News Cut: January 25, 2011 Archive
What's going on in your cockpit? (5x8 - 1/25/11)
Posted at 7:05 AM on January 25, 2011
by Bob Collins
(6 Comments)
Filed under: Five by 8
Travails of the tired pilot, Tim Pawlenty: The movie, funerals by webcast, how I became a Minnesota pineapple farmer, and the vanishing mention of war.
Continue reading "What's going on in your cockpit? (5x8 - 1/25/11)"
The achievement gap in black and white
Posted at 11:08 AM on January 25, 2011
by Bob Collins
(3 Comments)
Filed under: Schools, Science
It's official. Lots of children are left behind. The "nation's report card" -- the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- is out today, showing the U.S. trailing other nations when it comes to knowledge of science. Science often plays a different fiddle to math and reading in test scores.
While the U.S. ranking compared to other countries is getting the lion's share of attention, the tragedy of the achievement gap isn't getting anywhere near the same amount of notice.
Here, for example, are the test scores by ethnicity for the fourth grade:
In Minnesota, black student had an average score that was 36 points lower than white students. That's not much different than the national average, even though Minnesota's overall scores were slightly higher than the national average.
The limits of free speech
Posted at 1:21 PM on January 25, 2011
by Bob Collins
(7 Comments)
Filed under: Crime and Justice
"How can you get on the Internet and trash someone with no justification whatsoever and think you can get away with it?" Gene Cooley asked.
"It's the Internet," is no longer a good answer.
Cooley's fiancee was killed in 2008 when her ex-husband shot her before he killed himself.
. An anonymous poster on a local bulletin board, hiding behind six user names, labeled Cooley, among other things, a pervert and a drug user, according to WXIA TV in Atlanta.
Last week a jury awarded Cooley $404,000 in a libel suit.
Now it gets a little more complicated. The lawyer who represented Cooley says he's working on legislation to make similar situations a crime, not just a civil matter.
(7 Comments)Is there any hope for Somalia?
Posted at 3:01 PM on January 25, 2011
by Bob Collins
(1 Comments)
Filed under: War
Wednesday marks the 20th anniversary of Somalia's last president, Mohamed Siad Barre. Since then the country has been reduced to a battle zone with its image overshadowed by war and conflict.
The BBC Africa Have Your Say program is asking what role young Somalis hope to play in their country's future.
The program will be broadcast from the Horn of Africa community center in west London, and will link an audience in Mogadishu with an audience at MPR's headquarters in St. Paul. Young Somalis "will be able to talk about their sense of identity, and their relationship with their homeland under the most trying of circumstances."
Is Somalia simply ungovernable? Is there hope?
The program begins on air and online at 10 a.m. CT tomorrow. I'll be live-blogging it here.
The panelists in St. Paul are:
>> Mukhtar Osman. an engineer with MNDOT.
>> Hoodo Hassan, studying psychology and English literature at the University of Minnesota
>> Zuhur Ahmed, a pre-med student at Concordia University. She also hosts the radio program Somali Community Link on KFAI. (She was part of MPR's >)
>> Ruqia Mohamed is a student at the University of Minnesota majoring in political science and global studies.
Air continues to leak out of housing market
Posted at 4:18 PM on January 25, 2011
by Bob Collins
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Economy
The recovery in the resale price of homes in the Twin Cities last year apparently was a mirage.
The Case Shiller Index from Standard & Poors, which measures the resale price of a home, has fallen for a fifth consecutive month in the Minneapolis area. It dropped 1.4% in November. It's the longest slide in prices since the index showed almost two consecutive years of declining home prices (month-to-month), which started in 2007.
Prices dropped 4.5% from a year earlier. After a near 18% decline in 2008, prices recovered slightly in 2009 (up a little over 1%).
(1 Comments)| January 2011 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
Master Archive
Recent Entries
- Sunday liquor sales: The little bill that can't
- The concealed carry muzzle
- There's Texas and then there's everywhere else
- Tornado damage via satellite
- Sabrina's best day ever
- Postcards from the security state (5x8 - 5/23/13)
- God and the Oklahoma tornado
- Enough with the Hiroshima atomic bomb comparisons
- Justices fume over MN Supreme Court ruling in sexual harassment case
- What happened in the basement? (5x8 - 5/22/13)
Categories
- Arts
- Aviation
- Crime and Justice
- Disasters
- Economy
- Energy
- Five by 8
- Floods
- Floods 2011
- Health
- History
- Icons
- Life
- Marketing and advertising
- Mary and Bob
- Media
- News
- People doing good
- Politics
- Race
- Regional history
- Religion
- Schools
- Science
- Sports
- Surveys and trivia
- Tech
- The jobs we do
- War
- Weather
- You Should Meet...
Services
- Become a Member
- Member Connect Accounts
- Leadership Circle
- Sustaining Members
- Member Discounts
- Become a Sponsor
- Tax Information
- Planned Giving
- Vehicle Donation
- Donate Stock