Students Massachusetts

Officials say a 19-year-old quadriplegic from Missouri used an Internet chat room to make "Columbine-like" threats to hurt students and teachers at a Massachusetts middle school. Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Tom Reilly said Saturday that the paralyzed teen, whose name and hometown were not released, made the threats using an America Online chat room frequented by dozens of eighth-graders from Townsend's Hawthorne Brook Middle School.

Officials say a 19-year-old quadriplegic from Missouri used an Internet chat room to make "Columbine-like" threats to hurt students and teachers at a Massachusetts middle school. Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Tom Reilly said Saturday that the paralyzed teen, whose name and hometown were not released, made the threats using an America Online chat room frequented by dozens of eighth-graders from Townsend's Hawthorne Brook Middle School.

Making condoms available to high school students does not make them more likely to have sex, researchers reported in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Contrary to some arguments, the students at schools where the condoms were available were less likely to have engaged in sex, according to the researchers, who studied students in Massachusetts.

Gov. Michael S. Dukakis has signed a law imposing criminal penalties for the hazing of students at Massachusetts schools. "This is the kind of conduct we're not going to tolerate in this state," Dukakis said Tuesday at a signing ceremony. He was accompanied by Mary Lenaghan, whose son was killed in a hazing incident at American International College in Springfield last year.

A survey published today in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that nearly one out of 10 physicians and one out of six medical students regularly abuse drugs and that the number is likely to increase. The research team, led by William McAuliffe of Harvard University's department of behavioral sciences, said the levels reflect trends in drug abuse in the United States.

Mitt Romney, in an extended response to a question about assault weapons during his debate with President Obama, said, “We were able to drive our schools to be No. 1 in the nation.” As in the past, the former Massachusetts governor took credit for education achievement in the state. Student achievement is arguably tops in the nation in Massachusetts based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given to a sample of students nationwide. Massachusetts also has been praised for its rigorous academic standards.

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Microsoft Corp. has posted a single patch, or program repair kit, to fix all three security bugs found over the last week in its Internet Explorer Web browser. Without the patch, an unscrupulous Web site operator could take advantage of the flaws to wreak havoc in someone else's computer, send instructions to run programs secretly, send electronic mail under the other operator's name, or damage software stored on a hard drive.

A former Cal Poly Pomona student who sent threatening e-mail messages to Latinos at universities, corporations and government agencies around the country was sentenced Monday to two years at a federal "boot camp" for young offenders. Kingman Quon, 22, apologized in court "for letting my immaturity get the best of me" when he sent the hate messages with threatening ethnic slurs and denunciations of affirmative action.

Schoolchildren take such an array of standardized tests that the different results should not be compared to each other, an expert panel said Friday in a report that could bolster President Clinton's call for national testing standards. The special committee took no position on whether there should be national tests that would measure individual reading and math performance against a uniform standard.

Nearly 40% of doctors under age 40 admitted in a survey to be published today that they use marijuana or cocaine to get high with friends, and a quarter of doctors of all ages said they recently treated themselves with mind-affecting drugs. Overall, more than half of the physicians and three-quarters of the medical students who participated in the Harvard University survey said they have used drugs at least once for self-treatment, to get high or to help them stay awake.