Trump campaign manager

won’t face battery charges

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) – Donald Trump’s campaign manager won’t be prosecuted for battery after briefly grabbing a female reporter’s arm at a campaign event, but prosecutors said Thursday the situation might have been avoided with two simple words: I’m sorry.

State Attorney Dave Aronberg said at a news conference there wasn’t enough evidence to justify bringing misdemeanor simple battery charges against Corey Lewandowski for the March 8 dustup with Michelle Fields, then a reporter for the conservative Breitbart News website.

Although Lewandowski’s act wasn’t criminal, Aronberg said there may have been an easy way to defuse things.

“In a case like this we do encourage an apology. Had an apology been given at the beginning of all this, we could have avoided the whole criminal justice process,” Aronberg said.

Although police in Jupiter, Florida, found enough probable cause to charge Lewandowski last month after viewing a video recording of the encounter, Aronberg said prosecutors are held to a higher legal standard.

“We have the burden of proving each case beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.

Appeals court upholds California tenure, hands union victory

LOS ANGELES (AP) – A California appeals court handed teacher unions a big victory Thursday by reversing a trial judge’s ruling that found tenure deprived some students of a good education.

The 2nd District Court of Appeal said a group of nine students who sued the state had failed to show California’s hiring and firing rules were unconstitutional.

“The court’s job is merely to determine whether the statutes are constitutional, not if they are ‘a good idea,'” presiding Justice Roger Boren wrote in the 3-0 opinion.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge who found evidence to “shock the conscience” had sided with students two years ago who claimed that incompetent teachers were almost impossible to fire because of tenure laws and that schools in poor neighborhoods were dumping grounds for bad teachers.

The ruling was stayed pending appeal, so it never went into effect, but if upheld had threatened to shake up public schools that teach more than 6 million students from kindergarten through 12th grade statewide.

In reversing that decision, the appellate panel said the trial highlighted problems with tenure and layoff statutes and showed the “deleterious impact” of staffing decision on poor and minority students. But it said state law wasn’t to blame.