| S.C. school-bus incidents | Driving a busload of stress
Two 16-year-old boys sexually assault a 14-year-old girl on a Berkeley County school bus after paying the driver $10 to look the other way. A once-beloved Gilbert school-bus driver sits in prison after confessing to sexually abusing girls as young as 7 on his bus. Such stories grab the headlines and paint a grim picture of the trek that more than 300,000 S.C. children take twice a day on a school bus. But the reality is the vast majority of them arrive at school and back home again safe and sound. Local schools lean heavily on statewide standards for training, hiring and checking the backgrounds of school-bus drivers to make sure children get to school safely. But bus drivers and the people who work with them will tell you that, day in and day out, school-bus safety often comes down to basic communication and defusing problems before they get out of hand.
Don't Call It Plagiarism
Perhaps not since the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981 has the big press lavished such intense and generally sympathetic coverage on a labor dispute. Both the Washington Post ("it hasn't been easy for movie writers") and the New York Times ("my greed is fair and reasonable") have run op-eds by screenwriters demanding that the entertainment industry compensate Writers Guild of America members for digital use of their work on the Web, iPods, cell phones, etc., the sticking point of this strike. In the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times, writer-producer Marshall Herskovitz lectures about how corporate domination of Hollywood inconveniences him, and a nonscreenwriter laments the powerlessness of today's scribes ("there is nothing without the writer"). .
High Growth Reported for the Ceramic Tiles: UK
Reportlinker.com announces that a new market research report related to the industry is available in its catalogue. The UK market for ceramic tiles in volume (million m(2)) and value (GBP million), 2003-2012 The UK market for ceramic tiles, by application, in volume and value, 2003 2012: floor wall The UK market for ceramic wall tiles, by type of tile, in volume, value and average price, 2003-2012: others The UK market for ceramic wall tiles, by location, in volume and value, 2003-2012: internal others The UK market for ceramic wall tiles, by format, in volume, 2003-2012: others The UK market for ceramic wall tiles, by sector, in volume and value, 2003-2012: non-residential The UK market for ceramic wall tiles, by type of work, in volume and value, 2003-2012: replacement first installation The UK market for ceramic floor tiles, by type of tile, in volume, value and average price, 2003-2012: others The UK market for ceramic floor tiles, by location, in volume, and value, 2003-2012: internal others The UK market for ceramic floor tiles, by format, in volume, 2003-2012: others The UK market for ceramic floor tiles, by sector, in volume and value, 2003-2012: non-residential The UK market for ceramic floor tiles, by type of work, in volume and value, 2003-2012: opportunities threats Please note:This is delivered as a Zip file with a PDF and Excel file.
Beyond the Arc: Is Matta worth the money?
And how can anyone be worth more than that? After all, Matta isn't even the game's highest paid coach. (Or in the Big Ten. Michigan State's Tom Izzo makes more, and Matta's package was prompted by Tubby Smith's superior compensation package from Minnesota. Tubby, in should be noted, made nearly as much as Matta — in 2003 at Kentucky.) Since the Ohio State Board of Trustees must think Matta's worth it, it doesn't really matter if I think it's too much money to pay a coach. I can still wonder, though. Ohio State has the money to spend on top-flight coaches (in 2006, it was the only school with an athletic budget over $100 million), but that doesn't mean you'd have to pay that much up-front money to a coach. Why not spread it out? USA Today does a great package on coaches' salaries every year.
Kosovo Serb Protesters Attack UN Police
It is sending the picture of Serbia as bandits," said Miobor Stosic, 67, a retired airline official. "We are so ashamed."
Toma Rajcic, 40-year-old lawyer from Belgrade, was depressed over what happened.
"It is disgusting. It is all coming back, the fighting, darkness," he said. "It is disgusting. It's time to leave this country."
Pro-Western politicians in Serbia accused hard-line nationalists in the Kostunica's government of inciting the violence.
Parties of Tadic and Kostunica are united in a coalition government that has ruled Serbia since mid-2007. But the two differ sharply on Kosovo, with Tadic saying Belgrade must press on with efforts to join the EU regardless of Kosovo, and Kostunica seeking to drop the bid because most EU countries plan to recognize the province's independence.
Newsday's Movie Reviews
What's the point of making a parody that's dumber than the stuff it parodies? "Meet the Spartans" panders for cheap laughs at the expense of just about every vulgar excess in present-day pop culture. But it also wallows in the slop it denigrates to the point where the movie is all but indistinguishable from its dopiest targets. .
Update: Library Has 10 Copies of "Water for Elephants"
No Zags: Candidate endorsement is one of the most antiquated and soon-to-be-extinct functions of the newspaper industry. In a world where anybody can publish any opinion they want and anyone can read it, it seems pretty silly that the "wise old minds" of an editorial board still feel the need to put a newspaper's stamp of approval on a political position. Endorsements are relics of the old-journalism past, as are editorials. Question: I'm curious about the last sentence of No Zags' comment. Are editorials, indeed, relics. Or are the still important contributions to the public dialogue -- and help form community opinion? .
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