California Students Get $1 Million After They Were Expelled for Wearing Supposedly Racist Acne Masks​

Jacob Sullum
Updated Thu, May 9, 2024 at 4:25 PM CDT·4 min read


A.H.et al. v. St. Francis High School

During a sleepover in August 2017, three 14-year-old boys, two of whom were about to start attending St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California, took a picture of themselves wearing dark green acne masks. One of the boys, who was hosting the other two, had severe acne, and his friends applied the masks in an act of playful solidarity. They took the picture because they thought they looked "silly."

Three years later, after another teenager obtained the picture and posted it online, the two St. Francis students were falsely accused of posing in blackface and forced to leave the school under the threat of expulsion. This week a California jury awarded the boys, identified as A.H. and H.H. in their lawsuit against the school, $1 million in damages, plus a tuition reimbursement of about $70,000.
"A photograph of this innocent event was plucked from obscurity and grossly mischaracterized during the height of nationwide social unrest," the boys' familes said when they filed their lawsuit in 2021. The photo came to light in June 2020, a month after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. "St. Francis became involved in a number of racial scandals," NBC News reports, "including one where recent graduates of the school posted a meme about Floyd's death on Instagram." Because of that context, A.H. and H.H. argued, St. Francis officials rushed to judgment, tarring the students as racist and disrupting their lives without giving them a chance to explain the photo.

"The boys did not use the facemasks or take the photograph with any ill-intent, bias or prejudice, let alone in connection with any racist sentiments or epithets," the lawsuit said. "Defendants took it upon themselves to use the innocent and wholly unrelated photograph of the boys to make the malicious and utterly false accusation that the boys had been engaging in 'blackface,' and to recklessly assert that the photograph was 'another example' of racism" at St. Francis. That false accusation, according to the complaint, interrupted the boys' educations, destroyed their local reputations, and forced their families to move.
The jury agreed that St. Francis had treated the boys unfairly, thereby violating an oral contract. More controversially, the jury accepted a claim under the California Supreme Court's "common law doctrine of fair procedure," which extends due process requirements to private actors such as unions, hospitals, insurers, and professional organizations. Last year, the court ruled that the doctrine also applies to private universities. But according to the attorneys who represented A.H. and H.H., this is the first time the doctrine has been applied to a private secondary school.

"This case is significant not only for our clients but for its groundbreaking effect on all private high schools in California, which are now legally required to provide fair procedure to students before punishing or expelling them," said Dhillon Law Group partner Krista Baughman. "The jury rightly confirmed that St. Francis High School's procedures were unfair to our clients and that the school is not above the law."

Karin Sweigart, another lawyer at the firm, emphasized that it took four years to definitively refute the school's erroneous claim about the supposedly racist nature of the photo. "The jury's verdict finally cleared our clients' names after four long years of repeated personal attacks from St. Francis High School," she said. "Schools are supposed to protect and nurture children, not sacrifice them when it is convenient for public relations purposes."

The school's representatives said they "respectfully disagree with the jury's conclusion" about "the fairness of our disciplinary review process." They added that the school is "exploring legal options," including a possible appeal.

The plaintiffs' attorneys note that "St. Francis expelled the boys within 24 hours, without considering their evidence or offering any hearing." They add that "the school's actions led to significant personal, educational, and emotional consequences for the students."
The boys' parents amplified that point. "We would never wish the pain, humiliation, and suffering St. Francis has inflicted on our families on anyone," they said, "but we are thankful that the jury has spoken," "vindicated our boys," and "forced St. Francis to finally take responsibility for their repeated personal attacks."

Even with "time to reflect and contemplate after the heat of the moment had subsided," the parents said, St. Francis officials "don't regret their actions" and "would do the same thing today." Although the case has consumed "twenty percent of our boys' lives," they said, "the sacrifice is worth it to clear our boys' names" and "to try and make sure that St. Francis can never again assume a child is guilty" without giving him "the opportunity to show [his] innocence."

Well yes....it's the R's who want the ILLEGAL invasion to continue.............

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We will be on vacation and dressed like it, so we want to keep it casual. Most interested in restaurants with fresh seafood. Preferably within walking distance of the Hilton Clearwater Beach Resort. Although, isn't there some kind of trolly? We could drive as well, although I would prefer not to. Thoughts?

This is what the GQP has become...

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Anybody remember or ever worked at Barlows Grocery Store that used to be located just down the street from the CR/Marion border on First Avenue? I worked there in 78/79? but got fired for putting the wrong groceries in the wrong car more than once.

I voted satisfied. Very satisfied would've been getting a QB from Ohio State or someone of that caliber to come in and immediately be given the keys as the starter.

But, big get for Iowa. This is insurance, and potentially a better option than Cade. We'll have to wait and see -- but it's definitely a good thing.

