Bullying

Gov. Jerry Brown denies using his influence to bully election officials into approving his petition to put a tax initiative on a ballot ahead of other petitions. ALSO: The strange streets of L.A. Photo gallery: Ted Rall cartoons Global warming in our backyard   Follow Ted Rall on Twitter @TedRall . Follow Opinion L.A. on Twitter and Facebook .

In the laundry list of universal kid fears -- monsters, nightmares, kidnappers, mean big kids -- we may soon be able to add cyberbully.  According to data collected by Microsoft's Safety & Security Center, 54% of kids worldwide say they worry about being bullied online, and nearly 1 in 4 say they have experienced online bullying. Additionally, 24% admitted to having bullied someone else online. Online bullying is still less frequent than off-line bullying in almost all the countries included in the report.

People of the Internet, you did it: In less than 48 hours you managed to raise more than half a million dollars to send bullied bus driver Karen Klein on a vacation.  Max Sidorov, the young man who started the fundraising campaign on Wednesday morning, was hoping to raise $5,000 for Klein, but that was peanuts for you. You blew past that number in just five hours.  By the time Sidorov woke up Thursday morning the fundraising campaign...

The outpouring of emotion and cash in the case of bullied bus monitor Karen Klein may be peaking. Nearly half a million dollars have been raised for her "vacation" fund, she's appeared on "Anderson Cooper," and some U.S. Marines have created a video to show their support. The video from Marines at Fort Meade in Maryland declares the corps' intolerance for hazing and bullying and gives the 68-year-old grandmother, the recent target of abuse by students in upstate New York, a heartfelt "Oorah!"

A video of New York schoolboys taunting a 68-year-old school bus monitor has gone viral, watched more than 1.65 million times since it was posted online Tuesday. It's led many people to decry a new low in an increasingly coarse culture and to ask: What's wrong with our children? Social media is driving an effort to try to help the monitor, Karen Klein. More than $278,000 --  and counting -- has been raised. The money is ostensibly a “vacation” fund for Klein, but it's turning into a financial indicator of the public's outrage over the boys' bullying behavior and a way to collectively apologize to Klein.

The New York middle school students caught on video taunting and mocking a 68-year-old school bus monitor don't deserve to be punished, says parenting expert Jane Nelson. Everyone else in America might be calling for harsh, swift justice to be meted out by both the Greece Central School District and the parents of the kids involved. But not Nelson. Co-author of two dozen parenting books including the "Positive Discipline" series, Nelson says the traditional means of punishment -- yelling, shaming, hitting, grounding, etc. -- are counterproductive.

A diverse group of Reddit fans, Twitter users, Facebookers and just plain emailers banded together Wednesday to raise more than $60,000 to send a beleaguered school bus monitor on vacation. The story unfolded when Max Sidorov, a recent college graduate in Toronto, came across video of Karen Klein, a 68-year-old bus monitor at a middle school in upstate New York, being tormented by a pack of boys who appear to be 12 or 13. The video, which one of the boys posted to Facebook, goes on for an excruciating 10 minutes with the kids calling Klein fat and poor.

An anti-bullying initiative that will enable Los Angeles students to anonymously report threats of violence via text message to school officials is scheduled to be introduced next fall through a charitable donation by media mogul Sumner Redstone. The 89-year-old Redstone, chairman of Viacom Inc., which includes MTV Networks and Nickelodeon, and CBS Corp., donated $100,000 to the Safe to Talk Fund program. The money will be used to establish a service called SchoolTipline in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

An anti-bullying initiative that will enable Los Angeles students to anonymously report threats of violence to school officials via text message is scheduled to be introduced next fall through a charitable donation by media mogul Sumner Redstone. The 89-year-old Redstone, chairman of Viacom Inc., which includes MTV Networks and Nickelodeon, and CBS Corp., donated $100,000 to the Safe to Talk Fund program, made the announcement Monday. The money will be used to establish a service called SchoolTipline in schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Cue the violins. The end of this school year is bound to bring a spate of desperate pleas from people who owe their salvation to programs that are on the chopping block in the cash-strapped Los Angeles Unified School District. Their stories crowd my inbox: the high school dropout who got a second chance for a diploma, the immigrant who learned enough English to help his daughter with homework, the single mother whose son steered clear of gangs because a teacher unlocked his artistic talent.