Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.

In an era when college students commonly take longer than four years to get a bachelor's degree, some U.S. schools are looking anew at an old idea: slicing a year off their undergraduate programs to save families time and money.

As if the recession had not given community college advocates enough to worry about, some fear that the anti-tax sentiment stirred by Tea Party activists could endanger their federal, state and local funding.

One Tea Party group in New Jersey is questioning Warren County Community College's plans to open a satellite campus, meant to accommodate the institution's burgeoning enrollment in outlying areas and free up space on its main campus. As required by New Jersey law, half of the $7.3 million bond to buy and renovate a commercial building for the new campus would be paid from an existing pool of state funds. The remainder, officials say, would be paid for by leasing additional space in the renovated building to interested tenants.

A Montgomery County teacher has agreed to apologize to a 13-year-old student whom he reprimanded and sent to the office for twice refusing to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance, said a lawyer who represents the student.

Street theater. Communes. Manifestoes. Denunciations of "the system." The counterculture is back. Only this time it's on the right.

Political factions that are out of power have a choice. They can form a counter-establishment or a counterculture. A counter-establishment (a term that Sidney Blumenthal used to describe the neoconservatives in the 1970s) seeks to return to power by reassuring voters that it is sober and responsible. A counter-establishment publishes policy papers and holds conferences and its members endure their exile in think tanks and universities.

In contrast, a counterculture refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the rules of the game that it has lost. Instead of moving toward the center, the counterculture heads for the fringes. Like a cult, it creates its own parallel reality, seceding from a corrupt and wicked society into morally and politically pure enclaves.

THE .50 CALIBER Bushmaster bolt action rifle is a serious weapon. The model that Pvt. 1st Class Lee Pray is saving up for has a 2,500-yard range and comes with a Mark IV scope and an easy-load magazine. When the 25-year-old drove me to a mall in Watertown, New York, near the Fort Drum Army base, he brought me to see it in its glass case—he visits it periodically, like a kid coveting something at the toy store. It'll take plenty of military paychecks to cover the $5,600 price tag, but he considers the Bushmaster essential in his preparations to take on the US government when it declares martial law.

His belief that that day is imminent has led Pray to a group called Oa/th Kee/pers, one of the fastest-growing "patriot" organizations on the right.

Most of the men's gripes revolve around policies that began under President Bush but didn't scare them so much at the time. "Too many conservatives relied on Bush's character and didn't pay attention," founder Rho/des told me. "Only now, with Obama, do they worry and see what has been done. I trusted Bush to only go after the terrorists. But what do you think can happen down the road when they say, 'I think you are a threat to the nation?'"

It is a grand vision: a global college with no tuition, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

When the higher education entrepreneur Shai Reshef laid out his ambitious plan to build a free university that would use modern technology to spread the promise of a college degree to all corners of the earth, he got an enthusiastic reaction from some high-profile institutions. The United Nations has backed the venture. So has Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Reshef and his lieutenants also like to mention the many letters of support and offers to pitch in from professors worldwide.

Questions about the so-called University of the People abounded: How do you build quality programs without charging tuition? How effective would the project’s peer-to-peer pedagogical model be in classrooms of students from vastly different cultural and educational traditions? Who would accredit such an operation at a time when the perceived value -- even necessity -- of a postsecondary education is ascendant in virtually every country? Reshef’s heart seems to be in the right place. But is his head?

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

South Carolina will no longer recognize U.S. currency as legal tender, if State Rep. Mike Pitts has his way.

Pitts, a fourth-term Republican from Laurens, introduced legislation earlier this month that would ban what he calls “the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver and gold coin” in South Carolina.

If the bill were to become law, South Carolina would no longer accept or use anything other than silver and gold coins as a form of payment for any debt, meaning paper money would be out in the Palmetto State.

[Texas School Board member Don] McLeroy moved that Margaret Sanger, the birth-control pioneer, be included because she “and her followers promoted eugenics,” that language be inserted about Ronald Reagan’s “leadership in restoring national confidence” following Jimmy Carter’s presidency and that students be instructed to “describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” The injection of partisan politics into education went so far that at one point another Republican board member burst out in seemingly embarrassed exasperation, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!” Nevertheless, most of McLeroy’s proposed amendments passed by a show of hands.

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – In the wake of his comments about the earthquake in Haiti, televangelist Pat Robertson has become a “public relations nightmare” and a “gynormous embarrassment to me, personally,” God said today.

Washington, D.C. – Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, praised an independent committee at the Department of Defense for adding emergency contraception (EC) to the list of medications made available to servicemembers overseas. Approximately 350,000 women serve in the military or depend on military facilities for their health care abroad.

Power lines down, thousands of other Lakota and other tribes people, already face 75 to 85% unemployment, before a blizzard and an ice storm that added six inches of ice weight to utility poles – hit. Two weeks since those lines were knocked down and most of the electricity went with it. They managed to get the water turned back on at Cheyenne River, unfortunately most of the water goes into a pipe system that failed during the storm. The pipes are broken. With the wind chill it was minus 19 there today. What we find out about this on the Senate Committee of Indian Affairs – some means of donating to the affected tribes, means of underwriting the energy companies now distributing propane tanks by hand? An emergency hearing on a crisis there? Nothing. There’s a committee meeting Thursday to discuss regular business. The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs – AWOL. Today’s worst persons in the world.

The planned uranium mine site in the southern Black Hills can impact four aquifers. Powertech, Inc. USA plans to begin uranium extraction in 2011 and operate for 15 years in the permit area of 10,580 acres located in Dewey and Burdock Counties, north of Edgemont, SD.

http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/80412587.html

On Dec. 4 an action was taken against Crow Creek tribal land near my district that shook the absolute foundations of Indian law all the way back to the 1800s. Yet, few people were in the small room in Highmore, S.D. to see this monumental action and few other tribes even know it has taken place. Any tribe with land should shutter with the magnitude of what this precedent could mean for themselves or their individual tribal members. The Internal Revenue Service collected against 7,100 acres – 11 square miles – of Indian owned land in Hyde County, S.D. This particular parcel was part of the original Crow Creek treaty boundaries, but the treaty was subsequently broken and this land was sold to LeMaster. Interestingly enough, our tribe was able to use settlement money from another federal land taking to purchase this land back in 1998.