Latest News and Articles
Is An Online Degree Right for You?
(ARA) - With the ever-changing job market and increasing competition for stable, well-paying jobs, more and more adults are seeking additional education to help them in their current professions or to prepare them for a career change. For people who are working full time, online learning, sometimes referred to as distance learning, can be a great choice. Taking courses online enables you to pursue an advanced degree without sacrificing the time you spend with your family or the momentum you have in a career track. Online programs allow learners to take courses when it's convenient for them. Without set classroom time, learners can work on assignments from home, the office, or on the road -- as long as they have access to e-mail and the Internet.The practicality and convenience of online learning has helped it become a popular choice among busy adults.
Defending the death penalty all in a day's work
When Dane Gillette goes to work each morning in the California attorney general's office, he is greeted by death. For decades, he has been known as "Dr. Death," a nickname coined by his adversaries. Gillette is California's leading defender of the death penalty, the man most responsible in the state for making sure death sentences are upheld in the courts and carried out at San Quentin.
The professorial, understated career appellate lawyer is the point man in California's fight to preserve lethal injection and resume executions. A senior assistant attorney general in charge of hundreds of death penalty appeals, Gillette is a national expert in what the legal profession considers the most complex, wrenching work a lawyer can do.
But when Gillette, 56, returns to his East Bay home at night, he manages to put aside the stories of murder and violence in the files he reads each day.
Museum of Confederacy, Civil War Center to stay separate
RICHMOND, Va. -- The Museum of the Confederacy needs a new home for its collection, but it has no plans to relocate them to the new American Civil War Center.
Museum officials announced in October that the museum's collection of Civil War items would need to be moved to escape encroachment of Virginia Commonwealth University's downtown medical campus. The White House of the Confederacy will remain at its current location on the museum grounds.
"I know we will be doing a lot with the American Civil War Center, but if we showed up with all our stuff, they would immediately become unbalanced," museum president Waite Rawls said.
The center, which opened in October at the old Tredegar Iron Works site, offers perspectives of the Civil War from the Union, Confederate and black participants.
Home Depot chief steps down
Robert Nardelli, the Home Depot chairman and chief executive officer who recently became a target for critics of excessive executive pay, resigned Wednesday after six years at the helm of the world's largest home-improvement retail chain.
The abrupt resignation of Nardelli, who helped oversee Home Depot's push into the professional building supply business that included the acquisition of Orlando-based Hughes Supply last year, came after investors had stepped up criticism of his lofty compensation in the face of a sagging stock price.
Nardelli earned $225 million while the company's stock fell during his six-year tenure. Before Wednesday's news, Home Depot's stock had been down more than 3 percent on a split-adjusted basis since Nardelli took over in December 2000.
Steel complaint gets result
A complaint by Saskatchewan steel fabricators that they're being shut out of the structural steel work as Home Depot Canada contracts to build more stores in the province seems to have produced some action.
Rob Pollock, president of the Saskatchewan Steel Fabricators and Erectors Association, says construction tender documents fi led recently showed the big box chain has already "pre-tendered" the structural steel component of new stores that will be going up this year in Lloydminster and in Saskatoon at the new Stonegate shopping centre.
Pollock says the steel component of the tender was stamped "pre-tendered," even though the general contractor for building those stores hasn't yet been chosen.
"It's kind of upsetting that a fi rm like Home Depot virtually chooses to ignore the Saskatchewan fabricators," he said.
POLITICS-SUDAN: I Am Staying Because This is My Home
KHARTOUM, Jan 5 (IPS) - In recent weeks, violence has flared again in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, forcing the largest-scale evacuation of humanitarian workers since aid operations in the war-torn area began in 2004.
Over 400 staff members from the United Nations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were moved from conflict zones last month due to rising insecurity. They included employees from Irish aid group GOAL.
"For three years we have begged the international community to send in an international peacekeeping force to protect innocent civilians and keep the aid channels open," said GOAL founder John OShea in a press statement following the withdrawal. "It is clear that the international community does not rate the lives of the four million people in the region desperately in need of protection by the international community."
International staffers and Sudanese workers from regions other than Darfur were evacuated: "You have a responsibility, if you recruited someone from Sudan, to return them to where they are from," Mark Blackett, the country director of GOAL Sudan, told IPS.
Exploring the arts
Exposing kids to arts experiences of all kinds is important to well-rounded learning and required as part of Missouri's curriculum, says Beverly Rohlf, music coordinator for Springfield Public Schools. Only funding doesn't always match the need, and teachers have their hands full meeting a variety of goals. That is why visiting performing arts programs are so welcomed. "(Art) is such a powerful tool for reaching kids who are many times outside the mainstream," she says. "And it broadens their vision of the world. It can be the basis of a college scholarship. It can bring them into a group that shares the right kind of social values that will help them be successful in schools."
Drury, Evangel and Missouri State universities all bring students to their campuses for music and theater productions.
Sloane Robinson bucking the latest trend
For Hugh Sloane and George Robinson, commuting to their slightly tatty offices near London's Monument is more than just a job.
The founders and senior partners of Sloane Robinson, which this year joined the exclusive club of London hedge funds with more than $10bn (£5.2bn) under management, are obsessed with picking winning stocks.
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Comic artist plunges headlong into ‘Spirit’
Darwyn Cooke hopes that even though you might know nothing of Will Eisner's "The Spirit," his own "spirited" and updated relaunch of the classic crime fighter for DC Comics will be engaging enough for anyone to jump right into the action. The late Eisner practically revolutionized the comics medium, proving it could become a legitimate art form -- with a more engaging and effective means of storytelling -- in the right hands. "The Spirit" originated in 1940 as a weekly serial for newspapers and hit its artistic peak in the postwar years. Eisner's innovative and inspirational illustrative style and characterizations hold up to this day.
In his introduction to "The Best of the Spirit" paperback collection, fantasy author and "Sandman" creator Neil Gaiman wrote that "a lot of the delight in 'The Spirit' is in watching Eisner invent and discover new ways of telling stories -- the use of white space and panels to represent freedom and captivity in one story, the echoing, reflecting dual panels in another, the use of the murderer's point of view as a third." All told through the adventures of Denny Colt, who fought evil-doers and femme fatales with just his wits and fists in an any-America place known as Central City.
