Quick Hits.
Another edition of our running series of news of note, plus a “Rule 5″ picture.
This week we are going to look at people with “chutzpah” defined as “unmitigated effrontery or impudence; gall, audacity; nerve”.
The City of Pittsburgh received a $40 million dollar gift from the Bill Gates Foundation to help improve their education system.
The school system proceeded to spend a third of the gift on consultants.
Two years after Pittsburgh Public Schools received $40 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to increase teachers’ effectiveness, the district has spent or allocated nearly a third of it on consultants and contractors, mainly from outside the state.
Administrators told board members that they need consultants to perform specialized work outside the expertise of district personnel.
The first thing to notice is that the school system claims it doesn’t have the expertise to make things better. That is quite a change from the usual cry from unions of “no oversight” and “we know what we are doing.” The school system can’t have it both ways. It cannot claim on one hand that it needs outside help and then on the other hand claim monitoring and input from outside groups is not welcome.
The district anticipates spending about $19 million by the end of next year, about 68 percent of it on consultants. It must use the money as outlined in its grant application: increasing teacher effectiveness through more comprehensive evaluations and creating better learning environments. The end result, the district told the Gates foundation, would be higher-achieving students.
Nineteen million dollars that won’t help the city school system at all. But it will pad the accounts of consultants.
Remember, it is all “for the kids.”
Brian Terry was a border patrol agent who was killed in a shootout along the Mexican border. According to AzCentral.com,
Terry and members of his tactical unit got into a midnight shootout on Dec. 14 with a group of suspected banditos near Rio Rico. Terry died. A suspect named Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, who suffered a gunshot wound, was arrested at the scene.
Osorio-Arellanes was charged initially with illegal entry in a case that is published on PACER, an online database of federal court filings. But that case was terminated when Osorio-Arellanes and several unidentified co-defendants were secretly indicted April 20 for murder by a federal grand jury.
The case has garnered attention as the guns used to kill Terry are allegedly from the botched “Fast and Furious” gun running sting the ATF and the DOJ botched. What has also caught the eye of many is that the details of the case and the Federal indictments have been sealed.
Now, in a showcase of chutzpah, a group of immigration advocates are calling for an investigation into the shooting as the released information demeans Latinos.
Latino groups are going to demonstrate this weekend in Phoenix at Paradise Valley State Park. Members of civil rights group Nuestros Reconquistos believe that people have been lied to about the death of border agent Brian Terry, who was supposedly killed by Mexican drug cartel members.
“The misinformation about Brian Terry’s death is mind boggling. It was just a lie to get people all riled up about illegal immigration,” claims Nuestros Reconquistos President Manuel Longoria. “There is other information going around saying that Terry was accidentally killed by another U.S. border agent. The mainstream media is refusing to report this!”
So Terry gets killing in a fire fight with Latinos on the border who used illegal weapons and the advocates want to blame the Border Patrol?
That takes some cajones.
Finally, Max Mosley is the powerful head of the FIA, the governing body of Formula One Racing. The man has made millions, if not billions off of Formula One.
In 2008, Mosley was caught in an alleged “Nazi themed sex orgy.” In July of that year, Mosley won a lawsuit for invasion of privacy against the newspaper that originally reported the incident.
Part of Mosley’s defense was the orgy or sex game was not “Nazi themed,” but rather the people in the room yelled at each other in German.
We suggest you make your own conclusions about that.
However, not content to let the incident go, Mosley is now suing.
The former Formula One boss revealed he is taking legal action against Google during his testimony before the Leveson inquiry at London’s royal courts of justice on Thursday.
Mosley is battling to remove from the internet false and libellous references to an alleged “Nazi-themed” orgy and a News of the World video. He told the inquiry he had taken legal action in 22 countries and ordered the removal of material from 193 websites in Germany.
Not only is he suing in Europe, Mosley is thinking of suing Google in the US.
Mosley said he was considering fresh legal action against Google in California, where the company is based, if it did not censor the results.
A Google spokesman said: “Google’s search results reflect the information available on billions of web pages on the internet. We don’t, and can’t, control what others post online, but when we’re told that a specific page is illegal under a court order, then we move quickly to remove it from our search results.”
In essence, Mosley wants Google to censor the internet.
Good luck with that one.
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