ShortFormBlogFebruary 6, 2012

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An 18-month affair: A former intern for the Kennedy administration plans to release a tell-all book titled “Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath.” Starting when she was 19, Mimi Alford worked at the White House and claims to have had an 18-month affair with President Kennedy. Alford, who says she lost her virginity to the president, claimed that the president overpowered her, but he did so using his charm, not physically, “because I really think I was willing to do it.” source

Posted by samimain • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Feb 2012 20:03

» And parents were protesting outside: Roughly three dozen parents and supporters protested outside the L.A.-area school Monday, which has been rocked by two shocking but unrelated allegations of sexual molestation. The first case, involving a former teacher accused of doing unspeakable things to his students (note: trigger warning), was shocking enough; the second case, involving a teacher active until last week, only worsened things, as the allegations against him came out only as a result of the first case. The initial allegations did not lead to parents keeping their children home en masse (as the school had over 90 percent attendance throughout last week), but the second case, however, did. Low attendance hurts the school’s funding, so this hurt financially, but the school will also close Tuesday and Wednesday for emergency staff meetings, so the pain could go even deeper for the school. And things might go deeper: A third allegation at a different school in the region led to the arrest of a janitor.

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

» It’s the largest lead either candidate has held over one another since The Washington Post/ABC News started polling Romney-Obama match-ups in April of last year. It’s also a huge reversal from just a month ago, when Romney led Obama by one. Why the change? Well, it could be the (slowly) improving economy, or the insanity of the Republican primary taking its toll on all the Republicans, or Romney saying that he’s “not concerned about the very poor” on CNN last week. Or maybe, people are just fickle, and Romney will be twelve points ahead of Obama next week.

Posted by Seth Millstein • 0 Comments • Permalink

last month Facing legal complaints that their sites “create enmity, hatred, and communal violence” and “will corrupt minds,” Facebook and Google told an Indian court that they could not block content, and that it would be difficult to pre-screen. The complaint was filed by a journalist, Vinay Rai, who has been on a crusade over this issue.
this month Facing an order from the Delhi High Court to block said content from their services, Google and Facebook say they’ve already removed objectionable content, and Facebook has submitted a compliance report to the court on Monday, but not without joining Yahoo and Microsoft in having misgivings on the case. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

The State has failed to provide any explanation or evidence as to why a public advertisement or offer to assist in an otherwise legal activity is sufficiently problematic to justify an intrusion on protected speech rights.
The Georgia Supreme Court • In a unanimous ruling on a 1994 assisted suicide law that said two things — one, it didn’t fully make assisted suicides illegal, and two, it blocked legal forms of free speech, meaning that the law ran smack-first into the First Amendment. As a result of the incident, members of the Final Exit Network, who were facing charges over allegedly helping a cancer-stricken man die, won’t face trial for the incident. The 1994 law, passed in the wake of Jack Kevorkian, made it a felony for anyone who “publicly advertises, offers or holds himself or herself out as offering that he or she will intentionally and actively assist another person in the commission of suicide and commits any overt act to further that purpose.” source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink