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☆ Uganda detains 20 rebel 'collaborators' after student massacre
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-19 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

REUTERS/Stringer/File PhotoKAMPALA, June 19 (Reuters) - Ugandan authorities said on Monday 20 people had been detained for questioning about their possible role in the massacre of 42 people, mostly students, on Friday by the Islamist group Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). "At least 20 suspected ADF collaborators have been arrested, to assist with our investigations," the country's police force said in a statement. The student victims included a 12-year-old girl in her first year of secondary school education, according to police. "All the 17 burnt bodies were male and the burns were distributed all over the bodies, both front and back. ADF fighters have occasionally carried out attacks inside Uganda, including bombings in Kampala in 2021.

Persons: Stringer, Yoweri Museveni, Elias Biryabarema, Christina Fincher Organizations: Secondary, Allied Democratic Forces, REUTERS, Islamic, Democratic, ADF, Thomson Locations: Mpondwe, Uganda, KAMPALA, Islamic State, Uganda's, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Kampala

☆ Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas postpones annual financial disclosure amid donor controversy
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( Dan Mangan | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas arrives for the swearing in ceremony of Judge Neil Gorsuch as an Associate Supreme Court Justice in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, U.S., April 10, 2017. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked for more time to file his annual financial disclosure as he faces an ethics controversy over accepting pricey vacations and other largesse from Republican billionaire Harlan Crow. Justice Samuel Alito, another conservative, was the only other Supreme Court justice to request an extension. The Texas real estate developer also purchased properties belonging to the conservative justice's family in Georgia, and funded part of his great-nephew's private school education. The revelations sparked harsh criticism of Thomas for failing to disclose the ties, and calls for ethics reform of the Supreme Court.

Persons: Clarence Thomas, Judge Neil Gorsuch, Harlan Crow, Thomas, Samuel Alito, ProPublica, Crow Organizations: Justice, White, Supreme, Democratic Locations: Rose, Washington , U.S, Crow, Texas, Georgia

☆ Oxford, but Not That Oxford: How a Tiny For-Profit School Suddenly Got Big
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-05 | by ( Emma Bubola | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“Money, money, money,” said Stefan Lespizanu, a former recruiter for Oxford Business College. Whole families signed up, helping turn a vocational school of 41 students atop a Chinese restaurant into a for-profit juggernaut. Oxford Business College, unaffiliated with the elite school nearby, now has several campuses and more than 8,000 students. Years of free-market changes to British higher education have created opportunities for for-profit schools like Oxford Business College. Through opaque partnership deals with publicly funded universities, schools can offer undergraduate degrees and get access to the British government’s student aid.

Persons: ”, Stefan Lespizanu, ‘ Organizations: Oxford Business College, ”, Facebook

☆ Ken Paxton's impeachment revealed how divided far-right and moderate Republicans in Texas have become, political scientist says
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-31 | by ( Hannah Getahun | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was impeached from office Saturday. Many of the Texas House members who voted to impeach him were Republicans themselves. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, a moderate Republican who later helped impeach Paxton, was vocally opposed, calling it an improper use of taxpayer dollars. For Texas House Republicans, it was more about strategy. This GOP-on-GOP conflict in Texas reflects a national struggle between Republicans that rarely, if ever, plays out the way it did in Texas, Jillson said.

Persons: Ken Paxton, —, MAGA, Nate Paul —, Paxton, Paul, Cal Jillson, Jillson, Dade Phelan, Paxton —, Ken Paxton's, you've, Dan Patrick, Donald Trump, Phelan, It's, Kevin McCarthy, McCarthy, emasculating, Joe Biden Organizations: Texas House, GOP, Service, Southern Methodist University, Trump, Republican Party, Texas, Republican, New York Times, Texas House Republicans, Tea Party, The New York Times, Republicans, Caucus, Texas Republicans, Texas Republican Locations: Texas

Ten years ago, Emine Kilic, was focused on raising her two children at home in Istanbul when she decided to set up her own clothing company to help support her family. Her business, started with an interest-free government-backed loan for female entrepreneurs, now employs 60 people and exports to 15 countries, said Ms. Kilic, who has an elementary-school education. She credited a powerful motivator who inspired her to transform her life — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — calling him a champion for women. “Thanks to my president, I became the boss of my own company,” said Ms. Kilic, 38. To beat back the most serious political threat to his two-decade tenure as Turkey’s dominant politician, Mr. Erdogan counted on the fervent support of an often underappreciated constituency: conservative religious women.

☆ I run a homeschool agency for clients like Kylie Jenner and Khloé Kardashian. Here's what it's like catering to parents for whom price is no object.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-24 | by ( Jenny Powers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

In 2013, Tiffany Sorya responded to a Craigslist ad and began tutoring Kylie and Kendall Jenner. I did well in high school, but my freshman year of college was a struggle and my grades plummeted. Now I run Novel Education Group, a homeschooling agency that caters to the children of celebrities, royalty, and ultra-high-net-worth families. After graduating in 2010, I moved to Los Angeles and began tutoring through an agency while homeschooling students on the side. Since 2020, we've also started working with families in Saudi Arabia, some of whom are royalty.

Persons: Tiffany Sorya, Kylie, Kendall Jenner, Sorya, —, Kris Jenner, Kendall, Jenner, haven't, Dre's, Kylie's, Stormi, we've, I've Organizations: Education, Service, Craigslist, University of Southern, NDAs Locations: New York City, Cambodia, France, Portland , Oregon, Los Angeles, Laurel, America, University of Southern California, Caribbean, Saudi Arabia, Riyadh

☆ Goldman Sachs says jobs mismatch drove up China's youth unemployment
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-23 | by ( Evelyn Cheng | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

People look for jobs at a fair in Shanghai, China, on May 20, 2023. Record unemployment among China's young people stems partly from a mismatch between their majors and available jobs, Goldman Sachs analysts said in a report Monday. Regulatory changes wiped out jobs in after-school education in 2021. That "likely contributed to the weakening of labor demand" in information technology, education and property — industries that also tend to hire more young workers, the Goldman analysts said. Their research found that information technology saw one of the largest increases in graduates between 2018 to 2021.

Persons: Goldman Sachs Organizations: Goldman Locations: Shanghai, China

☆ Asian hedge funds piled to China education, U.S. AI shares in Q1
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Summer Zhen | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

Investors poured money into private tutoring leaders, including New Oriental and TAL Education (TAL.N), that have come through a near two-year crackdown in China on after-school education. Greenwoods also built a new position in TAL Education by acquiring 2.2 million shares. The fund run by ex-Alibaba CTO John Wu bought 2.1 million more shares to boost its stake in the tutoring giant. Share prices of both New Oriental and TAL collapsed over 90% from its peak after Beijing’s ban on K-12 private tutoring. The price of two stocks have doubled from the low point in October after China dropped its strict controls against COVID-19.

☆ One in 5 young people in Chinese cities are out of work. Beijing wants them to work in the fields
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Laura He | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

Guangdong, the manufacturing powerhouse that abuts Hong Kong, said last month it will help college graduates and young entrepreneurs to find work in villages. Guangdong’s plan, which was widely panned on social media, coincided with the rate of urban unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds surging to 19.6%, the second highest level on record. Kong Yiji, a famous literary figure from the early 20th century, has been one of the hottest memes on China’s social media since February. A tourist shop named 'Kong Yiji' in China's Zhejiang province. Other popular buzzwords have included “lying flat” and “letting it rot.”Authorities, uneasy about dissatisfaction expressed through memes, have banned the hashtag of Kong Yiji.