I cry Plagiarism!

Been hearing rumblings that NW transfer Brendan Sullivan was on campus Friday and Saturday. Talking with some folks right now to see what I can find out.

Word is that Booty is working to schedule a visit, too.

VA Congressman Introduces Bill To Remove Federal Restrictions on Purchasing or Possessing Suppressors: Congressman Bob Good
Virginia Congressman Bob Good has recently introduced the Silencers Help Us Save Hearing (SHUSH) Act, signaling his commitment to Second Amendment rights. Despite facing a tough primary fight for re-election, Good’s legislative proposal aims to eliminate federal restrictions on the purchase and possession of suppressors, highlighting his stance on firearm ownership rights.

Upholding Second Amendment Liberties
Good’s initiative underscores his opposition to regulatory burdens on individuals’ constitutional right to bear arms. By advocating for the removal of barriers to suppressor acquisition, he seeks to ensure that lawful gun owners can access safety accessories without undue federal oversight or taxation, asserting the importance of protecting Second Amendment freedoms.

Addressing Noise Disturbances
One practical benefit of easing suppressor restrictions is the potential reduction of noise disturbances associated with firearm use. In areas like Burgin, Kentucky, where residents have raised concerns about disruptions from nearby gun ranges, suppressors offer a solution to mitigate noise levels. While not silencing gunfire entirely, suppressors can significantly decrease noise, promoting neighborly coexistence.

Limited Legislative Prospects
Despite the merits of the SHUSH Act, its passage into law faces significant obstacles with a Democratic-controlled Senate and White House. Nevertheless, Good’s introduction of the bill serves as a symbolic gesture to Second Amendment supporters, reaffirming his advocacy for individual gun rights amid a politically charged landscape.

Voter Impact and Perception
Good’s legislative maneuvering ahead of the primary election in Virginia’s 5th District may resonate positively with constituents, particularly among gun-owning voters. By championing firearm freedoms through the SHUSH Act, he aims to solidify his standing as a pro-Second Amendment candidate, strategically positioning himself amidst electoral competition.

Electoral Dynamics and Candidate Strategies
As Good navigates the electoral landscape, he faces challenges not only from political opponents but also from voter scrutiny regarding past actions and party nomination processes. The introduction of the SHUSH Act adds another dimension to the campaign, offering voters a clear delineation of his policy priorities and commitment to safeguarding constitutional rights.

Evaluating Candidate Integrity
In a contested primary race against state Sen. John McGuire, Good’s legislative initiatives may sway undecided voters grappling with competing considerations. Beyond policy alignment, constituents weigh factors such as candidate integrity, electoral transparency, and the broader implications of legislative proposals on individual liberties.

Constituent Perspectives and Voting Decisions
Constituents in Virginia’s 5th District confront a complex decision-making process as they evaluate candidates and their policy platforms. Good’s advocacy for the SHUSH Act resonates with gun-owning voters concerned about regulatory encroachments, prompting reflection on how legislative proposals align with their values and priorities.

The Future of Second Amendment Advocacy
As the primary election approaches, voters in Virginia’s 5th District face critical choices that will shape the trajectory of Second Amendment advocacy. Good’s introduction of the SHUSH Act underscores the ongoing debate over firearm freedoms, highlighting the significance of individual liberties and the role of elected officials in safeguarding constitutional rights.

Influence on Voter Perceptions
What do you think? How do incumbent lawmakers’ legislative initiatives, such as the SHUSH Act, influence voter perceptions and electoral outcomes in primary races? What role do single-issue voter blocs, such as Second Amendment advocates, play in shaping electoral dynamics and candidate strategies?

Electoral Transparency
How can candidates effectively navigate concerns over electoral transparency and party nomination processes to maintain voter trust and support? In what ways do legislative proposals like the SHUSH Act reflect broader debates over individual liberties, regulatory oversight, and public safety?


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What a mess. Gotta love it when uninvited guests start making those demands. As you can see, they want free food, free medical care, free housing and free attorneys. Note that they are flying the Mexican flag at their camp, too.

Some of those demands sent to Denver Mayor Mike Johnson include:

* Migrants will cook their own food with fresh, culturally appropriate ingredients provided by the City instead of premade meals – rice, chicken, flour, oil, butter, tomatoes, onions, etc

* Shower access will be available without time limits & can be accessed whenever

* Medical professional visits will happen regularly & referrals/connections for specialty care will be made as needed

* "Connection to employment support, including work permit applications for those who qualify,"

* "Consultations for each person/family with a free immigration lawyer."

* Privacy within the shelter once moved there

* "No more verbal or physical or mental abuse will be permitted from the staff, including no sheriff sleeping inside & monitoring 24/7 – we are not criminals & won’t be treated as such."


