SAN JOSE (KPIX 5) –- After hours of contentious and boisterous debate, the San Jose City Council late Tuesday night voted to remove a controversial Christopher Columbus statue from the City Hall lobby.
The statue of Columbus has taken a prominent place at San Jose’s City Hall since the 1950’s.
Much of Tuesday night’s debate came when city officials suggested places to put the statue. However, every suggestion aroused opposition.
One idea was to put it at the San Jose Mineta Airport, but that was considered too controversial. No local museum reportedly wants it. Finally, the council members gave leaders of the local Italian-American community six weeks to find a suitable location before the statue is simply placed into storage.
Among those who supported the statue’s removal was San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo.
“Columbus never landed in the Alviso Marina. So there is no policy basis for keeping a statue of somebody who was not from San Jose in City Hall,” said Liccardo.
The marble statue, hand carved in Italy, was a gift to the city of San Jose from Italian-American groups in 1958.
Some members of those same groups still want the statue to stay.
“It’s kind of a setback in our culture. Columbus is renown throughout the world, not just in Italy,” said Tony Zerbo with the Italian American Heritage Foundation. “Italian Americans here, in San Francisco and throughout the Bay Area are very proud of that.”
But over the decades, the statue has become a focal point in San Jose culture wars.
While some view Columbus as a brave explorer, others see him as a ruthless colonizer.
The statue has been attacked and pieced back together twice.
“Look, I’m Italian American. I think my grandfather was a member of the group that donated it,” said Liccardo. “But I think that our understanding of history evolves as we learn more.”
San Jose has a history of public art controversy.
A statue of Thomas Fallon raising the American flag over San Jose during the war with Mexico was kept in crates for years because it offended Mexican Americans.
Another statue of an Aztec plumed serpent was commissioned to provide cultural balance.
Statue backers say they expected more support from Liccardo.
“I’m really disappointed in him, he’s supposed to be our leader in the Italian American community,” said Zerbo.
WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) — A Massachusetts man was charged with accepting money to marry six women to help them evade immigration laws.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Peter Hicks, 57, of Worcester, married the women from sub-Saharan African nations between 2003 and 2013 and filed for immigration benefits for four of them. Some of the women were in the U.S. illegally.
Authorities also allege that on at least one occasion, he was still married to one woman at the time of his marriage to another.
Hicks was released following an initial appearance in federal court in Worcester on Tuesday. He faces a maximum of five years in prison if convicted. His federal public defender did not return a call for comment.
The U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts said Hicks acknowledged during an interview to marrying three of the women solely to obtain immigration benefits for them, The Telegram of Worcester reported .
According to the criminal complaint, federal agents went to Hicks’ home in 2014 but he asked to them instead at a nearby doughnut shop. There, he allegedly told the agents that he had found God and wanted to “set the record straight,” and that he had married the women so they could obtain legal immigration status in the U.S.
During a later interview, Hicks told agents that he was paid to marry African women who were in the U.S. illegally, according to the complaint.
Some left-wing activists are not thrilled that Democrats selected Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-MA)—a privileged “white man”— to give the response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday evening, arguing that it will be tougher for Democrats to attack Trump as a white guy who inherited his wealth with another white liberal who inherited his fortune. They are also slamming Democrats for selecting someone who is not progressive enough.
The left-wing media outlet Splinter blasted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for believing that “a white man from a storied political dynasty who is, by all accounts, not one of Capitol Hill’s pioneering forces—will ‘do an excellent job in making clear that Democrats are laser-focused on enacting policies to benefit middle class Americans, not special interests or the wealthiest.’”
The founder of Moms Demand Action, a prominent gun control group, argued that Democrats should have selected a woman of color to deliver the response. Others echoed the same sentiments, arguing that is is “really inexcusable,” “tone deaf,” and “an extraordinary waste of a valuable opportunity” to not feature a woman of color to represent the resistance.
Another asked: “Maybe Dems could have tried to find someone who isn’t a white guy?”
A Democratic lawmaker reportedly told the Wall Street Journal: “Kennedy is an establishment pick, which is tone deaf after the 2016 rejection of the Bush and Clinton dynasty.”
