unfit to teach black children.

The teachers work at a predominantly black elementary school that has a recent history of racial tension. Their lawsuits say that a former principal had them read an article that said “white teachers do not have the ability to teach African-American students.”

The teachers also allege that the principal, Charles Ray III, and others undermined their work by reprimanding them, randomly changing their room assignments and letting black teachers ignore rules that their white counterparts had to follow. Ray also retaliated when they filed union grievances, they said.

“Charles Ray III consistently stated that he had a relationship with top school officials indicating that his conduct was part of an approved policy or was part of a pattern of practices sanctioned and supported by ‘higher authority,”’ the suits allege.

The teachers—Nicole Boyd, Debra McKibben Marenbach, Colleen Yarnell and Marta Ciccimaro—filed the lawsuits last week, demanding more than $150,000 each. Courthouse News Service first reported on the complaints Tuesday.

The school district had no immediate comment, spokeswoman Shana Kemp told The Associated Press.

Kemp said she was not immediately authorized to say if Ray still works for the district. A message left at a possible home number for him was not immediately returned.

Racial tensions among staff at Thomas Mifflin Elementary School have simmered before.

A white principal left about four years ago amid a chorus of complaints from black parents. One mother testified at a City Council meeting in December 2007 that she had heard the administrator say Muslim students looked like “flying nuns,” according to news reports.

In April 2008, vandals defaced a mural on the side of the school with anti-Semitic graffiti.

Ray arrived that fall, and lasted only for the 2008-09 school year, the lawsuit said.

The surrounding East Falls neighborhood is largely white and, in some sections, wealthy. Residents include former Gov. Ed Rendell and former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter. But many white families in the area send their children to private schools.

Mifflin currently has about 270 students, 86 percent of them black and 85 percent of them poor, according to school district data.

The defendants include the local teachers union and a supervising teacher whom Ray allegedly ordered to go through personnel files and investigate their home and personal lives.

Lawyers for the teachers did not immediately return calls for comment.

The competition to get your favorite disease recognized in the bible of mental health, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, can be as fierce as the talent contest in the Little Miss St. Paul Contest. The American Psychiatric Association is contemplating adding something called "parental alienation syndrome" (PAS) to the new edition of the DSM, scheduled to be published in May 2013, and the question has launched a national lobbying and letter-writing campaign on both sides. That angry letters and editorials might play any part in a debate about mental health and custody disputes probably tells you most of what you need to know about the validity of PAS.
What is parental alienation syndrome? Richard Bernet, a professor of psychiatry at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and an advocate for its inclusion in the DSM-5, describes it as "a mental condition in which a child, usually one whose parents are engaged in a high conflict divorce, allies himself or herself strongly with one parent, and rejects a relationship with the other parent, without legitimate justification." There is no doubt that an ugly divorce can affect kids’ relationship with their parents or cause children to choose sides, often in anger. In fact, that probably happens more often than not. But Bernet and others who argue that adding PAS to the Sears, Roebuck catalogue of mental health want to see it recognized as a legitimate mental health disorder in order to "spur insurance coverage, stimulate more systematic research, lend credence to [the] charge of parental alienation in court, and raise the odds that children would get timely treatment."

They want, in other words, to affix a name, some blame, and also a price tag on a broad range of child responses to a custody fight—some perfectly justified and some not—in the hopes of expanding its use in court.

And what’s the downside to including PAS in the DSM? Well, for one thing, with a minimum of three participants needed to diagnose it, PAS starts to look less like a mental health disorder than an epidemic. It assumes that one crazy person (the mother) brainwashes a second crazy person (the child) into telling lies about a third person (the father). Just because a lot of parents have experienced blocked visitation and unreturned phone calls doesn’t make every instance of that conduct the result of a medical "syndrome." Joan S. Meier, a professor of clinical law at George Washington University School of Law, has explained it this way: "PAS is a label that offers a particular explanation for a breach in relationship between a child and parent, but insofar as that breach could be explained in other ways, it is not in itself a medical or psychological diagnosis so much as a particular legal hypothesis."

