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By Kelsey Williams, SFGate:

Looks like Michael Vick has completed the comeback no one thought possible.

Michael Vick talks to children in 2010 as part of the Humane Society of the United States’ “End Dogfighting” outreach program. Looks like his efforts at rehabbing his image are paying off. (AP Photo)

CNBC reports: “In a remarkable move, Nike, which severed Vick’s contract in 2007 after he admitted to his involvement in a dogfighting ring, has re-signed the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback.”

Vick’s agent Joel Segal said that “Michael is excited to have a long-term and strong relationship with Nike.” And Nike spokesman Derek Kent said “Michael acknowledges his past mistakes. We do not condone those actions, but we support the positive changes he has made to better himself off the field.”

After Vick admitted his crimes in 2007, public ire was so strong that few in the sports world thought the explosive quarterback would ever return to the NFL at all, and Nike cut ties with Vick that August calling his actions, “inhumane, abhorrent and unacceptable,”

Then in 2009, after serving 19 months in prison and two months in home confinement, Vick joined the roster of the Philadelphia Eagles. A year later, he won the starter’s job.

Upon release, Vick had an exclusive interview with “60 Minutes,” in which he expressed his remorse and regret for his actions. The athlete has since worked with various organizations to speak out against animal cruelty.

All that is well and good, but likely the biggest factor ingratiating Vick to NFL fans and sponsors is his spectacular 2010 performance.  Vick proved last season that as a football player, he has still got the goods, as one of the most dangerous offensive players in the NFC. By the end of the season, Vick’s number 7 Eagles jersey was the sixth most popular in the league.

In the world of sports, one good season can sweep away all manner of past transgressions in the minds of former critics, and now, Vick has managed to win back one of the most difficult critics of all, a former sponsor.  Wonder who will forgive him next?  PETA? Probably not.

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By Kelsey Williams, SFGate:

The Los Angeles Unified School District just released their new policy that homework will count for only 10 percent of the grade, giving students essentially a free pass to not do a thing.

While there are some lauding the approach as progressive and fair towards students whose home life and economic circumstances makes work outside of the classroom difficult, the overarching move once again takes power away from the teachers who know their student’s situation better than any school supervisor could.  According to the Los Angeles Times:

The L.A. approach is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district’s mostly low-income, minority population. It’s also aimed at supporting L.A. Unified’s increasing focus on boosting measureable academic achievement.
According to the new policy, “Varying degrees of access to academic support at home, for whatever reason, should not penalize a student so severely that it prevents the student from passing a class, nor should it inflate the grade.” It was distributed to schools last month.

Homework, however, is not just a teacher’s form of torture meant to overload students and cause problems. There are benefits to doing those geometry problem sets every evening or reading a chapter or two of classic literature. Homework helps students get a better grip on what they’re learning and forces repetition of concepts that just don’t sink in the first time around.

Now, instead of allowing teachers to have some control over how they help their students learn, once again policy makers are enforcing a homogenizing measure that will help some kids pass, but allow anyone to slack off more and learn less.

Indeed, there are students with circumstances that make additional work difficult, but perhaps we should just leave it to good teachers to make that call– teachers who aren’t forced to treat students as just one more test score, but as individuals.

The  move accompanies another policy being tested in which student’s grades go up for performing well on state standardized tests. It’s all in the policies now, public school is no longer about teaching the next generation the knowledge and skills to succeed but about looking good in standardized test statistics.

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By Kelsey Williams, SFGate:

Talk about a death at a funeral! A shocked Russian woman reportedly died from a heart attack after waking up during her own funeral.

The Daily Mail reports:

As mourning relatives filed past her open coffin the supposedly dead woman suddenly woke up and started screaming as she realised where she was.

Fagliyu Mukametzyanova, 49, who was rushed to the hospital after collapsing in her home with chest pains, had been declared dead from a heart attack earlier that day by doctors in Kazan, Russia, a city of 1.14 million about 400 miles east of Moscow.

Waking up hysterical at her own funeral, Mukametzyanova lived for another 12 minutes, before dying for good.

The woman’s husband, Fagili Mukhametzyanov, 51, said, “I am very angry and want answers. She wasn’t dead when they said she was and they could have saved her.”

Minsalih Sahapov, a spokesman for the hospital, declined comment beyond stating that the hospital is carrying out an investigation.

