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Opinion: In today’s pages: Facebook, football, fake photos

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Environmental writer Glenn Hurowitz explains how the pope is saving the Earth, and columnist Gregory Rodriguez says Germany doesn’t like its new U.S. embassy, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Former Notre Dame football player Allen Sack asks if top academic schools like his can compete on the gridiron without compromising grades. And IvyGate editors Maureen O’Connor and Jacob Savage wonder what impact all those Facebook photos will have on future elections:

Imagine if the current crop of public figures had grown up during the Facebook era. We might have photos of John McCain in Florida slurping body shots off his stripper girlfriend. Barack Obama rolling a joint on a beach in Hawaii. George W. Bush passed out at a Yale frat party, 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped to his hands. Hillary Rodham Clinton at a Wellesley peace rally, locking lips with her husband’s future secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. It’s one thing to hear that your elected representative had a wild time in college. It’s entirely different to have pictorial proof. Would you still vote for someone after viewing a photograph of him passed out in his own vomit?

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The editorial board urges California to go forward with its Green Chemistry Initiative, reacts to the Iranian missile photo scandal, and says the case of army deserter Joshua Key -- who is trying to get refugee status in Canada -- should spur some soul-searching in the U.S.:

Of course, Canada has the sovereign right to grant refugee status to anyone it pleases, but do its judges have the right to decide whether the U.S. is breaching the Geneva Convention? Actually, they must consider such evidence to give would-be refugees a fair hearing -- just as U.S. judges do when considering similar claims by those fleeing foreign military service. But they do not have jurisdiction to rule on the legality of the U.S. conduct of the war. Nor could the U.S. be sued in The Hague because it has not joined the International Criminal Court. In reality, the U.S. answers only to itself. That is why we should take a second look at our procedures for dealing with soldiers who allege human rights violations....

On the letters page, readers discuss the state’s plan to test eighth-graders in math. Corona’s Ron Lankford says, ‘Here we go again, forcing our students to be proficient in a subject most of them will never use again.’

*Art by David Suter

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