Here is video:



Related story:

TikTok star stuns by revealing she needed surgery to remove vibrator from her rectum​

When will people stop sticking strange objects into their bodily orifices? There are actually products designed with that intended purpose - there is no reason to resort to dumbbells, plastic ducks and yes, even eels.

Humans have developed an unfortunate habit of shoving things where the sun don't shine, and one woman looking for a good time decided a vibrator would be just the ticket.

However, her escapade quite literally became a pain in the butt. While we all know some people find pleasure in pain, this woman's unintentional foray into S&M unfortunately ended in A&E.

Documenting her experience on TikTok earlier this month, British woman Sophs - who goes by the username @sophzaloafz - revealed the vibrator became lodged inside her rectum.

"I got a vibrator stuck up my arse," she matter-of-factly captioned the now-viral clip.

Sophs admitted her indiscretion landed in her hospital, even sharing an X-ray image of the vibrator lodged inside her body. After she failed to retrieve the three-inch toy herself, Sophs said she knew she needed medical help - but first endured an entire night with the still-buzzing vibrator trapped inside her.

In the video, Sophs said she had the object surgically removed when she made it to hospital the following morning. When she awoke from the procedure, the vibrator was sitting next to her in a plastic bag - and apparently, still had some battery life.

She has since made her account private.

According to media outlets who viewed the video, Sophs elaborated on the incident and explained she had been 'getting busy' while her children were asleep. When she realised the vibrator was stuck, she felt too embarrassed to call an ambulance - which led to her rather restless night's sleep.

"I tried to sleep which was quite difficult because it was literally buzzing on my spine. Eventually, I did fall asleep. I woke up and it was off, so one would assume the battery had died. That was very wrong of me to assume," she said.

"I woke up in recovery. On the table was a kidney dish with a plastic bag. Curious old me, who was still on antiseptic [anaesthesia], lent over, grabbed it to see what it was.

"I pressed the on button and it f**king worked, didn't it! I think it must have had some cool technology. It must have had a self-timer. Or [the doctors] thought, 'she had such a good time, let's replace the batteries for her, completely free of charge'."


Sophs' vibrating venture follows a case that made international headlines last month after appearing in an academic medical journal. The case report documented the experience of a Brazilian man who was hospitalised after a metallic, 20cm-long, 2kg dumbbell became lodged in his rectum.

And in 2017, Newshub filed an Official Information Act request with the District Health Board for information on the miscellaneous items that were found up New Zealanders' bums that year.

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/life...rgery-to-remove-vibrator-from-her-rectum.html

I ordered some deep dish pizzas from Bertolini's in Chicago after a friend had tried some. The thin crust were great, but the deep dish were problematic, like deep dish tends to be at home. Lou Malnati's is the only place I've ordered from that seems to have developed a deep dish that ships well, and cooks well at home. So, I thought about getting a heat sink, like you often see at a restaurant. The Bertolini's pizzas require thawing before cooking, so I figured a heat sink would work well. But, I can't find one on Amazon, E-Bay, or anywhere. Amazon doesn't seem to carry them amongst all the pizza supplies they offer. E-Bay has sold them in the past, but none are currently available. I found a restaurant supply place that sells them in bulk, but they won't ship just one.
What kind of a world is this?

The second Florida receiver Iowa offered this week is 2025 three-star, Chase Collier.

Collier talks a budding relationship with another 2025 Iowa recruit, what has impressed him about receivers coach Jon Budmayr, official visit plans and more.

STORY:

No?

***NON-POLITICAL POST — NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR POLITICS, SAVE IT FOR SOMEWHERE ELSE ***

Cool video from Megan Gustafson with her once-again teammate Kate Martin to celebrate the Aces' WNBA title at the White House. Not sure either imagined a future like this when they signed with Iowa so many years ago.

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Deplorable:

Israeli residents twice set fire to the perimeter of the headquarters of UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinians, in East Jerusalem on Thursday, the agency’s chief said. The attacks led to the decision to shut down the compound “until proper security is restored,” he said.
U.N. agency staff members were in the compound when the fire was started, UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said on social media Thursday. No casualties were reported, though the fire damaged outdoor areas. U.N. staff members had to put out the fire themselves before fire officials and police showed up, Lazzarini said.
A crowd accompanied by armed people stood outside the compound, chanting, “Burn down the United Nations,” Lazzarini said, sharing a video posted on Israeli media.
“This is an outrageous development. Once again, the lives of U.N. staff were at a serious risk,” he said.

