Lead Stories
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Oregon’s budget is under such strain that some of the state’s public schools were forced to end their academic years early, and lawmakers are cutting corners wherever they can. In April a prison doctor declared death-row inmate Horacio Reyes-Camarena a good candidate for a kidney transplant, a $100,000 procedure that would eliminate the even greater expense of his dialysis–$120,000 a year until his execution, which may be delayed by appeals for a decade. (Reyes-Camarena agreed to accept the kidney only reluctantly: “Why take it with me?” he said.) Meanwhile Oregon hospitals have had to turn away law-abiding kidney patients covered by the state’s health plan, because the plan’s reduced benefits might not cover the cost of drugs to prevent organ rejection.
A February BBC report from Meghalaya, India, noted a playful local tradition of giving children famous Western names (the people like to appear knowledgeable and worldly, and their culture links laughter to long life and health). Among the candidates in a recent election: Adolf Lu Hitler R Marak, Tony Curtis, Rockfeller Momin, and Hilarious Dhkar. Current popular baby names include Bush, Blair, Clinton, and Saddam.
Last year public schools in Washington, D.C., in an effort to help elementary students prepare for a standardized test, printed a study guide so riddled with embarrassing errors and typos that this year’s edition was expected to be a showpiece. But according to an April story in the Washington Post, the new guide is even worse. One multiple-choice question, accompanied by an image of nine flowers, asks the student to count them–but the answers are all numbers between 22 and 30. Another question reads, in full: “234 people went to the movie theater to see the first feature film and 456 went to the movies to see the second film. How many people went for both shows?”
