Latest news with #Middleborough
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Lottery ticket purchased from Mass. package store wins $1 million prize
A $1 million prize was won after the player purchased it from a Middleborough package store. The scratch ticket game was '$1,000,000 Monopoly Doubler' and it was purchased at Kurts Corner. It wasn't the only big winner won or claimed on Friday. There were also two $100,000 prizes. A $100,000 'Mass Cash' prize was won from a ticket purchased at Shaws in Worcester. And another $100,000 prize was claimed from the game '$15,000,000 Colossal Millions' after the scratch ticket had been purchased at Acres Newsstand in Springfield. Overall, 590 prizes worth $600 or more were won or claimed in Massachusetts on Friday. The Massachusetts State Lottery releases a full list of winning tickets every day. The list only includes winning tickets worth more than $600. The two largest lottery prizes won so far in 2025 were each worth $15 million. One of the prizes was from a winning 'Diamond Deluxe' scratch ticket sold in Holyoke, and the other was from a '300X' scratch ticket sold on Cape Cod. Mass. State Lottery winner: $1M prize won in $10 game but winner's name not released Mass. State Lottery winner: Father will take children to Disney with $100K prize 2 $100K 'Mass Cash' wins despite lottery 'mistake' that spilled drawing balls Mass. State Lottery winner: $1M ticket sold at Springfield gas station Read the original article on MassLive.
Wall Street Journal
27-05-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘There Are CENSORED Genders'
Student speech at public schools is a thorny topic, but what happened to a seventh-grader in Middleborough, Mass., isn't complicated. He was pulled from class for wearing a t-shirt saying, 'There Are Only Two Genders.' The school also banned, 'There Are CENSORED Genders.' Yet it encouraged others to wear 'Pride gear to celebrate Pride Month.' The student, known as L. M., needed the Supreme Court to vindicate his free speech, but on Tuesday it refused to hear his case, over two conservative dissents. 'We should reaffirm the bedrock principle that a school may not engage in viewpoint discrimination when it regulates student speech,' Justice Samuel Alito writes, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. He also says lower-court judges 'watered down the test' for when schools may prohibit speech to avoid disruptions.
Daily Mail
27-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
Outrage as teen who was banned from school over 'only two genders' shirt LOSES latest appeal
A teen's freedom of speech case has made it all the way up to the Supreme Court after he was sent home from school over two years ago for wearing a shirt that said, 'There are only two genders.' The Supreme Court declined to hear Liam Morrison's appeal, upholding a district court's decision siding with Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, a suburb outside of Boston. The First Circuit Court ruled that the school had the right to prohibit students' viewpoints if they were harmful, citing that the message was offensive to transgender students. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, with Alito writing that the case, 'presents an issue of great importance for our Nation's youth.' The Alliance Defending Freedom and the Massachusetts Family Institute are defending Liam and his parents in the case. 'We're disappointed the Supreme Court chose not to hear this critical free speech case,' ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of U.S. Litigation David Cortman said in a statement after the ruling. 'Students don't lose their free speech rights the moment they walk into a school building. Schools can't suppress students' views they disagree with,' Cortman continued. 'Here, the school actively promotes its view about gender through posters and "Pride" events, and it encourages students to wear clothing with messages on the same topic—so long as that clothing expresses the school's preferred views on the subject.' The case cites a landmark ruling in 1969, Tinker v. Des Moines, which set precedent that students don't shed their right to free speech at school unless it causes 'substantial disruption.' The controversial saga originated over two years ago, when Liam, who was in seventh grade at the time, was asked to remove the divisive shirt. When he refused, his father, Christopher Morrison, was called to pick him up. Liam then returned to school with a piece of tape over the words 'only two' and wrote 'censored,' instead. Liam has since stood by his decision to wear the shirt, accusing his middle school of stripping him of his right to freedom of speech. 'What did my shirt say? Five simple words: "There are only two genders,"' Liam said at a school board meeting shortly after. 'Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.' The family then filed the suit, citing the town of Middleborough, the previous acting school principal Heather Tucker, the Middleborough School Committee, and Middleborough Public Schools superintendent Carolyn J. Lyons. In June, the district court sided with the school, agreeing that educators didn't violate Liam's First Amendment rights. However, last October, Liam's family appealed his case to the Supreme Court in hopes of a different outcome. 'This case isn't about T-shirts; it's about a public school telling a middle-schooler that he isn't allowed to express a view that differs from their own,' Cortman said at the time. Liam wrote an op-ed featured in Fox News in February titled, 'My middle school silenced my free speech T-shirts about "two genders." I'm fighting back.' In his essay, Liam said that his parents taught him to challenge his thinking and come to his own conclusions without outside influences. 'It's natural for our family to have those conversations where we share our different thoughts and views. Shouldn't that be natural and encouraged at school, too?' he wrote. Deborah Ecker, the lawyer representing the school, previously argued that educators were within their rights to ask Liam not to wear the shirt. 