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Statesman reports police have arrested a former Georgetown teacher’s aide accused of breaking a student’s wrist after the boy threw a marker at him at Forbes Middle School, according to a warrant.


Kelvin Daniel Fuller, 53, was charged with injury to a child. Georgetown police were informed about the incident on Nov. 25, the warrant said.

An 11-year-old boy told investigators Nov. 27 that Fuller intentionally pushed him to the ground at school, causing the boy to break his right wrist, the warrant said.
The boy said he was upset and “intentionally irritating” Fuller, according to the warrant. He said he was in front of Fuller’s desk when Fuller walked toward him and pushed him in the chest with his hand, the warrant said.

The boy told investigators he fell backward on his right arm. Another student witnessed the incident and told investigators the same story as the injured boy, the warrant said.

Fuller did not want to answer certain questions when a police officer interviewed him on Dec. 18, the warrant said. “It appeared to me that Kelvin was not comfortable answering certain questions about his anger issues and past employment with other school districts,” the warrant said.

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LA Timesreports a former Redlands schoolteacher convicted of having sex with three of her students, and who gave birth to a child fathered by one of the teens, has been released from San Bernardino County jail after serving six months of her one-year sentence.

Laura Elizabeth Whitehurst, 29, was released Jan.5, according to jail records. In addition to wearing a GPS monitor, Whitehurst is required to register as a sex offender. Whitehurst was sentenced under a plea deal reached with the San Bernardino district attorney's office that resulted in her 41 felony charges reduced to six. She had faced up to 29 years in prison.

Whitehurst must remain on probation for five years and undergo counseling. If she violates the terms of probation, she could spend more than six years in prison.

After Whitehurst was arrested in July 2013, she pleaded guilty to engaging in sex acts with three boys while teaching at Citrus Valley and Redlands high schools. She also pleaded guilty to four counts of unlawful sexual intercourse and two counts of oral copulation of a person under 18.

San Bernardino County Judge Arthur Harrison agreed to the plea despite objections from the victims and their families. The father of Whitehurst's child, who was 16 at the time, asked Harrison to reject the deal, saying he had been subject to manipulation and countless sexual assaults.

"Physically, I feel sick to my stomach thinking about the manipulation I was subjected to," said the teen father of her child. "Physically sick that I was not the only victim. Physically sick that I am one of the very few here today putting a voice and face to the destruction Ms. Whitehurst has caused.

"And physically sick that Ms. Whitehurst is facing minimal consequences for her stomach-turning violations of me and other boys," he continued.

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The Record / Herald News reports Breaking a day of silence as the George Washington Bridge controversy mushroomed, Governor Christie issued a terse, four sentence statement late Wednesday in which he claimed to have no knowledge that his deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority were involved in a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes leading to the world’s busiest bridge. - 

Electronic messages between the three Christie loyalists are replete with references and insults to Fort Lee’s mayor — who had failed to endorse Christie for re-election — and they chronicle how he tried to reach Port Authority officials in a vain effort to eliminate the paralyzing gridlock that overwhelmed his town of 35,000, which sits in the shadow of the bridge.


Read emails between Christie administration and Port Authority executives: View / Download 
The documents obtained by The Record raise serious doubts about months of claims by the Christie administration that the September closures of local access lanes to the George Washington Bridge were part of a traffic study initiated solely by the Port Authority. Instead, they show that one of the governor’s top aides was deeply involved in the decision to choke off the borough’s access to the bridge, and they provide the strongest indication yet that it was part of a politically-motivated vendetta—a notion that Christie has publicly denied.

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National Review reports those who have elected to keep close tabs on the reactions to Obamacare’s blotchy rollout will presumably have noticed that it has been marked by admissions of guilt. The latest such confession comes from The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber, who bluntly conceded yesterday that 

“Obamacare actually paves the way toward single payer.” Pushing back against Michael Moore’s unsettling criticisms of the law, Schreiber tweeted:

Dear liberals bummed about Obamacare: Don't sweat it. It's going to get us to a single-payer system before long. http://t.co/2tGykCyrSc
— Noam Scheiber (@noamscheiber) January 6, 2014

This, Scheiber made sure to explain, was not an accident, and nor was it merely a dose of post hoc optimism. Obamacare, he claimed, is in fact “a deceptively sneaky way to get the health care system both of us really want” — that is, single payer. And “Republicans are in some sense playing into the trap Obamacare laid for them.”

I honestly do not know whether Scheiber’s prediction is correct. When government wishes to expand itself, it is tough for people to resist, and the instances are legion of people who wanted a little change but were subjected instead to a lot. Still, I suspect that this will not be the case with Obamacare. For a start, the rollicking disaster that has been the law’s launch will now be projected into every home each and every time an expansion of government is suggested. And, disappointingly for the movement that spawned the change, Americans appear to be reacting to it by concludingthat government should henceforth have less — not more — to do with health care. Either way, whatever happens in the future, I do know this: When Republicans have written their own version of Scheiber’s column, complaining that Obamacare is but a “deceptively sneaky way to get” to single payer, they have been immediately denounced for hysteria and mendacity and invited to remove the tin foil.

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