One of the teachers was found listed “teaching chitlins in the ghetto of Charlotte” as one of her activities, one posting “I’m feeling p—ed of because I hate my students!” in a Facebook ‘mood box’, and a reporter showed the school district officials photos of teachers in sexually suggestive poses.

“When you’re in a professional position, especially one where you’re interacting with children and parents, you need to be above reproach,” Carr said to the press.

The school in question, Thomasboro Elementary, has most of its students from minorities in low-income homes.

Filed in the US District Court, Central District of California, Southern Division, the case also says that the company also violates the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and breaches the Fiduciary Duty and the Sherman Act. The plaintiffs seek to prevent the management from further damaging its stock price.

“Given Sirius XM’s low stock price, Mr. Karmazin said he would love to take the company private. But given the state of the credit markets, ‘How do you find [the money] today?’ If the company were generating positive cash flow, which he expects it to do for the full year in 2009, privatization would become much more feasible, he says," a spokesperson for the Save Sirius Group said in the press release.

"In light of the aforementioned, it is clear that they have lost sight of their obligations to shareholders and have breached and will continue to breach their fiduciary duties in the future. We, as a group, will not stand for this and will use any means possible to prevent and preclude them from stealing this company from its rightful owners — we the shareholders."

The press release can be found after the jump.

SIRIUS Shareholders File Suit Against SIRIUS XM Radio Management

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 3 /PRNewswire/ — The following is being issued by "Save Sirius":

A group of incensed shareholders, over 500 strong and growing, have banned together and accused SIRIUS XM management of unjustly enriching themselves at the expense of shareholders.

A derivative suit on behalf of shareholders has been filed in the United States District Court, Central District of California, Southern Division. Case number SACV08-00790CJC

The case accuses management of violations of the FEDERAL RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS ACT (RICO), BREACH OF THE FIDUCIARY DUTY AND THE SHERMAN ACT.

This suit seeks to prevent management from further damaging its shareholders with massive amounts of additional dilution (8 billion shares in the fully diluted float) and as much as a 1 for 50 reverse stock split.

"We are working to gain control of our company by seeking to remove current members of the board as well as top executive Mel Karmazin," said Michael Hartleib on behalf of Save Sirius and its members. In a September 15th 2008 Wall Street Journal article written by Sarah McBride, she states, "Given Sirius XM’s low stock price, Mr. Karmazin said he would love to take the company private. But given the state of the credit markets, ‘How do you find [the money] today?’ If the company were generating positive cash flow, which he expects it to do for the full year in 2009, privatization would become much more feasible, he says."

It is clear that management under Mr. Karmazin’s leadership has an agenda to steal this company from its shareholders.

Given Management’s history of:

– Locking their shareholders into the longest merger delay in history;

– Preventing the Corporation from seeking alternatives or potential suitors;

– Failing to commercially introduce interoperable radios;

– Their insistence on going forward with the merger at any and all costs;

– Consummating the merger issuing 300 million shares to the financiers of XM’s debt to be sold short on the open market

Mr. Karmazin and the board have severely damaged shareholder value in violation of their fiduciary duties. Shareholders have lost over 90% of their value under Mr. Karmazin’s leadership.

"In light of the aforementioned, it is clear that they have lost sight of their obligations to shareholders and have breached and will continue to breach their fiduciary duties in the future. We, as a group, will not stand for this and will use any means possible to prevent and preclude them from stealing this company from its rightful owners — we the shareholders," said Michael Hartleib, on behalf of Save Sirius and its members.

It also found that 8 percent of participants already owned iPhones, an increase of 2 percent from the last survey. As well, students expecting to eventually buy a mobile phone, 33 percent selected an iPhone.

Source: CNN Money

Shares of technology companies have taken a huge beating on Monday (US time) as the House of Representatives failed to pass a bailout plan for the financial sector, with the vote for the rejection was 228 to 205, with two-thirds of the Republicans rejecting the bill with a significant number of Democrats. More information can be found at The Journal.

When the announcement happened, the shares on the Dow Jones fell more than 777.68, nearly 7 percent down from Friday, with the S&P 500 Index dropping 8.8 percent, or 106.46 points; and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index dropped more than 9 percent, or 199.61 points, to 1,983.73 – the first time it had reach below the 2,000 mark since 2005.

Among the hardest hit were Apple, who shares closed $105.26, 18 percent (or $22.98) down from Friday; AMD, who shares were nearly 17 percent down; and Google, who shared dropped more than 11 percent to close at $381. Those who managed to survive the storm of mass losses where Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Microsoft – with all of their shares fell more than 5 percent.

IBM, however, managed to have one of the narrowest percentage losses. They closed down 4 percent from Friday to $114.46.

While many companies declined to comment on the market plunge, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith released a statement, urging that the US House of Representatives reconsider their decision about rejecting the bailout plan:

“Microsoft strongly urges members of the U.S. House of Representatives to reconsider and to support legislation that will re-instill confidence and stability in the financial markets. This legislation is vitally important to the health and preservation of jobs in all sectors of the economy of Washington State and the nation, and we urge Congress to act swiftly.”