The New Republic pointed out that left-wing activists are also upset that Kennedy did not vote for the Medicare-for-all bill or marijuana legalization.
In the final moments of her life, 16-year-old Valaree Schwab was just trying to get back her house keys.
The New Rochelle High School junior had slipped out for lunch at around noon on Jan. 10 despite a policy against leaving campus at the award-winning school.
She was soon knocked to the ground and robbed at a nearby McDonald’s by a gang of school bullies. Then her teenage tormentors — who harassed her on a daily basis about her tattoos, love for the band Nirvana and affinity for social activism — proceeded to stalk her for the next hour.
They followed her into a Subway sandwich shop and then a Dunkin’ Donuts — where she would spend her last conscious seconds gasping for air, clutching the hand of a young cashier as blood poured from two stab wounds to her heart and lungs.
“She didn’t even know she was stabbed,” the worker recalled to The Post.
“She was screaming, saying that somebody stole her keys . . . The next thing you know, you see a commotion, and then everybody’s gone, and then [she was] just standing by herself, bleeding.”
The green-eyed teen flatlined once in the ambulance, again at the hospital and a final time at around 4 p.m., just after her school’s eighth period would have ended.
“She was bullied, stalked, assaulted, robbed and ultimately stabbed and murdered by her own classmates,” said Valaree’s aunt, Monica Furrelle Schwab.
“There aren’t too many words to express how we feel.”
Over the next eight days, two more New Rochelle High students were assaulted in another possible bullying case.
Parents, teachers and students in the well-off, leafy Westchester County enclave appeared baffled over how the spate of violence could have happened in their typically peaceful town, where the most they usually had to worry about was the occasional schoolyard scuffle.
Pizzeria owner Michael Napolitano, 45, whose shop was the scene of the second violent incident, said that in the two and a half decades that he has owned local businesses, he has never seen anything like it.
“It’s a good community, it’s a good school,’’ Napolitano said of New Rochelle High, whose grads include “60 Minutes’’ founder Don Hewitt, TV journalist Andrea Mitchell and “Shaft’’ movie star Richard Roundtree.
“Great kids come out of [the school]. It’s sad. It’s gotta get better.”
Behavioral experts aren’t sure how fast change can come.
“It’s everywhere — it’s everywhere,” Andrea Altshuler, a clinical social worker specializing in adolescents, said of bullying.
“I think that growing up now is so different than anything we experienced,’’ she told The Post. “There are so many more different avenues for bullying than there ever has been in history.
“Kids getting exposed to such a windfall of information that they don’t understand creates pent-up anxiety, pent-up anger, pent-up emotion that manifests itself in impulsive activity in adolescents.
“Maybe in some level that’s what’s happening at New Rochelle.”
Police say 16-year-old New Rochelle student Z’Inah Brown was among Valaree’s five or six tormentors that violent day — and allegedly killed the teen with a steak knife after she dared to fight back with pepper spray.
Modal TriggerZ’Inah BrownWestchester County District Attorney's Office
On a sunny Friday morning soon after Valaree’s death, Maryann Coyle, 54, and her daughter Melissa, 18, went to the Dunkin’ Donuts where Schwab was killed.
“We feel jittery even coming in here after that,” Maryann said, holding a bag of doughnuts and orange juice.
While a makeshift memorial to Valaree, replete with stuffed animals, drawings and handwritten notes, had been growing outside the North Avenue Dunkin’ Donuts, violence involving students at the school has only been intensifying.
A week after Valaree’s death, a 15-year-old student was followed to Gemelli’s Pizzeria, on North Avenue, and jumped by a group of older teens while trying to order a slice. Some said the attack was a form of bullying.
Police said six or seven young men between the ages of 16 and 17 swarmed the victim — who admittedly had been violent when younger — throwing chairs and bottles at him. Police said the victim grabbed a few wine bottles to defend himself and chased the boys out of the restaurant.
“I ran up there, and it was just a mess,’’ shop owner Napolitano told The Post.
