Ny Safidinao

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city. Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates. Among them are Samuel Zell, the Chicago investor who is seeking to complete a buyout of the Tribune Company, and Rupert Murdoch, who has lobbied against the rule for years so that he can continue controlling both The New York Post and a Fox television station in New York. The proposal appears to have the support of a majority of the five commission members, agency officials said, although it is not clear that Mr. Martin would proceed with a sweeping deregulatory approach on a vote of 3 to 2 — something his predecessor tried w

LONDON (AFP) - Falling numbers of state dentists in England has led to some people taking extreme measures, including extracting their own teeth, according to a new study released Monday. Falling numbers of state dentists in England has led to some people taking extreme measures, including extracting their own teeth, according to a new study released Monday. Others have used superglue to stick crowns back on, rather than stumping up for private treatment, said the study. One person spoke of carrying out 14 separate extractions on himself with pliers. More typically, a lack of publicly-funded dentists means that growing numbers go private: 78 percent of private patients said they were there because they could not find a National Health Service (NHS) dentist, and only 15 percent because of better treatment. "This is an uncomfortable read for all of us, and poses serious questions to politicians from patients," said Sharon Grant of the Commission for Patient and Public Involveme

Automakers would just love it if we went out and bought a new car every few years. But not all of us are hitting the showrooms with that frequency. Mike in Maine, for example, wants to know how long his car will keep going. I’m driving a 1993 Toyota Camry with over 235,000 miles. I have spent about $2,000 in maintenance on the car since 1996, when I bought it with 64k on the odometer. The car runs fine and drives fine. What’s the useful life of a car these days? No one can tell me the average life I should expect from this engine or transmission. Mike T., Portland, Maine You should be driving down the road with a big smile on your face, because you certainly got your money’s worth from that Camry. Consumer Reports says the average life expectancy of a new vehicle these days is around 8 years or 150,000 miles. Of course, some well-built vehicles can go 15 years and 300,000, if properly maintained. There’s no way to tell how much longer your car will stay trouble-free, but somewhere dow

Abstract (Summary) Americans have always been extremely religious and overwhelmingly Christian. The 17th-century settlers founded their communities in America in large part for religious reasons. Eighteenth-century Americans saw their Revolution in religious and largely biblical terms. The Revolution reflected their "covenant with God" and was a war between "God's elect" and the British "Antichrist." Jefferson, Paine and other deists and nonbelievers felt it necessary to invoke religion to justify the Revolution. The Declaration of Independence appealed to "Nature's God," the "Creator," "the Supreme Judge of the World," and "divine Providence" for approval, legitimacy and protection. The words "separation of church and state" do not appear in the Constitution, and some people cite the absence of religious language in the Constitution and the provisions of the First Amendment as evidence that America

KAI RYSSDAL: Wall Street's credit crunch has come to the world of student loans. Back in April, a group of investors agreed to pay $25 billion for the federally chartered student loan company Sallie Mae. Since then, of course, much of the financing for those big leveraged buyouts has dried up. Today, we learned the potential buyers want to renegotiate their purchase price. Another thing that's weighing on their minds is a bill the president signed today -- it'll pump another $20 billion into federally-backed student aid programs, in part by cutting subsidies to lenders like Sallie Mae. Commentator Kim Clark says more money for college students is all well and good. But we ought to check the math on how we factor those costs in the first place. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- KIM CLARK: You know how kids crack open algebra textbooks and whine "Why do I have to learn formulas? Nobody uses this in the real world!" Wel

WASHINGTON - Elementary and middle schoolers posted solid gains in math and more modest improvements in reading in national test results released Tuesday. The test scores landed in the midst of a raging debate in Congress over renewal of President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind education law, and provided ammunition for those who want to see it extended with minimal changes. "If we hadn't seen progress today, I think it might have been the death knell for renewing the law," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's definitely going to give the proponents some evidence that five years into the experiment, we're seeing some uptick in some parts of the country." Bush welcomed the news, calling it proof that his policies are "producing positive results for students across the country." The 2002 law requires schools to test students annually in math and reading. School

