Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it. Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments. This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up. Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans […]
The California Senate on Friday approved legislation that sends a clear message to Texas and textbook publishers: don’t mess with our kids’ minds. ‘My bill begins the process of ensuring that California students will not end up being taught with Texas standards,’ State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), who authored and sponsored the legislation, said in an interview. Texas standards had better not ‘creep into our textbooks,’ he said. The S.B. 1451 measure – approved on a bipartisan vote of 25-5 – requires California’s Board of Education to examine and report any discrepancies between the new Texas standards and California’s standards. ‘At that point,’ Yee told Raw Story, ‘we will make it very, very clear that we won’t accept textbooks that minimize the contributions of minorities and propagate the close connection between church and state.’ California, also a critical client for textbook companies, can counteract Texas’s influence on how books are written for schools across the country. ‘It’s a warning to the textbooks writers and companies,’ said Yee, who served on the San Francisco Board of Education earlier in his career and is currently the second highest ranking Democrat in California’s upper house. The Texas modifications […]
The needle pricks involved in acupuncture may help relieve pain by triggering a natural painkilling chemical called adenosine, a new study has found. The researchers also believe they can enhance acupuncture’s effectiveness by coupling the process with a well-known cancer drug — deoxycoformycin — that maintains adenosine levels longer than usual. ‘Acupuncture has been a mainstay of medical treatment in certain parts of the world for 4,000 years, but because it has not been understood completely, many people have remained skeptical,’ lead author Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said in a news release. ‘In this work, we provide information about one physical mechanism through which acupuncture reduces pain in the body.’ Nedergaard and her team report their findings online May 30 in the journal Nature Neuroscience. They are also scheduled to present the results this week at the Purines 2010 scientific meeting in Barcelona. Working exclusively with mice, Nedergaard and her colleagues administered half-hour acupuncture treatments to a group with paw discomfort. The investigators found adenosine levels in tissue near the needle insertion points was 24 times greater after treatment, and those mice […]
As of 10:06 on Sunday, May 30th, we will have spent $1 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan. A trillion dollars is a baffling amount of money. If you write it out, use twelve zeros. Even after serving in Congress for over a decade, I, like most Americans, still have a hard time wrapping my head around sums like this. This month, we mark the seventh anniversary of President Bush’s declaration of ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq, yet five American soldiers have been killed there in May alone. Iraqis went to the polls nearly three months ago, but the political system remains so fractured that no party has been able to piece together a coalition. There are some indications that sectarian violence is again on the rise. The only clear winner of the Iraq war is Iran. Their mortal enemy, Saddam Hussein, was taken out and fellow Shiites are in charge. Iran has been emboldened to the point of threatening the stability of the region and the world with its growing nuclear capability. And then there’s Afghanistan, which, after nearly a decade of war, represents the longest continuous U.S. military engagement ever. Even the non-partisan Congressional Research Service […]
ROBERT, La. — The most ambitious bid yet to stop the worst oil spill in U.S. history ended in failure Saturday after BP was unable to overwhelm the gusher of crude with heavy fluids and junk. President Obama called the setback ‘as enraging as it is heartbreaking.’ The oil giant immediately began readying its next attempted fix, using robot submarines to cut the pipe that’s gushing the oil and cap it with funnel-like device, but the only guaranteed solution remains more than two months away. The company determined the ‘top kill’ had failed after it spent three days pumping heavy drilling mud into the crippled well 5,000 feet underwater. It’s the latest in a series of failures to stop the crude that’s fouling marshland and beaches, as estimates of how much oil is leaking grow more dire. The spill is the worst in U.S. history - exceeding even the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster - and has dumped between 18 million and 40 million gallons into the Gulf, according to government estimates. ‘This scares everybody, the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven’t succeeded so far,’ BP PLC Chief Operating […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
