Etc...

Your car will be safe here

In case you missed it, a respected British science magazine has published its choices for the world's most secure places. Care to guess them? Well, one is the vault at Fort Knox, Ky. - you know, the one that holds all that gold bullion behind granite walls and a 25-ton door. Then, there's former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's Baghdad bunker, which was built to withstand a direct hit by a nuclear bomb. But the editors also wanted to include "something down to earth." That turned out to be ... a multi-level parking garage in Derby, England, whose ultra-sophisticated system of closed-circuit TV cameras, security doors, panic buttons, sensors, and bar-coded tickets has not allowed a single break-in, assault, or act of vandalism since it opened six years ago.

Graduation from high school is literally a 50-50 proposition for students from ethnic minority groups, according to a new report, "Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis." The Urban Institute and Harvard University's Civil Rights Project compiled the report, calculating graduation rates on the basis of the number of students enrolled each year relative to the number who are awarded diplomas after four years in school. The study comes up with an overall graduation percentage and breakout rates by ethnic subdivisions, as follows:
All students 68.0%
Asian/Pacific Islander 76.8%
White 74.9%
Hispanic 53.2%
Native American 51.1%
Black 50.2%