'Looking at what the school officials knew about their school, the age of the kids, the LGBTQ community in that school, and the real mental health concerns, their decision to have the plaintiff remove the T-shirt was reasonable.' 'They reasonably could forecast that the message, if he was allowed to wear it in the school and in a classroom, would reasonably cause a disruption to the school work and invade the rights of other students.' School officials also argued that the student handbook prohibits clothing implying hate speech based on 'race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation or any other classification.' The school's superintendent defended the decision, noting that some students 'have attempted to commit suicide or have had suicidal ideations in the past few years, including members of the LGBTQ+ community,' Reuters reported. The superintendent added that some of the students' struggles were related to the mistreatment they received because of their gender identity. Liam's case has made national headlines since he was sent home over two years ago. The political climate has changed since then, with President Trump signing an executive order on his first day in office titled, 'Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.' The order redefined the definition of sex as a biological classification of male or female. It also required Americans to have their biological sex listed on all federal documentation instead of their gender identity. The political climate has changed since Liam first wore his shirt to class. President Trump signed an executive order stating that the federal government would only recognize two genders The Massachusetts Family Institute, who is also representing Liam and his family in the case, praised the Executive Order. 'For individuals like Liam Morrison, which have been persecuted for saying exactly what this order proclaims, this development serves as validation,' the Massachusetts Family Institute said in January. However, many have called the order transphobic, with LGBTQ+ advocacy organization GLAAD calling it 'inaccurate,' 'inflammatory,' and 'highly unhinged.'
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
These conservative justices are skeptical of students' freedom of speech, except this time
The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal over a middle schooler being barred from wearing a T-shirt to class that said, 'There Are Only Two Genders.' Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, arguing that the court should have taken up the First Amendment dispute. The denial came Tuesday on the court's routine order list, a document that announces action in pending appeals, mostly consisting of the justices declining to take up cases for review. The court grants review in relatively few cases and it takes four justices to do so. In the T-shirt case, called L.M. v. Middleborough, Thomas and Alito each wrote dissents. Both are notable, especially since both justices have (in different ways) previously ruled against students in First Amendment cases. In Thomas' brief dissent, he reminded readers that he thinks the landmark precedent upholding student speech rights was wrongly decided. That precedent is Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which, he noted, said in 1969 that public schools can't restrict student speech unless it 'materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.' Thomas cited his prior concurring opinion from a 2007 case in which he wrote that the Tinker standard 'is without basis in the Constitution'; he wrote in that concurring opinion, 'In my view, the history of public education suggests that the First Amendment, as originally understood, does not protect student speech in public schools.' So if Thomas doesn't think kids have speech rights in school, why does he care about this one? The formal reason he gave is that while he thinks Tinker is wrong, 'unless and until this Court revisits it, Tinker is binding precedent that lower courts must faithfully apply.' He wrote that the student here didn't create a material disruption by wearing the two-genders shirt or a later one that said, 'There Are CENSORED Genders.' Alito's lengthier dissent said (in part) that the case presented 'an issue of great importance for our Nation's youth: whether public schools may suppress student speech either because it expresses a viewpoint that the school disfavors or because of vague concerns about the likely effect of the speech on the school atmosphere or on students who find the speech offensive.' Put that way, it sounds like an important issue. But let's take a step back and look at that 2007 case that Thomas brought up, Morse v. Frederick (which Alito also cited in his dissent). That one involved a high school principal ordering students at a school-supervised event to take down a banner that said, 'BONG HiTS 4 JESUS.' The Supreme Court split 5-4, siding with the school and finding no First Amendment violation for confiscating what the court called 'the pro-drug banner' and suspending the student responsible. Thomas and Alito were both in the majority in that case. As Thomas noted in his dissent Tuesday, he wrote a concurring opinion in Morse, explaining his view that went even further in the school's favor. Alito also wrote a concurring opinion in that case, seeking to keep his options open to side with students in future cases. He wrote that he joined the majority 'on the understanding that (1) it goes no further than to hold that a public school may restrict speech that a reasonable observer would interpret as advocating illegal drug use and (2) it provides no support for any restriction of speech that can plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any political or social issue, including speech on issues such as 'the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use.'' In the Massachusetts case rejected by the majority Tuesday, a federal appeals court panel had deferred to school officials, citing Tinker and subsequent cases, including Morse. 