News In Brief

September 21, 2000

Hi, what's no. 3?

"I don't know what to do," laments a school principal in Zagreb, Croatia, about a tough problem: student cheating on examinations. No, not when a child's eyes wander to a test paper on another desk. Rather, published reports say, cheating has gone high tech thanks to cellphones. "At the end of the last school year," continues the exasperated principal, "we caught the first pupils cheating in their mathematics exams using short-message services to get the right answers." Oh, and in case you were wondering, the principal isn't confronting this problem with teenagers; she's dealing with grade-school pupils.

DON'T PEEL ANY FOR ME, OK?

When tons of oranges washed ashore on Texas' Galveston Island recently, beachcombers assumed cargo had been lost from a ship. Not quite. The fruit was part of a cleanup exercise in the Gulf of Mexico. "When you have a group of them," explained a Coast Guard spokesman, "they behave like an oil spill."

Airport expansion projects: Is yours involved in one?

If you've taken a commercial flight recently, you know the airlines have been stretched to the limit by the booming economy. To try to cope with the crush, airports are spending massive sums of money on new runways, terminals, improved ground transportation, and other facilities. The US's 10 busiest airports and funds earmarked for expansion at each (in billions) as measured by Geneva-based Airports Council International:

1. Hartsfield Atlanta $5.4

2. Chicago-O'Hare 3.7

3. Los Angeles International 12.0

4. Dallas/Fort Worth International 2.5

5. San Francisco International 2.5

6. Denver International 175 million

7. Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan 2.6

8. Detroit Metropolitan 2.0

9. Miami International 5.4

10. Las Vegas McCarran International 1.0

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society