The Morning Report
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Here’s a quick roundup of some of what voiceofsandiego.org staff have been tweeting about this week. You can keep up with our back-channel chatter by following our staff Twitter list. It’s fresh and newsy. Sometimes you’ll even see our news there before we publish our stories.
• Law school may be no guarantor of job success, according to a recent New York Times story passed around the office. Although law schools report high employment rates for their grads, those enticing numbers can include employment at Jack in the Box and other unglamorous non-legal jobs.
A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.
In San Diego, Thomas Jefferson School of Law is being sued by a graduate who learned her lesson the hard way. Anna Alaburda told our media partner NBC San Diego that she has applied for 150 jobs, has more than $150,000 in law school debt, and that the school misrepresented graduates’ job prospects.
Her classmates may be in a similar situation: TJSL has the highest rate of graduate debt among all law schools, according to US News & World Report. Denying the claims, Associate Dean of Student Affairs Beth Kransberger told CBS News 8:
It is the responsibility of the person who is paying so much for an education to figure out what they’re going to be able to do with it. That is going in with your eyes open; I guess it’s a very expensive life lesson.
• Former Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rhon is behind bars in Mexico City after being arrested early June 4th by military authorities acting on an anonymous tip. Mexican soldiers reported finding 88 firearms and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Rhon and 10 bodyguards and other employees were arrested on charges of illegal possession of weapons, a federal crime.
Rob Davis reminded us about the casino and off-track betting magnate’s appearance in the news in 2007, during the race for Baja California Governor. Rhon heated up the campaign trail as the people’s “Santa Claus.” What some voters would think of as political seduction, others saw as gifts from a true philanthropist who cared about the people.
They say Hank is more Don Corleone than Santa Claus. They say the shower of gifts is a cynical act of political seduction blinding the poor to his past: How his chief of security in 1988 was found guilty of murder in the slaying of a crusading Tijuana journalist. How U.S. authorities once investigated him for alleged links to organized crime.
Rhon lost the 2007 election.
Morgan Stinson is a junior at High Tech High and an intern at voiceofsandiego.org. She can be reached at vosdinterns@gmail.com