Nota Bene

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.

The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming.

“At first, there was a sense of, ‘No way,’ ” said homeschool parent Loren Mavromati, a resident of Redondo Beach (Los Angeles County) who is active with a homeschool association. “Then there was a little bit of fear. I think it has moved now into indignation.”

The ruling arose from a child welfare dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Philip and Mary Long of Lynwood, who have been homeschooling their eight children. Mary Long is their teacher, but holds no teaching credential.

The parents said they also enrolled their children in Sunland Christian School, a private religious academy in Sylmar (Los Angeles County), which considers the Long children part of its independent study program and visits the home about four times a year.

The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time public or private schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home.

Some homeschoolers are affiliated with private or charter schools, like the Longs, but others fly under the radar completely. Many homeschooling families avoid truancy laws by registering with the state as a private school and then enroll only their own children.

Yet the appeals court said state law has been clear since at least 1953, when another appellate court rejected a challenge by homeschooling parents to California’s compulsory education statutes. Those statutes require children ages 6 to 18 to attend a full-time day school, either public or private, or to be instructed by a tutor who holds a state credential for the child’s grade level.

You can read the decision published by the Second District Court of Appeal here.

The LA Times reports:

Civil rights attorney Stephen G. Yagman, whose relentless quarter-century crusade against police brutality drew both admiration and ire, was convicted Friday in federal court of 19 felony counts of tax evasion, bankruptcy fraud and money laundering.

The verdict, if upheld on appeal, would end the career of the combative and pioneering litigator, who brought hundreds of cases against the Los Angeles Police Department and other law enforcement agencies.

Yagman, 62, could be sentenced to more than six years in federal prison, according to Assistant U.S. Atty. Alka Sagar.

Via How Appealing.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The growing Pinkberry Inc. chain took a couple of body blows last month, when two consumer lawsuits were filed contending that the popular frozen dessert lacked the healthy bacteria cultures found in yogurt.

Making matters worse, Los Angeles-based Pinkberry can’t call its product frozen yogurt because it is mixed in the stores, not at a manufacturing plant as required by state regulations, authorities said. Pinkberry said its product contained yogurt, as well as a powder, but declined to say what else was in it.

Intrigued by the mystery of whether the product is actually yogurt, The Times sent samples of Pinkberry — along with Golden Spoon and Baskin-Robbins frozen yogurt — to a food lab for analysis.

The test results were clear: “Bottom line, they all had cultures,” said Brian Parmenter of Bodycote FPL, a food-testing lab in Portland, Ore. What’s more, they are all relatively low-calorie and fat-free. Of the three samples, Pinkberry logged the lowest calories per ounce with 26 and undetectable levels of fat.