Thursday, November 10, 2016



Hindus lead in college education in USA

Hindus have the largest share of those with a college degree in USA as compared to any other major religious group, per an analysis by Pew Research Center (PRC), a nonpartisan fact tank headquartered in Washington DC.

According to a chart posted in this analysis; 77 per cent of Hindus have college degrees, thus topping this chart which lists 30 US religious groups. Among the religious groups given; Jews are at number 3, Buddhists at 7, Atheists at 9, Muslims at 12, United Methodist Church at 13, Mormons at 16, Catholics at 19, Southern Baptist Convention at 24, Jehovah's Witness at 28, etc.

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Substitute teacher lost his temper and picked up a disruptive student to kick him out of class - causing the boy to bang his head against a wall

What was the teacher supposed to do?

A teacher who caused a disruptive primary school student to bang his head against a wall during an outburst has been reprimanded.

Juris George Karklins, a teacher for 28-years at Whangarei Primary School in New Zealand’s North Island, was found guilty of serious misconduct while disciplining a student in November 2015, Stuff reported.

Karklins was working as a relief teacher for the class when he punished a disruptive student after a three strike warning by requesting he sit on the staffroom steps during recess.

After discovering the boy had disobeyed his order Karklins sought advice from the principal who told him to find the boy.

Karklins was unable to find the student during the break and the boy’s disruptive behaviour continued when class resumed.

Karklins attempted to ignore the student and continue teaching the class.

'When this did not work [Karklins] lost his temper and forcibly removed the student from the classroom,' the New Zealand Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal Council said.  ‘He did so by walking up to the student, picking him up, and taking him to the cloak room, where he deposited him on the floor.

‘At this time the student was thrashing around. In the process of being set down on the cloakroom floor, the student banged his head against the wall.’

Karklins acknowledged his actions were inappropriate.

He accepted a censure which will be visible on the teacher’s register until his practicing certificate expires in April next year.

He must also complete a professional development course within six months and must pay 50 per cent of the tribunals costs and 50 per cent of the Complaints Assessment Committee’s costs.

SOURCE 






Australia: QUT students to pursue defamation suit against Gillian Triggs

About time for someone to call the old bag to account. She's just a Leftist bigot who doesn't care what damage she does

Gillian Triggs is under renewed fire and facing a defamation ­action from Queensland University of Technology students who accused her yesterday of making false and damaging statements implying they and their Facebook posts were racist.

The Human Rights Commission president was asked by the students’ barrister Tony Morris QC yesterday to publish a retraction and apology, make no further “defamatory” comments about the students, and pay damages and costs. The warning to Professor Triggs that she faces being sued comes after she told Fairfax Media and the ABC’s 7.30 that the human rights body had acted in “good faith” and in consultation with the students during a 14-month investigation into Facebook posts from May 2013.

QUT staffer Cindy Prior had named seven students in May 2014 in her complaint to the ­commission of racial hatred under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act over posts they wrote after being told they could not use an indigenous-only computer lab at QUT. In one post, Alex Wood said: “QUT stopping segregation with segregation?”

The claims by Professor Triggs are contradicted by the commission’s internal documents and its acknowledgment in legal letters that it did not tell the students at any stage that they were the ­subject of a complaint for the 14 months from its lodgement by Ms Prior to soon before it was finalised by the rights body.

Internal documents obtained under Freedom of Information show the commission never advised the students or engaged them in any way, despite official guidelines requiring such disclosures to people accused of racial vilification. That was left to QUT and meant the students were not made aware until late July last year, three business day before the commission ran a conciliation conference with Ms Prior.

The students accuse the commission of breaching their human rights by not telling them of the complaint until it was too late to prepare, obtain legal advice and potentially prevent it being escalated to the Federal Circuit Court as a $250,000 damages claim. The claim was thrown out last week, 3½ years after the Facebook posts.

“Much of what you said was knowingly and demonstrably false,” Mr Morris wrote yesterday in a defamation “concerns notice” to Professor Triggs about her ­interview on the ABC’s 7.30 with Leigh Sales.

“You said ‘what we did was do what we normally do which is ­investigate the facts, get a sense of what each of the parties is saying, and then attempt to conciliate the matter’. There was no investigation. There was no attempt to ‘get a sense of what each of the parties is saying’. The truth is that the (commission) sat on the complaint for 14 months, without contacting any of the students or even telling them that a complaint had been made against them.

Only two of the seven students were present at the purported ‘conciliation conference’, and those two students had no more than three business days’ notice to attend.

“You said ‘for 14 months or at least for 12 of those months we ­believed that in good faith we were going to get a conciliation’. It is impossible that the (AHRC) held any such belief — let alone that it held such a belief in ‘good faith’ — when it had not even made contact with (the ­students).”

Mr Morris said Professor Triggs defamed the students when she said on 7.30 that while some cases were vexatious or frivolous, “this was one that had a level of substance”. “The complaints were ones that attracted a certain measure of concern about the nature of the comments that were made,” she said. “I won’t repeat the language but it was worrying and troubling.”

He said her statement meant the students wrote Facebook posts that were “so abhorrently racist that it could not with propriety or dignity be repeated on a mid-­evening television program run by the national broadcaster”. Mr Morris said the claim was “palpably false” and that there was no basis for the accusation his clients used language of such a racist character that she felt it unseemly to repeat on air.

The letter asks Professor Triggs to pay compensation and costs “given that you explicitly claimed on two occasions to be speaking ‘in good faith’, even though you either knew that what you were saying was untrue, or spoke with reckless indifference to the truth or falsity of your remarks”.

One of the students, Calum Thwaites, told The Australian: “I never received one piece of correspondence from the commission. There is absolutely no truth in what she said about that (on Monday night) on 7.30 and to Fairfax Media. She was claiming the students were being consulted from the start by the commission and that there was this ‘good faith’ dialogue but that is completely false.”

The documents include a contemporaneous diary note by a commission officer managing the complaint, showing that less than a week before the conciliation conference she told QUT’s solicitor “it would not be possible to postpone” it; that QUT should have contacted the students; and that “if a student is notified and wants to attend next week, they will have to make time”.

Professor Triggs did not ­respond to a request for comment.

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