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Similar incidents have occurred at the compound over the past two months, he said, citing demonstrators throwing rocks at U.N. staff members and buildings, harassment and intimidation of staff members, as well as vandalism and damage to the compound.
“On several occasions, Israeli extremists threatened our staff with guns,” Lazzarini said.
In light of the “second appalling incident in less than a week,” the UNRWA chief said he decided to temporarily close the compound.
Lazzarini said it is the responsibility of the Israeli government to ensure the safety of U.N. personnel and facilities. He called on those with influence in Israel to put an end to the attacks and hold perpetrators responsible.
“Anything less will set a new, dangerous standard,” he added.

The whole country is captivated by CC. If she is on the USA team, the ratings would set records.

My wife thought a CC Logo 3 shoe for girls 6-15 would take off. What Mom is not going to buy that for their daughter?

After decades of hype and doubt, giant factories that can pull thousands of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere are starting to spin up.
Climeworks, a Swiss start-up, opened the biggest carbon absorbing plant in the world on May 8 in Hellisheidi, Iceland. Dubbed “Mammoth,” the plant is designed to remove 36,000 metric tons of carbon each year, the equivalent of taking 8,600 cars off the road.


10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

That makes the new plant nine times bigger than the previous record-holder, the Climeworks “Orca” plant, which opened in Iceland in 2021 — though still tiny given the millions of tons of carbon experts say the world will need to pull out of the air to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius this century.

But Mammoth shows the industry is starting to grow beyond pilot plants and lab demonstrations. “It’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s a much bigger drop in the bucket than any we’ve seen so far,” said Klaus Lackner, who heads the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University.

How Mammoth works​

The Climeworks Mammoth plant is basically a giant air filter. Fans pull air through a series of filters designed to catch stray CO2 molecules, which make up a tiny share of air’s mass — just 0.04 percent. Then, another company called Carbfix mixes the CO2 with water and pumps it deep underground, where it reacts with basalt rock and turns into stone.



The entire process runs on Iceland’s plentiful geothermal energy, so powering the machines doesn’t produce more carbon emissions. Outside scientists confirmed that the Climeworks Orca project and an earlier pilot plant really do remove carbon while producing very few emissions in a 2021 analysis published in Nature.
Climeworks then sells offsets based on that captured carbon. It doesn’t publicly say how much it charges its big corporate customers, including Microsoft, Shopify and Stripe, for the service — but it offers regular people carbon removal subscriptions at a price of $1,500 per metric ton of carbon removed. More than 20,000 people have signed up, according to the company’s website.
“The only people purchasing Climeworks removals at this point are very wealthy individuals or very wealthy companies that are … paying a lot of money to bring down the costs of what they see as a potential future industry,” said Rudy Kahsar, manager of carbon dioxide removal at the clean energy think tank RMI.


As more carbon removal plants pop up and get bigger, experts hope, the costs will fall closer to $100 per ton, which is the target price many start-ups are aiming for, Lackner said.

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“$100 is tolerable,” he said. “The world can manage and afford it. At $1,000, they cannot.”

Bigger than Mammoth​

The record-breaking Mammoth plant may soon be dwarfed by much larger facilities set to open this decade. Next year, a subsidiary of the oil company Occidental Petroleum plans to open a plant in Texas capable of removing 500,000 metric tons of carbon per year — equivalent to emissions from 119,000 cars. Climeworks is designing another plant in Louisiana it says will capture 1 million tons of carbon annually by 2030. That’s 238,000 cars.


Experts say these early plants will play an important role in proving whether these machines work — and just how expensive and energy-hungry they will be.


“We need to show that these facilities can be done at a commercial scale so we can see that they work, that they’re [socially] accepted, that you can get financing for it,” said Kahsar. Mammoth “paves the way for other facilities to come behind it.”
Capturing carbon from the atmosphere remains controversial. Critics say the technology is an unrealistic distraction or an excuse to keep using fossil fuels. But a 2022 U.N. report concluded the world is so far behind on cutting greenhouse gas emissions that capturing at least some carbon is now “unavoidable” if humanity hopes to meet its climate goals.

“It’s not an excuse to do nothing,” said Eric Gimon, a senior fellow at the energy and climate policy think tank Energy Innovation. “We still need to be firing on all cylinders for everything else we need to do to decarbonize.”

Why do we need carbon capture?​

Although solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other established green technologies can cut most of the world’s greenhouse emissions, U.N. climate scientists predict there will be some stubborn emissions remaining by 2050 in sectors like air travel, shipping and steelmaking.

To meet key climate targets, the world may need to directly capture as much as 600 million tons of CO2 per year, according to the International Energy Agency, or as little as 20 million tons of CO2 per year, according to a 2022 report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That report notes there hasn’t been much research on the potential impact of direct air capture, which makes it hard to predict how big a role the technology will play in fighting climate change.
But the report predicts some amount of carbon capture will be necessary to offset whatever emissions remain.
“If we get stuck, and there’s a last few percent [of emissions] that’s really hard to do … we’ve got a way to take care of it,” Gimon said.