| Parents fight to save schools from CPS ax
Parents, ministers and students jammed the Chicago Public Schools headquarters Wednesday, pleading to save some of the 19 schools swept up in what officials say will be the largest wave of school shakeups in CPS history. Some parents cried. Some had kids in tow. The largest contingent, from Edison Gifted, filled more than a third of the Board chambers plus an overflow room to protest snippets of information they had received. .
Reader comments: Cougars unload 'avalanche' of 3s in big routaway
BYU is a "NICE TEAM" but not a good team. They are to be congratulated for the win. But part of it is, it is just another testament of the ridiculous 3 point basket distance. You have to be kidding! If there is to be a 3 point basket at all it must be at least 23 feet, not this 19 or 20, whatever the distance. It's just silly. And what about some of the names of the players these days....what is a 'Jimmer', and a Diserese? Wow!! I'm still saying UNLV is the team to beat in the MWC, which is a joke of a conference.....no one without a ticket can see the games. 19,932 or whatever was the attendance....what was the ticket gross for that number? TCU must be a wonderful team, being beaten by that powerhouse Ute team by 16 or whatever the spread was. Jeff Call, Harmon, and all you MWC lovers keep raving on about how great the thing is!!!! Go Cougars!!!! .
Pick Phillips, you tell Gatland
The Ospreys No 9 is your overwhelming choice for the scrum-half position in our hugely popular People's Team poll which has been running online for the last two weeks. We asked which Wales XV you want new coach Gatland to pick as the Six Nations beckons ... and the votes flooded in. You chose 11 Ospreys in your Wales team, six in the forwards and five in the backs. The biggest surprise perhaps came at scrum-half where Scarlets star Dwayne Peel, historically a huge favourite amongst Welsh fans, was left trailing in the wake of his rival Phillips. Ospreys ace Phillips canvassed 67 per cent of the votes for the No 9 jersey, compared with 20 per cent for Peel. Sale-bound Peel is a doubt for next Saturday's big showdown with England anyway because of shoulder trouble.
Kenyans count bodies in post-election battleground
Until Friday, it had escaped weeks of violence that has killed at least 700 people in the east African country and forced 250,000 from their homes since a disputed Dec. 27 election returned President Mwai Kibaki to power. Not anymore. As police unloaded sixteen burnt bodies off the back of a pick-up truck, a crowd stood by in shock, looking away as each corpse was dumped. A woman wailed and ran away. "I've never experienced this in Kenya," said a sharply dressed man in a navy polo shirt, his face streaming with tears. "I just pray that our leaders end this thing quickly." Kibaki's rival Raila Odinga, who lost by a narrow margin in a vote international observers say was flawed, claims rigging. Many have died in clashes between rival tribes that have exposed the deep ethnic fault lines in the nation's politics.
Gift card pitfalls
I'm not sure where they shop, so it's a great idea that they can go where they want." The average shopper will buy between four and five gift cards, spending more than $156 on them, up from $146 last year, according to the National Retail Federation. Yet, more than a quarter of the gift cards purchased during the 2005 holiday season weren't redeemed until the following Christmas, according to a Corporate Research International study. Consumers can get caught by a variety of balance-eating fees that peck away at the card's value, in the worst cases leaving them with little or no gift. "The other day, we found one card we hadn't used within the first year and learned it was charged $2 for every month it went unused," Nolet said. "It can really be an issue if you don't use them promptly." Consumer Reports found that cards are unredeemed because people just didn't have the time to shop or couldn't find anything they liked.
Safeguarding your life savings in turbulent markets
Do I have 100, 150, 200? Give me 220, 250, 300. Sold for 306.95 to the trembling investor in the back with no shirt on.
It seems like these days it is impossible to have a day when the nightly news doesn't report a move of more than 100 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average that day. These sessions are getting difficult to stomach even for an experienced professional who has been taught of the swings of the market. Being told that these ups and downs are expected doesn't give much solace to an investor who just witnessed 10 percent or more of their life savings evaporate in the course of a few months.
So what is an investor to do? Well, the first thing to do is stay calm. One of the biggest mistakes the average investor makes in a period like this is simply selling everything and putting their investment in a savings account or under the mattress.
All aboard the monoline Titanic
What disturbs me most about the current mess in debt markets is the apparent inability of banks and investors to act in a rational and co-ordinated way to prevent a relatively small, local financial difficulty turning into a global meltdown. I'm talking about the buffeting of the monoline insurers, whose shares – notably those of Ambac and MBIA – have been taking a beating. The importance of these companies is that they provide guarantees to bonds with a value of $2400bn. It's their sole business, which is why they are called “monoline". They exist to provide insurance that turns good-quality bonds into bonds that are supposedly of impeccable quality, almost as good as US Treasuries, because there are certain risk-averse investors that can only buy the best triple A securities.
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