The most worrisome aspect of the legal fight over parental alienation syndrome may be that it divides supporters and opponents along strict gender lines: As a rule, this is classed as a women’s sickness alleged by men. Fathers’ rights groups are not solely to blame for the fact that an entire "disease" is predicated on the notion that women are lying liars; the inventor of the syndrome can take responsibility for that. But no hypothesis so rooted in gender bias should be credited by medical science. And because evidence of PAS is so frequently offered to counter maternal allegations of abuse, the experts testifying about PAS can be aiding and abetting a system that takes children from abused mothers and hands them right back to abusive fathers. Once again, this doesn’t mean that some parents don’t alienate their children in a divorce. It means that PAS is now used to discredit women whenever they claim abuse.

With a bit of encouragement from the Terminator himself, some of Schwarzenegger’s supporters are pushing for a constitutional amendment that would allow the Austrian-born governor to run for the White House as soon as 2008. Schwarzenegger is blocked by Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution. It reads, "No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of president." The 12th Amendment says the vice president cannot be foreign-born.

Could America’s infatuation with Schwarzenegger lead to passage of a constitutional amendment that would drop those bans — an idea that has died in Congress more than two dozen times since the 1870s? Probably not, but Schwarzenegger’s rise in politics has led members of Congress and a few of the governor’s wealthy California donors to launch a long-shot campaign that they have cast as an effort to guarantee equal rights for millions of foreign-born Americans.

If the movement gains significant momentum, it might create some interesting political scenarios. It could become a test of American attitudes toward immigrants in the post-9/11 era, and put a spotlight on the depth of conservative Republicans’ feelings about Schwarzenegger, who supports abortion rights and gay civil unions.

The bar to the nation’s highest offices is the only formal restriction on the rights of the USA’s 12.8 million foreign-born, naturalized citizens, who are among the 34 million U.S. residents born abroad. Every year, 450,000 immigrants are naturalized, including 25,000 children adopted by citizens.

Proponents of change note that 700 immigrants in uniform have been awarded the Medal of Honor since the Civil War, and that 60,000 now serve in the military.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a political ally of Schwarzenegger, introduced the Equal Right to Govern Amendment in July 2003, a few weeks before the actor declared his candidacy in the recall election in which Californians ousted Democrat Gray Davis as governor.

If Hatch’s amendment is adopted, an immigrant who has been a naturalized citizen for 20 years could run for president or vice president.

April 29, 2011

Senator Hatch’s Office Claims Missing Amendment "Just a Coincidence"
Earlier today I noted the sudden disappearance of (and associated back-end server error pages relating to) archival material on Senator Orrin Hatch’s site, the day after a Salon author called attention to the Senator’s past support for allowing persons not born in the U.S. (such as Arnold Schwarzenegger) to become U.S. president.

The Salon article noted the conflict of this position, supported by many in the GOP at the time, vs. the currently still very much alive "birther" movement and other efforts to even more tightly restrict presidential candidacies. A Salon follow-up article today also mentioned that Hatch’s office didn’t respond to their original query yesterday on this topic, but added that the Senator’s office since then has now claimed that the missing material is simply a coincidence, resulting from a site redesign issue that just happened to take place between Salon’s queries about the amendment yesterday, and my noticing the missing pages and visible database errors this morning.

Hey, coincidences can happen, right? Just really bad timing. Or good timing, depending upon your point of view. I’m not a gambling man, and am only an armchair statistician, so I’ll let the ersatz-Spocks in the readership calculate the odds.

In any case, here’s a little free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) advice for Hatch’s Web site designers. Standard good practice when cutting over a new Web site isn’t to use the equivalent of a fire axe, that leaves important links not only failing to reach appropriate pages or redirects, but instead lead to pages of back-end database errors that would seem as cryptic as hieroglyphics to most viewers.

Accurately or not, such techniques give the impression of what we might call "Web site ‘get the stuff offline fast!’ panic redesign" — or in the UNIX/Linux world the

rm -rf *
school of damage control (don’t try that one at home, kids).
Just a remarkable coincidence. OK, let’s take them at their word. And if the good Senator is still willing to publicly stand behind his earlier words that so directly conflict with birther sentiments, more power to him, and then of course my apologies for casting any aspersions on his character or motivations, irrespective of the impression given by his site’s sudden, coincidental, and quite dramatic perturbations.

Perhaps the Senator will now be one of President Obama’s staunchest and most vocal defenders against birther nuttiness, and the Orrin Hatch Web site (new and improved, with suspicious broken links all eventually neatly repaired) will trumpet Hatch’s support in this regard for all the world to see!

It’s a good day in Washington D.C., after all!

