FORT VALLEY, Ga. – During the school year, Mondays in this rural Georgia community are for video games, trips to grandma’s house and hanging out at the neighborhood community center. Don’t bother showing up for school. The doors are locked and the lights are off. Peach County is one of more than 120 school districts across the country where students attend school just four days a week, a cost-saving tactic gaining popularity among cash-strapped districts struggling to make ends meet. The 4,000-student district started shaving a day off its weekly school calendar last year to help fill a $1 million budget shortfall. It was that or lay off 39 teachers the week before school started, said Superintendent Susan Clark. ‘We’re treading water,’ Clark said as she stood outside the headquarters of her seven-school district. ‘There was nothing else for us to do.’ The results? Test scores went up. So did attendance – for both students and teachers. The district is spending one-third of what it once did on substitute teachers, Clark said. And the graduation rate likely will be more than 80 percent for the first time in years, Clark said. The […]
Proving that they know how to read polls, politicians in Florida have been lining up behind Arizona’s controversial new law cracking down on illegal immigration. Republican candidate for governor Rick Scott has made support for the law a major plank in his platform, and goaded the GOP front-runner in the race, Attorney General Bill McCollum, into endorsing the idea. The leading Republican for U.S. Senate, Marco Rubio, also is backing it. Last week, the chairman of a state House panel on crime, Republican William Snyder of Stuart, said he’s interested in passing a law in Florida like Arizona’s. Polls show a majority in Florida and across the nation support Arizona’s law. But many state and local police, who would enforce the law, oppose it. Their informed perspective would be a much better guide for Florida legislators on this issue than polls or pandering politicians. The Arizona law was born of understandable frustration over the failure at the federal level to secure the southern border. Illegal immigration, and crime spawned by it, have surged in the state. While Florida has by some estimates a million illegal immigrants, it is not experiencing a crisis like Arizona’s. The new […]
Debbie Hughes was doing some very early online Christmas shopping when she typed ‘Tiffany & Company’ into the search bar. ‘Up came a website called Tiffany & Company On Sale and I thought, wow!’ says the 57-year-old Ohioan. ‘They were selling a sterling silver necklace and bracelet for $228-what it usually costs for just the bracelet.’ But the website didn’t belong to the famous New York jeweler, despite looking quite a bit like the one that does. Its address-www.tiffanyco.mn-was a tweak of the real Tiffany website, www.tiffany.com, and the .mn meant it was registered as a Mongolian site. And the discount designer jewelry that Hughes ordered? It did arrive-in a package with a Chinese postmark. ‘It was chrome-like junk,’ she tells Scam Alert. But the gift box was a very clever copy of a Tiffany box. It took Hughes, who operates a home-based business selling books and DVDs over the Internet, nearly four months to get a refund from her credit card company. The fake Tiffany company ignored her e-mails requesting a refund, and its website had no telephone number. Popular brands make prime targets The scam here is called ‘cybersquatting.’ It occurs when […]
Like most parents of small children, I was having major problems at bedtime. Things had gone from bad to worse: each night, my four-year-old refused to go to bed, and once she got there, was repeatedly getting up. The whole process could last as long as two hours, leaving us both frustrated and exhausted. I tried everything: reading longer bedtime stories in an attempt to calm her down; a frog that played classical music. I tried extra trips to the park, trying to tire her out even more in the hope that she would collapse into bed at night. Nothing seemed to work. Until last Christmas, when I slipped a CD of guided meditations into her stocking, along with a bit of wishful thinking. The CD promised to ‘help kids sleep more soundly and feel more confident and secure in their home and school life’. I was dubious that a mere CD could help, but was willing to try anything. What does meditation consist of for a small child? The CD consisted of pairs of tracks: the first was a short relaxation, where listeners are told to tighten muscles in different parts of their body and then let […]
Fully 40% of teens aged 15 to19 have had sex at least once, and 14% of the girls and 18% of the boys say they would be a ‘little pleased’ or ‘very pleased’ if this resulted in a pregnancy, a new study shows. That’s according to the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth conducted by the CDC. Researchers conducted in-person interviews of 2,767 teenagers to determine rates of sexual activity, contraceptive use, and births among U.S. teens aged 15-19 in 2006-2008. The rate of sexually active teens did not change much from 2002, which was the last time that this survey was conducted. The survey showed that 79% of girls and 81% of boys reported using some form of birth control method during their first sexual experience. The most commonly used contraceptive method was a condom, which was also the same in 2002. Using condoms along with a hormonal contraceptive method such as birth control pills, however, has increased since 2002, the new survey shows. ‘I am encouraged to see the statistics surrounding contraceptive use. It means we are getting better at informing teens about some of the realities associated with sexual intercourse,’ says […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