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Los Angeles metropolitan area led the nation in traffic jams in 2005, with rush-hour drivers spending an extra 72 hours a year on average stuck in traffic, according to a study released on Tuesday. The metropolitan areas of San Francisco-0akland, Washington, D.C.-Virginia-Maryland, and Atlanta were tied for the second most gridlocked areas, according to the study by the Texas Transportation Institute. Drivers in those three areas spent an extra 60 hours on average during peak periods, defined as 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., the study found. But drivers in other regions around the country were not much luckier. The report (http://mobility.tamu.edu) found traffic gridlock worsened in all 437 large, medium and small urban centers in 2005. "What causes congestion? In a word, 'you.' Most of the Mojave Desert is not congested," wrote report authors David Schrank, associate research scientist, and Tim Lomax, research engineer. The Texas Tra

By keeping your car for 15 years, or 225,000 miles of driving, you could save nearly $31,000, according to Consumer Reports magazine. That's compared to the cost of buying an identical model every five years, which is roughly the rate at which most car owners trade in their vehicles. In its annual national auto survey, the magazine found 6,769 readers who had logged more than 200,000 miles on their cars. Their cars included a 1990 Lexus LS400 with 332,000 miles and a 1994 Ford Ranger pick-up that had gone 488,000 miles. Calculating the costs involved in buying a new Honda Civic EX every five years for 15 years - including depreciation, taxes, fees and insurance - the magazine estimated it would cost $20,500 more than it would have cost to simply maintain one car for the same period. Added to that, the magazine factored in $10,300 in interest that could have been earned on that money, assuming a five percent interest rate and a three percent inflation rate, over that time. The magaz

Kai Ryssdal: The pool of federal money that funds student aid programs is about to get $20 billion deeper. Last night, Congress agreed on a deal to cut subsidies to banks that issue those loans and use the money for aid programs directly. Today, The White House said the president will be signing the bill. We've been talking about education this week. About the accessibility of a college degree for people who might not ordinarily be able to get one. People like Reyes Ventura. From North Carolina Public Radio, Paul Cuadros reports. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Cuadros: Reyes Ventura was once a star defender for his small-town high school soccer team in central North Carolina. The team won a state championship in 2004 -- the first predominantly Latino team to do so in that state. Members of that team still come together at a local park in Siler City on weekends to play. When Reyes graduated a year ago last June, he took a const

Kai Ryssdal: It's technically still summer, but the vacation is over for almost everyone of school age in this country K-12 and beyond. More people from almost every background go to college today than did so 30 years ago. But if you're thinking ivy-covered halls, think again. From North Carolina Public Radio, Laura Leslie reports some students may be learning to dream small. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura Leslie: It's lunchtime at Chapel Hill high school, one of the most academically competitive schools in North Carolina. It's a good school, by any measure, but it's also an easy place for at-risk kids to get lost. That's why counselors here started the Blue Ribbon program to help push those students through high school and into college. Most of the students in the program are minority kids from low-income families, like Alisha Lee. Alisha's a senior this fall and she already knows she's going. Sh

SAN FRANCISCO — When San Francisco started trying to promote socioeconomic diversity in its public schools, officials hoped racial diversity would result as well. It has not worked out that way. Abraham Lincoln High School, for example, with its stellar reputation and Advanced Placement courses, has drawn a mix of rich and poor students. More than 50 percent of those students are of Chinese descent. “If you look at diversity based on race, the school hasn’t been as integrated,” Lincoln’s principal, Ronald J. K. Pang, said. “If you don’t look at race, the school has become much more diverse.” San Francisco began considering factors like family income, instead of race, in school assignments when it modified a court-ordered desegregation plan in response to a lawsuit. But school officials have found that the 55,000-student city school district, with Chinese the dominant ethnic group followed by Hispanics, blacks and whites, is resegregrating. The number of schools where students of a sing

by Nell Boyce All Things Considered, July 5, 2007 · Schoolteacher Barbara Morgan was the backup for Christa McAuliffe on the Challenger Space Shuttle. She watched the terrible explosion, but it didn't turn her off from the idea of going to space. Instead, she left teaching to become a full-fledged astronaut, NASA's first "Educator Astronaut." Now, after two decades of waiting, Morgan is scheduled to fly on the next shuttle mission. a Quote: "being is not important, doing is" "I don't ask to my student: what do you want to Be when ypu grow up but what do you want to Do" To Listen.