–Lauren–

Last week we learned that power couple Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver have decided to separate after a 25-year marriage, and while the split initially appeared to be relatively drama-free, today Arnie dropped a bomb, admitting that he had an affair and fathered a child with one of his household staffers. While the affair took place a decade ago, Shriver only recently found out about it, prompting the announcement of the couple’s separation.

"After leaving the governor’s office I told my wife about this event, which occurred over a decade ago," Schwarzenegger said in a statement in the LA Times following inquires by the newspaper. "I understand and deserve the feelings of anger and disappointment among my friends and family. There are no excuses and I take full responsibility for the hurt I have caused. I have apologized to Maria, my children and my family. I am truly sorry."
Apparently the baby mama worked for the family for some 20 years, retired "on good terms" and received a healthy severance package, in addition to complete financial support from Arnie throughout the child’s life. Maria knew about the child, but never the identity of his father. TMZ is reporting that Shriver is "completely distraught" and meeting with a financial adviser to hammer out details for a divorce. Shriver and Schwarzenegger have four children together, ages 14-21.

If there’s one thing people around the world love to do — in fact, need to do — it’s eat. Unfortunately, another thing everyone likes to do is talk on their cell phones. And according to a new study (PDF), these two activities are completely at odds because of a cell phone signal’s confusing effects on one key player: bees.

Researcher Daniel Favre of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has found that wireless signals cause honeybees to become so disoriented that they finally just die. Favre’s team conducted 83 separate experiments that tested bees’ reactions to a nearby cellphone. . . .

So-called “colony collapse disorder” among the world’s bee population has been recorded since 1972. But it wasn’t until 2006 that the drop in the bee population took a nosedive, with beekeepers noting a 30 to 90 percent loss of their bee colonies, up from 17 to 20 percent in previous years.

Favre’s study corroborates a 2008 report that showed that honeybees would not return to their hive when a cell phone was placed nearby, which sparked the theory that wireless signals are the problem.

There are other reasons scientists believe the world’s crucial bee population is plummeting, things like the use of clothiandin, a pesticide used to treat corn seeds. But Favre’s study shows that our cell phone habit is playing a major role in the current bee holocaust.

If the mission to neutralize Osama bin Laden were a blockbuster movie, the screen would have almost certainly faded to black as soon as the accused terrorist’s death was announced. No doubt, the credits would roll to Queen’s "We Will Rock You" and then the big "The End" would appear. *Alas, real life is not one of Hollywood’s many Pentagon-sponsored flicks — and as hard as President Obama tried to portray last week’s events as proof "that America can do whatever we set our mind to," the mission and its cloudy aftermath have raised troubling questions about the "whatever" part. Among the most important of those queries are:

Philip Morris exec: Cigarettes not that hard to quit
Camilleri’s comment made to cancer nurse at shareholder meeting in New York

RICHMOND, Va. — The head of cigarette maker Philip Morris International Inc. told a cancer nurse Wednesday that while cigarettes are harmful and addictive, it is not that hard to quit.

CEO Louis C. Camilleri’s statement was in response to comments at its annual shareholder meeting in New York. Executives from the seller of Marlboro and other brands overseas spent most of the gathering sparring with members of anti-tobacco and other corporate accountability groups.

The nurse, later identified as Elisabeth Gundersen from the University of California-San Francisco, cited statistics that tobacco use kills more than 400,000 Americans and 5 million people worldwide each year. She is a member of The Nightingales Nurses, an activist group that works to focus public attention on the tobacco industry.

Gundersen also said a patient told her last week that of all the addictions he’s beaten — crack, cocaine, meth — cigarettes have been the most difficult.

In response, the often-unapologetic Camilleri said: "We take our responsibility very seriously, and I don’t think we get enough recognition for the efforts we make to ensure that there is effective worldwide regulation of a product that is harmful and that is addictive. Nevertheless, whilst it is addictive, it is not that hard to quit. … There are more previous smokers in America today than current smokers."

Camilleri is a longtime smoker. An April 2009 BusinessWeek article quoted him as saying he had quit only once, for three months when he had a cold. Following Wednesday’s meeting, the company reiterated its position that "tobacco products are addictive and harmful."

Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids said the comments represent the "most irresponsible form of corporate double-speak."

"Study after study has documented the powerful addiction to cigarettes is one of the most difficult to overcome of any drug anywhere in the world," Myers said. "It is stunning in the face of overwhelming science for the leader of the world’s largest private tobacco company to deny how difficult and addictive cigarettes are."