After this, I’d wager doctors in Kazan are going to be extra careful from now on to double-check whether their patients are not just “almost dead,” but “all dead.”

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The Dallas Mavericks and their star Dirk Nowitzki may have won the world championship, but what people really want to talk about is the failure of the Miami Heat and its love-him-or-hate-him superstar.
LeBron James sent a message in the post-game press conference to people who were happy to see him fail — get a life.

Because at the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal, but they have to get back to the real world at some point.

<a href="http://video.msn.com?mkt=en-us&#038;brand=foxsports&#038;%23038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:947b28e8-9295-4e62-a191-e4f2311f0620&#038;%23038;showPlaylist=true&#038;%23038;from=IV2_en-us_foxsports_videosearch&#038;%23038;fg=RAMP" title="LeBron on critics">Video: LeBron on critics</a>
The implied lifestyle contrast was reminiscent of Lina, the evil silent movie queen in “Singin’ in the Rain,” saying “If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives…”
Meantime, Nowitzki got off pretty much scot-free for his own bonehead move — running into the locker room before the game even ended instead of shaking hands with his opponents.
As one poster said on a Lakers forum, “Can you imagine if James or (Dwayne) Wade pulled something similar? That’d be getting crucified. But because it’s Nowitzki and he comes across as a humble superstar, he’ll get a complete pass.”

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Doomsday predictor Harold Camping is “doing well” after suffering a stroke on Thursday night at his home in Alameda, Calif., near Oakland.

Harold Camping on May 14, 2011, a week before his rapture prediction. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle)

According to the Christian Post, a woman who answered the door Sunday at his home (believed to be Camping’s wife Shirley) told its reporter: “He is doing very well– not a serious stroke at all.”

The radio evangelist, who is 89, is still hospitalized at an undisclosed location, she said.

A neighbor told the Oakland Tribune that Camping suffered the stroke on his right side and that his speech appeared to be a little slurred.

Camping, the head of Family Radio with a distinctive gravelly voice, sent the country into a tizzy with his widely publicized prediction of massive earthquakes and destruction worldwide on May 21, followed by a rapture of saved souls. He has subsequently moved that date of destruction back to October 21.

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Teenage phenom Bryce Harper has long been considered the next Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez, and that’s not altogether a good thing.
Last night, the 18-year-old Washington Nationals prospect stood around home plate watching his drive go out of the park for the Hagerstown Suns. Then, as he approached home plate, he puckered up and threw a kiss to the pitcher for the unfortunately named Greensboro Grasshoppers.

The gesture could have been in retaliation for being hit in the leg by a Greensboro pitcher the day before. Still, it drew jeers from Jim Joyce and Kevin Kennedy on Sirius XM’s “MLB Home Plate,” this morning, with Kennedy warning that if he does something like that in the majors, opposing teams will retaliate, most likely by hitting a top Nationals veteran like Jayson Werth. (The idea is that since Werth will know this, he’ll tell Harper to cool it before it happens.)

On ESPN, Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt advised Harper not to show up the pitcher. “Hit ‘em like you’re used to them–tone it down and play the game.”

Harper is running through the Class A South Atlantic League with a .342 BA and 14 HR’s (stats). Harper, from Las Vegas, was groomed by his father for stardom at a young age, like Tiger Woods, and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated at age 16. Some experts think he could be the first 18-year old major leaguer since A-Rod, but it’s more likely he’ll come up next season.

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The revisions are coming! The revisions are coming!
The story of Sarah Palin’s tangled explanation of Paul Revere’s ride galloped off in a new direction today when Little Green Footballs and the Huffington Post reported that her supporters tried to edit the Wikipedia page on the 1770s patriot on horseback to state that Revere did not say “The British are coming” because most people at the time considered themselves British. The revision was quickly reversed.

The dispute started last week when Palin visited Boston’s Old North Church last week and said that Revere “warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms.” History, of course, records that Revere was trying to warn the Americans.
On Fox News Sunday, Palin acknowledged that Revere was warning the Americans but also defended her stance, saying “Part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there that ‘hey, you’re not going to take American arms, you are not going to beat our own well-armed persons individual private militia that we have.’ ”
The Boston Herald found a local historian who backed up the idea that Revere at one point did issue a warning to the British.
As for Revere’s famous cry, according to the Paul Revere House website, what he really said was “The regulars are coming out!” That doesn’t quite have the ring of “The British are coming!,” but expresses much the same sentiment.