“A bunch of broken bottles of wine all over the place, blood, some tables were broken, food on the floor.”
The next day, the boy who was attacked came to school allegedly ready for battle.
At around 8:50 a.m., in a classroom right before third period, he plunged a weapon into the torso of a 16-year-old boy, leaving the stabbed teen with a punctured lung and lacerated spleen. The 15-year-old attacker then fled and is still at large.
The community, already fractured by Valaree’s death, reeled.
Modal TriggerA police officer outside New Rochelle High SchoolDavid McGlynn
Parents flocked to the campus. Teachers locked their doors. Frantic texts were exchanged. How could this happen again?
Erica Martinez, whose 15-year-old son, Gianni, was close friends with Valaree, said her boy was scared to say goodbye to her before heading off to school the morning after the third attack.
“He said, ‘Well, Mom, I hope I don’t get stabbed today,’ ” Martinez, 47, recalled.
Gianni told The Post that after the third violent incident, “Everybody was panicking.
“Like, who’s next? What’s going to happen?” he said.
Maryann Coyle, the mom at Dunkin’, said she takes students to the high school every morning as part of a car pool, and “I had one [student] this morning, she didn’t want to go to school today because she’s scared.’’
Modal TriggerMaryann Coyle outside Dunkin’ Donuts where high school student Valeree Schwab was stabbed to deathDavid McGlynn
The recent statistics on bullying are sobering.
According to StopBullying.gov, nearly a quarter of US students in grades 6 through 12 have experienced bullying, and more than 70 percent have witnessed it firsthand in school.
Cedeno, 18, later told The Post in a jailhouse interview that he “just snapped.” He said he had suffered from bullying since the sixth grade for being bisexual and dressing differently.
Dr. Jennifer Powell-Lunder, a Westchester therapist and adjunct professor at Pace University for graduate psychology students, said, “Why are responses so violent these days?
“Some research has told us the threshold for shock has really gone down because kids today are so much more exposed to violence with social media and the internet.
“So they’re not understanding the severity of their responses and just how scary and violent they are.”
Altshuler, the Westchester social worker, said some parents are little help.
“Adults now don’t understand what kids have to deal with because we didn’t experience it with all the technology and how kids can never turn off,’’ she said.
“There’s no time for kids to just . . . be home with their family alone, relax their brain and just be — because there’s always the pressure of social media.’’
Alana Millings, a therapist who works behind the Dunkin’ Donuts where Valaree was murdered, said, “I don’t know what it all means, but I do know that these are not isolated [bullying] incidents.
“Obviously, at the level of murdering someone, that doesn’t happen every day. But certainly the amount of bullying that goes on between students seems pretty unfortunately par for the course.’’
“People bully for so many different reasons,’’ she said. “But most the time it’s because they themselves have been bullied.
“So it’s really just an ongoing cycle of victims turning into bullies and then more victims turning into bullies.”
School officials in New Rochelle say they are taking steps to try to curb bullying in the wake of the recent violence.
For example, New Rochelle Schools Superintendent Brian Osborne said at a recent public meeting that the high school’s policy of “closed lunch’’ — meaning students can’t leave the building — needs to be better regulated.
Random bag searches also will be conducted for weapons, and an independent “top-to-bottom” audit on school safety and security across the district is underway, he said.
In addition, the district plans to create an app so students can anonymously report bullying or even brewing tensions between kids, in the hopes that adults can intervene before violence occurs.
Parents at the school say reforms are badly needed.
Modal TriggerA memorial for Valeree Schwab outside the Dunkin’ Donuts where she was stabbedDavid McGlynn
José Colon, 43, said he had to pull his ninth-grade stepdaughter, Angelina Valentine, 14, out of school earlier this month because a group of girls said she was going to get jumped and beat up.
“Stuff like this shouldn’t be happening in school . . .we’re not going to allow that to happen to her,’’ Colon told The Post.
Manuel Lopez, whose 11th-grade daughter was friends with Valaree, said his child has been getting bullied repeatedly since the sixth grade.
“It affects the whole family,’’ he said, his eyes starting to fill with tears.
