Schwarzenegger Passes Law to Protect Animal Researchers

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was busy this past weekend, signing state laws protecting all sorts of academic types. Animal researchers who have been under attack lately in the Golden State are somewhat safer now that the governor signed a law that strengthens protections for them, the Daily Californian reports. University of California researchers from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz have been victims of severe vandalism and fire bombings, acts that police have attributed to extreme animal rights activists.

The law makes it a misdemeanor to publish personal information about researchers or their family members if readers intend to use it to threaten or attack those researchers, and also makes it a misdemeanor for protesters to enter researchers' property to interfere with their academic practices.

The governor also signed into law a measure to protect high school and college newspaper advisers from being "dismissed, suspended, disciplined, reassigned, transferred, or otherwise retaliated against" for solely acting to protect a pupil's speech or for refusing an administrator's order to illegally censor speech, the Student Press Law Center reports.

Schwarzenegger signed 163 bills this weekend and vetoed 226.