WASHINGTON - Just when things looked darkest for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, when prison seemed all but certain, President Bush wiped away the former White House aide's 2 1/2-year sentence in the CIA leak case. Bush's move came Monday, just five hours after a federal appeals panel ruled that Libby could not delay his prison term. His prospects for an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court seemed bleak. The former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Libby was just waiting for a date to surrender. After months of sidestepping pardon questions, Bush stepped in. He did not issue a pardon but erased a prison sentence that he felt was just too harsh. "I respect the jury's verdict," Bush said in a written statement. "But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend 30 months in prison." Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald

WASHINGTON, June 28 — Striking down an antitrust rule nearly a century old, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that it was not automatically unlawful for manufacturers and distributors to agree on minimum retail prices. The decision will give producers significantly more, though not unlimited, power to dictate retail prices and to restrict the flexibility of discounters. Five justices, agreeing with the nation’s major manufacturers, said the new rule could in some instances lead to more competition and better service. But four dissenting justices agreed with 37 states and some consumer groups that abandoning the old rule could result in significantly higher prices and less competition for consumer and other goods. The court struck down the 96-year-old rule that resale price maintenance agreements were an automatic, or per se, violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. In its place, the court instructed judges considering such agreements for possible antitrust violations to apply a case-b

WASHINGTON, June 28 — With competing blocs of justices claiming the mantle of Brown v. Board of Education, a bitterly divided Supreme Court declared today that public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race. Voting 5 to 4, the court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., invalidated programs in Seattle and metropolitan Louisville, Ky., that sought to maintain school-by-school diversity by limiting transfers on the basis of race or using race as a “tiebreaker” for admission to particular schools. Both programs had been upheld by lower federal courts and were similar to plans in place in hundreds of school districts around the country. Chief Justice Roberts said such programs were “directed only to racial balance, pure and simple,” a goal he said was forbidden by the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating

The Environmental Protection Agency has long been criticized for the testing procedure it uses to gauge fuel economy — which determines the mileage numbers that car shoppers seen on window stickers. The current EPA method, introduced in the 1970s, is based on outdated assumptions: that motorists drive slower than they really do, that they never use air-conditioning, never go up a hill, never start their cars in the cold, never get stuck in traffic jams, etc. Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards have pretty much stayed flat for more than a decade. Efforts to require cars and trucks to be more fuel efficient have repeatedly been stymied in Congress. Source: NHTSA In 1985, the EPA tried to account for some of the shortcomings in its lab-based tests by adjusting its fuel-economy numbers downward by 10 percent for city driving, and 22 percent for highway mileage. The revised figures were slightly more realistic, but critics argued that they still failed to account for real-world driv

NPR.org, June 18, 2007 · CAFE standards — short for Corporate Average Fuel Economy — dictate the number of miles per gallon that an automaker should get for the range of vehicles it sells. Originating during the energy crisis of the 1970s, the standards represented the federal government's attempt at reducing fuel consumption by boosting the fuel economy of cars and light trucks. The standards ushered in an early surge in fuel economy for new cars and trucks. But CAFE requirements haven't changed much in more than a decade — and neither has the gas mileage of the vehicles that Americans drive. Below, a primer on these gas-sipping rules of the road: What are current CAFE standards? The current standard for passenger automobiles is 27.5 mpg. The standard for light-trucks — a classification that also includes SUVs under 8,500 pounds — rose to 22.2 mpg for model-year 2007 and will get bumped up to 22.5 for 2008 models. Why don't light trucks and SUVs have to meet the same fuel-

Morning Edition, June 19, 2007 · U.S. automakers say the types of vehicles that will get more miles per gallon of gas have features that consumers tend to shun, including four-cylinder engines and stick shifts. The Senate is set to debate new energy legislation, and a major issue is how much to raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks in order to fight climate change. A new bill's sponsors are proposing a requirement that the auto industry make vehicles that get an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. ECONOMY by Elizabeth Shogren

BERKELEY, Calif. - Human-rights activists are using high-resolution satellite cameras to keep watch over imperiled villages in the Darfur region of Sudan and posting the images online to enlist help preventing violence. The new Amnesty International Web site, http://www.eyesondarfur.org , was launched Wednesday in conjunction with a conference at the University of California, Berkeley. "We're hoping that by shining a light that we will deter the abuse from ever happening," said Ariela Blatter, director of the Crisis Prevention and Response Center for Amnesty International USA. Satellite images have been used before to document destruction in Darfur and elsewhere. But the latest project offers clearer, more up-to-date images, allowing experts to better track developments, Blatter said. The quality of the pictures is "very, very good," said Lars Bromley of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an international nonprofit group that publishes the