Opinion

Some years ago, with the Confederate flag in vogue on state license tags, civic boosters in Alabama's high-tech mecca of Huntsville came up with a more dignified vanity-plate statement -- "First to the Moon," in honor of the Saturn V rocket invented there. (True, the inventors were German, Hitler's missile engineers brought to the United States after the war, but their celebrity leader Wernher von Braun liked to say, "You can see I speak with an accent -- that's because I come from Ahlahbahma.")

The College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SAT (originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test) taken by many university applicants as a part of their admissions packages, just announced that it was introducing a new "adversity score" that measures how challenging the test-taker's environment was growing up -- incorporating metrics like the average poverty and crime levels of the applicant's home neighborhood and the quality of the high school they attend.

On May 10, San Francisco police officers carrying a sledge hammer, and with their guns drawn, raided the home of a journalist named Bryan Carmody. They handcuffed him for six hours and seized tens of thousands of dollars of his equipment along with his confidential work material. They had one goal: to learn who had leaked a police report to him about the death of longtime San Francisco public defender Jeffrey Adachi.