Wednesday News Roundup

Written by: Sheri Divers on May 30, 2007 11:00 PM EDT

New York Is Top State in Dollars Per Student

New York again leads all other states in school spending per pupil, according to the latest census figures. Nationwide, public school districts spent an average of $8,701 per student on elementary and secondary education in the 2005 fiscal year, 5 percent more than in the previous year. New York, which also came in highest last year, spent $14,119 per student, followed by New Jersey at $13,800, Vermont at $11,838 and Connecticut at $11,572.

Possible legal ramifications for Roe v. Wade: Her embryos or his?

Webster, Texas — AFTER two years of infertility treatments — from temperature monitoring and artificial inseminations to hormone injections and laparoscopic surgery — Augusta Roman felt her last, best hope for bearing a child was only hours away. Her doctor had retrieved 13 eggs from her ovaries, and six had been fertilized with the sperm of her husband, Randy Roman. Ten hours before the embryos were to be implanted in Augusta's womb, Randy emerged from their study and broke unfathomable news: Despite all she had endured, he couldn't go through with it.

Attorney post has few takers

Wanted: Veteran attorney to oversee important cases in 35 Florida counties. Job expected to last 18 months or so. Salary: $145,400.Sounds enticing, but so far there have been almost no takers. In the past, lawyers clamored to be U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida -- one of the most powerful federal-prosecutor jobs in the country.

LEFT BEHIND: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media

It would surprise few people, conservative or progressive, to learn that coverage of the intersection of religion and politics tends to oversimplify both. If this oversimplification occurred to the benefit or detriment of neither side of the political divide, then the weaknesses in coverage of religion would be of only academic interest. But as this study documents, coverage of religion not only overrepresents some voices and underrepresents others, it does so in a way that is consistently advantageous to conservatives.

U.S. still lacks disaster response plan: Coast Guard

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is better prepared to deal with a major disaster like Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf region in 2005, but still lacks a formal structure for coordinating a national response, the head of the U.S. Coast Guard said on Tuesday.

Adm. Thad Allen, appointed to oversee the federal response to Katrina a week after the hurricane, said the Department of Homeland Security was reworking it's national response plan to incorporate the lessons of Katrina and other incidents.

NASA: Danger Point Closer Than Thought From Warming

Even "moderate additional" greenhouse emissions are likely to push Earth past "critical tipping points" with "dangerous consequences for the planet," according to research conducted by NASA and the Columbia University Earth Institute.

With just 10 more years of "business as usual" emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, says the NASA/Columbia paper, "it becomes impractical" to avoid "disastrous effects." The study appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Its lead author is James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

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