Financial Data Image from Yahoo Finance

However, their plans will be different to what it is set here - with users will be capped at 250 gigabytes per month, per account - and for those who do will go over will get a courtesy call from their customer service, but those who go over it a second time within the next six months after their first notification will be suspended for an entire calendar year.

As well, they are not bringing out any tools to monitor your usage, but their support site tells you to search for bandwidth metering software on Google to track it. However, Comcast notes that most customers use between 2GB and 3GB of data.

Three of those charged are from the US, with others coming from Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus and China. However, one of those charged has not had his location mentioned. They are said to conceal the information in servers in Eastern Europe and the US.

Retailers affected by the fraud include TJ Maxx and Barnes & Noble; after their computers were compromised as a result of breaches on their computer systems.

These come after recently disclosed Department of Homeland Security policies say that such seizures maybe carried out without any suspicion of wrong doing - meaning that if you were not suspected of being a terrorist, you will still have your iPod taken.

Homeland Security officials have said that they were needed to prevent terrorism. Anyone, including their own citizens, can and will have their electronics seized by officials at the border. And it does not stop at electronics - books, pamphlets and other written materials can be seized as well.

That’s one less reason to go to the US now.

As well, just to make matters worse, the official Hasbro (the owners in the US and Canada) version of Scrabble did not work either, with the game being a victim of "a malicious attack". EA, the creator of the game, has said that it will launch an investigation of the apparent hacking, pointing no fingers at the moment.

However, bowing to legal pressure, the Scrabulous brothers from Calcutta have shut the application to users in Canada and the United States. And this created a huge backlash, including new groups like "Down with Hasbro", flooded its message boards and even bloggers denounced Hasbro.

And you would think I would get into this mess, I won’t. Because I don’t live in Hasbro’s territory, and Mattel does own the Scrabble rights here - and around the world. I would say this - you are just not seeing that fans are actually playing Scrabble, no matter if its some clone of it. Just make a deal with them (does not mean buy them).

Anyway, the Scrabble application by Hasbro has attracted about 15,000 daily users with mixed reviews - including critics saying that it had "pathetic" upload time. Mattel also has an application out for those outside the US.

The district attorney’s office has apparently made public nearly 150 usernames and passwords used by officials to gain access to the network, after it submitted to the court as Exhibit A in a case against Terry Childs, the network admin who was arrested on July 13 on four felony charges of tampering with the network.

Exhibit A was submitted as evidence after the defendant was asking a reduction of $5 million bail that was previously set for Childs. Despite calling the passwords pose an "imminent threat" to the network, they are now on public records.

However, a source has told InfoWorld that a second password is needed to gain access to the network; but giving the so-called ‘phase one’ passwords was not recommended.

The bank clerk, Heinrich Kieber, has now been branded a thief after he violated its bank secrecy laws. He is in hiding and will testify to a Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations via a video statement from a undisclosed location.

The investigation will also focus on the Swiss bank UBS and its allegations that it help wealthy Americans hide their money through shell companies in Liechtenstein.

He reportedly sold three CD’s full of names and data to tax authorities to the authorities, including Germany, France and Italy; with tax authorities in Italy will publish the names. In Germany, it had lead to several CEOs on tax evasion.

It has also been forced to call help from Silicon Valley, including Cisco, to help get its data back after Terry Childs, the hacker, set a master password giving him full control over the network. The mayor of San Francisco says that it could take eight weeks to get the data back.

Childs was also a convicted felon, with the SF Chronicle saying that he was convicted of aggravated robbery and aggravated burglary charges in 1982 and was on probation until 1987.

The mayor has said that it would not change how it would govern the city, and was reassuring its residents that it would get its data back.

The new change will see as much as $3 billion added to the overall cost, pushing it to now more than $14 billion.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was scheduled to tell a House subcommittee about the new plans, which will see the use of handheld computers to collect information scraped from millions of Americans who do not return the forms mailed out by the government.

The project to develop the computers have been plagued by schedule, performance and cost issues.

The 2010 census was expected to be the first high-tech count in the nation’s history, with the Census Bureau awarding a contract to purchase 500,000 computers at the cost of $600 million. The new computers proved too complex for some workers when a trial was done in North Carolina and the computers were not initially programmed to transmit larges amounts of data.

The officials have been blamed for not spelling out the technical requirements and specifications to the contractor, Harris Corporation - based in Florida

Sources say that Clinton has been asking for volunteers for a new anti-violence in video games initiative. Specifically, Clinton is looking for someone who feels passionate about extreme violence in video games.

One of Clinton’s ideas is to try and add a special tax to video games, sort of like what they do for cigarettes. The profits from the tax would then go to a child advocacy and obesity programs.

The “concerned parent” would need to attend a press conference and make a short statement about their opinion and should be able to deal with annoying reporters asking questions like: Did Clinton send out a memo asking for someone like you to talk for her at a press conference?

Just a word of warning gamers, this isn’t going away. Clinton has her heart set on making violence in video games a key component of her platform. Taxes on video games are going to be discussed.