Archive for the ‘Original’ Category
Why your child’s school bus has no seat belts
Video: Federal crash test video may look violent, but safety officials say much of the impact is absorbed by the foam padding on the seat in front. A lap or shoulder belt could cause significant neck and abdominal injuries.
If cars have seat belts, why aren’t they generally required in school buses? Because modern school buses are already remarkably safe, and because seat belts don’t work the same way in buses as they do cars, research shows.
Designers of modern school buses don’t trust squirmy children to use seat belts properly. Instead, they use a passive system called compartmentalization. Bus seats aren’t packed so closely together just to maximize capacity (although that’s one reason); they’re spaced tightly and covered with 4-inch-thick foam to form a protective bubble.
About 440,000 public school buses carry 24 million children more than 4.3 billion miles a year, but only about six children die each year in bus accidents, according to annual statistics compiled the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. About 800 children, by contrast, die every year walking, biking or being driven to school in cars or other passenger vehicles.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Biden vs. Biden?
Did somebody get to Joe Biden?
In an interview Thursday on msnbc TV, the vice president essentially pooh-poohed the WikiLeaks dump of classified State Department cables, saying that at worst, they were “embarrassing”:
“I don’t think there’s any damage,” Biden said. “I don’t think there’s any substantive damage.”
WikiLeaks paints more nuanced picture of Iran
The life of a reporter: I’m posting this late because I was on vacation when it actually ran on msnbc.com (in fact, I finished writing it on the plane to Georgia) and it slipped my mind.
Classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks paint a picture of an Iran with few friends in the Mideast, even among nations that speak more accommodatingly in public for political reasons. The documents show that the Iranian leadership is not united behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that the United States and its European allies must lean heavily on the government of Turkey for its limited insight into the affairs of Tehran, despite what they see as the erratic unreliability of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
WikiLeaks attacks getting more sophisticated
Over at Technolog, I’m analyzing the newest DDoS attack on WikiLeaks. This one is 50 times the size of the Anonymous attack on Scientology in 2008.
U.S. can’t let WikiLeaks limit candor, diplomats say
Former U.S. ambassadors say taking more diplomatic communications offline in response to the WikiLeaks documents would cripple the ability to “make the world work.”
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com with NBC News reports)
For small charities, success can be a burden
The Keep A Breast Foundation is generating more than $3 million a month from the sale of “i [heart] boobies” charity bracelets; just two years ago, it took in $495,969 — in total. “We’re still trying to figure out what we’re going to do with all the money,” the executive director says, mirroring the challenges for America’s small charities that are lucky enough to hit the jackpot.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com and Grant Stinchfield/KXAS-TV)
Decision 2010: We voted against Obama, Pelosi, voters say
For Democrats, Election Day was judgment day, with the jurors standing up and convicting them of guilt by association with Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Decision 2010: Divided Congress on tap as Republicans take House
Americans who insisted they were tired of partisan divisions elected a divided Congress on Tuesday, giving Republicans control of the House of Representatives but handing Democrats a razor-thin hold on the Senate.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Year-round schooling gains ground in U.S.
Kids from well-off families with access to tutoring and academic camps and travel keep learning when school’s out for the summer, while those without such advantages tread water or even sink, research shows. To slow the so-called spring slide, more U.S. school districts are moving to year-round classes, and by 2012, education groups estimate, more than 5 million pupils — about 10 percent of all children enrolled in American public schools — could be going to school year-round.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc)
If you’re on a mobile device, the sidebar box “Where does the summer break come from?” may not render. You can find it here.
Reporting: News organizations look at WikiLeaks material with different eyes
WikiLeaks.org tried to coordinate coverage of its highly anticipated release of secret U.S. documents from the war in Iraq by sharing the material with a select group of news organizations weeks in advance, but it couldn’t coordinate what they actually said.
In the end, the shadowy, decentralized organization couldn’t even coordinate the release of its own documents. Al-Jazeera, one of the news organizations that it had given the documents weeks ago, broke WikiLeaks’ embargo by publishing a six-minute video on its website late Friday afternoon. The New York Times, The Guardian of Britain and Le Monde, which also received the material under the embargo, followed swiftly with their extensive prepared reports.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
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Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 