Teacher accused of child bondage LOS ANGELES (AP) — Authorities say the elementary school teacher told the children that it was a game. Once inside his third-grade classroom, they say, he blindfolded them, gagged them and set cockroaches crawling on
Teacher accused of child bondage
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Authorities say the elementary school teacher told the children that it was a game. Once inside his third-grade classroom, they say, he blindfolded them, gagged them and set cockroaches crawling on their faces.
And then, Mark Berndt photographed them, creating hundreds of images that would eventually lead to his arrest, police say.
On Tues-
day, Berndt, 61, was sitting in jail on charges that he committed lewd acts on 23 boys and girls, ages 6 to 10, between 2008 and 2010. None of them complained about Berndt’s behavior, authorities said.
Police and school officials learned of it when a film processor found Berndt’s photos more than a year ago.
Since then, the school district fired Berndt, and police put him under surveillance.
“If it wasn’t for the film processor, this could still be continuing today,” said Lt. Carlos Marquez of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department.
Berndt was arrested Monday at his home in Torrance and was being held on $2.3 million bail.
Some parents at the school Tuesday complained that officials at Miramonte Elementary School should have notified them when the photos were found.
School bomb plot suspect charged
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Authorities on Tuesday charged a 16-year-old boy with a felony in what they say was a plot to detonate a bomb at a Utah high school.
The teenager, along with Dallin Morgan, 18, had planned for months to bomb an assembly at Roy High School, then steal a plane from a nearby airport and flee the country, police said.
Both were arrested last week. Morgan has been charged with possession of a weapon of mass destruction. He is set for a court appearance today and faces a possible life sentence if convicted on the first-degree felony charge.
Prosecutors on Tuesday charged the 16-year-old with the same count in juvenile court, but have filed a motion seeking to try him as an adult.
“The defendant’s emotional attitude, pattern of living, environment and home life demonstrate that he has sufficient maturity to appreciate the seriousness of these charges and to be tried as an adult,” prosecutors wrote in the motion filed Tuesday in Ogden’s 2nd District Court.
Moon base may be within reach
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to create a lunar colony that he says could become a U.S. state. There’s his grand research plan to figure out what makes the human brain tick. And he’s warned about electromagnetic pulse attacks leaving America without electricity.
To some, these ideas sound like science fiction. But several science policy experts say the former House speaker’s ideas are based in mainstream science. Gingrich’s promise that “by the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon” was ridiculed by rival Mitt Romney.
Returning to the moon and building an outpost there is not new. Until three years ago, it was U.S. policy and billions of dollars were spent on that idea.
Staying on the moon dates at least to 1969, when a government committee recommended that NASA first build a winged, reusable space shuttle followed by a space station and then a moon outpost. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush proposed going to the moon and staying there.
Many resist race labels in census
WASHINGTON (AP) — When the 2010 census asked people to classify themselves by race, more than 21.7 million — at least 1 in 14 — went beyond the standard labels and wrote in such terms as “Arab,” “Haitian,” “Mexican” and “multiracial.”
The unpublished data, the broadest tally to date of such write-in responses, are a sign of a diversifying America that’s wrestling with changing notions of race.
The figures show most of the write-in respondents are multiracial Americans or Hispanics, many of whom don’t believe they fit within the four government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander or American Indian/Alaska Native. Because Hispanic is defined as an ethnicity and not a race, some 18 million Latinos used the “some other race” category to establish a Hispanic racial identity.
“I have my Mexican experience, my white experience but I also have a third identity if you will that transcends the two, a mixed experience,” said Thomas Lopez, 39, a write-in respondent from Los Angeles. “For some multiracial Americans, it is not simply being two things, but an understanding and appreciation of what it means to be mixed.”