“My daughter is not an aggressive person. I’m constantly checking on her. I text her, ‘Are you OK? Is everything alright? Are you on the bus? Are you coming over? How’s your day? Are you all right?’ ”
Lopez said he gave his daughter pepper spray in case anyone tries to hurt her.
But, “Look what happened to Valaree. Valaree tried to defend herself with pepper spray . . . and they nailed her,” he said.
“You know I cried for that child. It broke my heart . . . She was just somebody’s baby.”
Valaree’s aunt Monica Schwab said she hopes the school’s efforts aren’t too little, too late.
“[Valaree] had written statements saying she needed help, she hated to come [to school], she didn’t want to be here,” Monica said.
“Let’s make sure no one else has to experience that.”
A Christian organization at the University of Iowa that was disbanded for not granting a gay member a leadership position has been reinstated. A judge ruled against the school’s “selective enforcement” of its nondiscrimination policy. (Getty Images)
A Christian organization at the University of Iowa that was disbanded for not granting a gay member a leadership position has been reinstated after a judge ruled against the school’s “selective enforcement” of its nondiscrimination policy.
The statement reads: “Members should conduct their careers without the greed, racism, sexual immorality and selfishness that too often arise in business, political and cultural institutions.”
The university shut the organization down, saying that membership and participation in campus organizations cannot be limited based on sexual orientation, among other things.
In order to be reinstated, the school said, the group would have to alter the Statement of Faith.
Group members, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, sued the school.
What did the judge say?
Judge Stephanie Marie Rose of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa ruled that the school must reinstate the organization for at least 90 days.
“BLinC’s motion is granted based solely upon the university’s selective enforcement of an otherwise reasonable and viewpoint neutral nondiscrimination policy,” the court order read.
So, it’s not that the university’s policy is wrong, but it appears the school is applying it to the Christian organization while not applying it to organizations such as fraternities, which only accept men, and The Feminist Union, which requires agreement on contraception and abortion issues for membership.
“The school is discriminating against BLinC by barring it from having the same ability to select leaders who share and live by its mission,” a summary of Becket’s case read.
The court has ordered the university to restore BLinC to registered student organization status for 90 days. The university respects the decision of the court and has acted accordingly by extending an invitation to BLinC to participate in the student organization fair on Jan. 24. The university will not comment on the merits of the case per its policy on pending litigation.
Image copyrightALAMYImage captionThe boy was wearing a Jewish skullcap, or kippa (file photo)
An eight-year-old boy wearing a Jewish skullcap, or kippa, has been attacked in a suburb of the French capital, Paris, in what officials suspect is the latest case of anti-Semitic violence.
Two teenage suspects, who fled the scene, did not shout any insults or steal anything from the boy, who also wore a traditional Jewish belt.
President Emmanuel Macron has condemned it as "an attack on the republic".
France's Jewish community has voiced fears over rising anti-Semitism.
The suspects - believed to be around 15 - were hidden behind rubbish bins and attacked the boy as he walked to a tutoring class on Monday evening in the northern suburb of Sarcelles, which has a large Jewish community, prosecutors said.
They pushed the boy to the ground and beat him, they added. The boy was said to be well physically, but shocked.
In condemning the attack, Mr Macron said on Twitter (in French) that "every time a citizen is attacked because of their age, appearance or religion, the whole republic is attacked".
Image copyrightAFPImage captionSarcelles, a suburb in northern Paris, has a large Jewish community (file photo)
France has Europe's largest Jewish community and Jews have been targeted in several attacks in Paris in recent years:
A 15-year-old Jewish girl was attacked by a man in Sarcelles as she returned from school in January
A suspected arson attack destroyed a kosher grocery store in Créteil also in January. The Promo & Destock store had already been defaced with Nazi swastikas
A Jewish family was taken hostage, beaten and robbed by a gang in Livry-Gargan in September 2017. One of the attackers told the victims "you're Jews, so where's the money?", according to the family's lawyer
Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jew, was killed in her apartment by a Muslim neighbour last April, in the 11th arrondissement (district)