'We see little sense in federal courts taking charge of defining the precise words that do or do not convey a message demeaning of such personal characteristics, so long as the words in question reasonably may be understood to do so by school administrators,' the appeals court wrote, citing Morse. Successfully opposing Supreme Court review, school officials from Massachusetts cited Morse to bolster the court's endorsement of deference to school officials. So while Alito sought to cabin his Morse concurrence to the drug context, and while a shirt about gender can be distinguishable from that context, it's cases like Morse that Alito and Thomas made possible that also helped make possible the appeals court ruling that the Supreme Court just declined to review. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration's legal cases. This article was originally published on
The Independent
27-05-2025
- General
- The Independent
US Supreme Court refuses student's case over ‘There are only two genders' T-shirt
The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case regarding a Massachusetts public school's decision to prevent a student from wearing a T-shirt that read "There are only two genders." The student, referred to as L.M. in court documents, was 12 years old when the incident occurred in 2023. He argued that the school's ban violated his free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution. He sought monetary damages from officials at John T. Nichols Middle School and the town of Middleborough. However, both a trial judge and the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled against him, upholding the school's decision as a reasonable restriction. The Supreme Court's decision not to hear the case leaves the lower court's ruling in place. The 1st Circuit decision stated that "it was reasonable for Middleborough to forecast that a message displayed throughout the school day denying the existence of the gender identities of transgender and gender nonconforming students would have a serious negative impact on those students' ability to concentrate on their classroom work." The legal dispute implicates a 1969 Supreme Court precedent in a case known as Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that lets public schools restrict student speech when it would "substantially disrupt" a school community. The issue of transgender rights is front and center in the U.S. culture wars. Since returning to office in January, Republican President Donald Trump has taken a hardline stance on transgender rights, targeting "gender ideology" and declaring that the U.S. government would recognise two sexes: male and female. The Supreme Court on May 6 permitted Trump's administration to implement his ban on transgender people in the military, allowing the armed forces to discharge the thousands of current transgender troops and reject new recruits while legal challenges play out. L.M., who was a seventh grade student at the time, wore the T-shirt reading "There are only two genders" to school in March 2023. His lawyers said in court papers he did so in order to "share his view that gender and sex are identical, and there are only two sexes - male and female." "L.M. hoped to start a meaningful conversation on gender ideology, a matter of public concern; protect other students against ideas that L.M. considers false and harmful; and show them compassionate people can believe that sex is binary," his lawyers wrote in a Supreme Court filing. A teacher reported the shirt to the school principal's office, noting that LGBT+ students were present at school that day and expressing concerns that the shirt could disrupt classes. The principal asked the boy if he would be willing to change his shirt and return to class, but he declined. The principal then called the boy's father, Chris Morrison, who opted to pick up his son from school rather than have him remove his shirt. Morrison, after complaining to school officials about the incident, was referred to the dress code in the school's student handbook. It states: "Clothing must not state, imply, or depict hate speech or imagery that target(s) groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation or any other classification." In May 2023, L.M. again wore the T-shirt to school, but covered the words "only two" with a piece of tape that read "censored," thus bearing the message: "There are (censored) genders." L.M. removed that shirt after being asked by school officials. During the proceedings, the school system's superintendent said that some students at John T. Nichols Middle School "have attempted suicide or have had suicidal ideations in the past few years, including members of the LGBTQ+ community," and that some of those students' struggles were "related to their treatment based on their gender identities by other students." The boy, who brought the lawsuit along with his father and stepmother, are represented in the lawsuit by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has represented clients in various high-profile cases before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs sought a court order prohibiting school officials from barring his wearing of the T-shirt and declaring the disputed portions of the dress code unconstitutional. They also sought unspecified monetary damages. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, ruled in favor of the school officials. Her decision was upheld last year by the 1st Circuit, prompting the Supreme Court appeal. The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is expected to rule by the end of June in a major transgender rights case. During arguments in the case in December, the conservative justices signaled their willingness to uphold a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.
