News & Blues 9/29

German authorities reported that robbers who tried to blow up a bank
cash machine in Malliss miscalculated and wound up reducing the bank to
rubble, completely obliterating its roof and damaging cars and buildings
within a 100-yard radius. The only thing left intact was the cash
machine. “Something evidently didn’t work the way the robbers wanted it
to,” police official Niels Borgmann said, noting, “The explosion was so
big, they had to run away without the money.” (Reuters)

Dumbing Up

Law schools at New York University, Georgetown and eight other
universities have made their grading systems more lenient in the past
two years, so their graduates will appeal to prospective employers. And
in June, Loyola Law School Los Angeles announced it’s inflating its
grades by a third and making the change retroactive. “If somebody’s
paying $150,000 for a law-school degree, you don’t want to call them a
loser at the end,” said former Duke University geophysics professor
Stuart Rojstaczer, who now studies grade inflation, “so you artificially
call every student a success.”

Duke, the University of Texas at Austin and other law schools now
offer their students stipends to take unpaid public-interest
internships. And Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law
recently began paying for-profit law firms to hire its students. (The New York Times)

New York kept its promise not to dumb down statewide exams that
determine whether students advance to the next grade; however, it
awarded partial credit for wrong answers on the state math test. A
miscalculation by a fourth-grader that 28 divided by 14 equals 4 instead
of 2 is “partially correct,” for example, if the student uses the right
method to verify the wrong answer. A student who answers that a
2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half credit for adding 24
and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12. 

State Education Department official Tom Dunn defended the scoring,
explaining that students are asked to show their work, and the scoring
guidelines, called “holistic rubrics,” require that points be given for
answers that indicate “a partial understanding of the mathematical
concepts or procedures embodied in the question,” even if that
understanding leads to fully wrong answers. (New York Post)

Hypocrite of the Week

Farmer David Jungerman, 72, posted a sign in a cornfield in Bates
County, Mo., accusing Democrats of being the “Party of Parasites,” who
“always have their hand out for whatever the government will give them”
in social programs. When asked about farm subsidies he has received
totaling $1,095,101 in the past 15 years, including $34,303 last year,
Jungerman insisted, “That’s just my money coming back to me. I pay a lot
in taxes. I’m not a parasite.” (The Kansas City Star)

Parasites of the Week

California welfare recipients are able to use state-issued debit
cards to withdraw cash from automatic teller machines at 32 of the
state’s 58 tribal casinos and 47 of 90 state-licensed poker rooms. To
make it easier for cardholders to locate ATMs in casinos, the Department
of Social Services lists them on its website. (Los Angeles Times)

Under the Radar

Politicians, business executives and university athletic recruiters
have taken advantage of a federal program to keep the public from
finding out about their private flights, according to the group
ProPublica. The program is designed to protect sensitive business deals
and executives’ safety by requesting that the Federal Aviation
Administration remove flights from its database before giving the
information to flight-tracking web sites. In 2008, after Detroit auto
executives found themselves under attack for flying corporate jets to
Washington to plead for federal aid, General Motors used the system to
keep its flights secret from the public .

Use of taxpayer-funded airspace is considered public information,
according to Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies. Because
the FAA lacks the resource to determine the validity of requests for
secrecy, however, the agency lets the National Business Aviation
Association, which lobbied for the program, run it. After a federal
judge rejected the NBAA’s argument that the list of approved requests
should remain confidential, ProPublica found it contained more than
1,100 secret flights. (USA Today)

Gateway Drug

Rod Adlington, a turkey farmer in Coventry, England, began making
bacon-style rashers from halal-slaughtered turkeys to sell to Muslims
who crave a taste of pork but cannot eat it because of their religion.
“There’s a want for the product for the halal market, for the pork-free
market and for the slimming market,” Adlington said, insisting he’s
simply reacting to demand. Although several Islamic scholars see no harm
in it, Maulana Naveed Ashrafi believes turkey bacon could “ultimately
lead to people who eat only halal food ending up eating the real bacon.”
(BBC News)

Grab Bag

The Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Minn., stopped providing free
dog-poop bags at city parks because people kept taking them. “People
walk up and take them until they’re gone,” Director of Parks and
Recreation John Keprios said, noting the city spent $12,000 a year to
keep its eight parks stocked. It was “not just one isolated incident,”
he added. “It’s everywhere and often.” (The Star Tribune)

All’s Swell That Ends Swell

After thieves took a 10-foot wooden wheelchair ramp leading from
Cordelia Simpson’s porch to the sidewalk in Elyria, Ohio, John Wright,
owner of an American Ramp Services franchise in North Olmsted, offered
to replace it with a steel ramp that usually costs $4,000. “I always
wanted a steel ramp,” said Simpson, 34, “but I could never afford one.”
(Associated Press)

News and Blues is compiled from the nation’s press. To contribute,
submit original clippings, citing date and source, to Roland Sweet in
care of The New Times.