☆ Ron DeSantis will spend up to $4 billion on school vouchers for Florida families to challenge 'woke' public schools
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Ethan Dodd | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Ron DeSantis is waging a war against 'woke' public schools. On Monday, the governor signed universal school vouchers into law, which both conservatives and liberals expect to hurt public schools. Public school enrollment has only dropped a few percentage points, from 89.6% to 87.2%, since Republican Gov. Now, however, DeSantis' move to broaden the voucher program to all Florida families could meaningfully threaten funding for public schools. Spar fears universal vouchers "will literally siphon money away" from public schools because it's all under the same education budget.

☆ Meet the typical Dollar General customer: An older rural worker with a high school education and an income of less than $40,000
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-16 | by ( Dominick Reuter | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Dollar General has 19,147 stores across the US and Mexico and employs more than 163,000 people. Dollar General's average customer is older, has a high-school diploma, and earns less than $40,000 per year. The first Dollar General store opened in 1955 in Springfield, Kentucky. Dollar General, now based in Tennessee, has 19,147 stores across the US and Mexico, mostly concentrated in the Sunbelt and Midwest. Numerator found that Dollar General's typical shopper is an older worker with a high-school education who lives in a two-person household in a rural area and earns less than $40,000 per year.

☆ Salad Chain That Thought It Was a Tech Firm Looks Wilted
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-06 | by ( Spencer Jakab | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Sweetgreen has faced sharply rising cash expenses for food, leases and labor. “I was an overnight success all right, but 30 years is a long, long night.”When Ray Kroc founded McDonald ’s, he had no more than a high-school education and grease under his fingernails. He took a winding path to eventual fast-food riches in middle age. They met in an entrepreneurship class at Georgetown University, raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture-capital funding and were all named to a Forbes “30 Under 30” list. The salad chain was valued at nearly $6 billion a day after its 2021 initial public offering.

New research conducted by a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that the AI-driven chatbot GPT-3 was able to pass the final exam for the school's Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. Prof. Christian Terwiesch, who authored the research paper "Would Chat GPT3 Get a Wharton MBA? Terwiesch’s findings come as educators become increasingly concerned that such chat bots could inspire cheating. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, on Sept. 28, 2022. Experts who work in both artificial intelligence and education have acknowledged that bots like ChatGPT could be a detriment to education in the future.

☆ A ChatGPT bot passed a Wharton business school exam, but a professor says he would've only graded the effort a B or B-minus
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-23 | by ( Lakshmi Varanasi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch tested ChatGPT with questions from his final exam. Terwiesch found that ChatGPT could answer basic questions well but sometimes made "surprising mistakes" in simple calculations. Terwiesch concluded that ChatGPT might earn a B or B- on his final exam. Based on an analysis of similar retailers, the founders expect to turn their inventory 1.5 times per year. To achieve an annual revenue of $3,000,000, how much inventory expressed in $'s should the founders expect their operation to require?

☆ Hardliner Jim Jordan emerges as a Republican alternative for U.S. House speaker
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-03 | by ( Richard Cowan | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

Twenty Republicans voted for Jordan - fewer than a tenth of those backing McCarthy, but enough to stop his progress. The House recessed after three votes without giving McCarthy the House majority he needed on Tuesday and adjourned until noon ET (1700 GMT) on Wednesday to try again. A champion wrestler in high school and college before becoming a college coach, Jordan denied the accusations and thrived in Congress. In 2011, with a newly installed Republican majority in the House, Jordan made President Barack Obama's life miserable by demanding deep budget cuts opposed by Democrats. With then-Speaker John Boehner maneuvering to bring a similar bill to a vote in the House, Jordan told Reuters at a key moment that it was dead.

☆ The Biggest Debates and Opinions in 2022 - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-20 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +30 min

Opinion The 22 Debates That Made Us Rage, Roll Our Eyes, and Change Our Minds in 2022Debating is what we do here at Times Opinion. To many, she was an icon: She ruled for 70 years, presided over the transition from empire to commonwealth and served as a living link to the generation that won World War II. (Though Ben Bernanke, a former Fed chairman himself, wrote in The Times that that wasn’t going to happen.) The United States and its European allies poured weapons and aid into Ukraine, but how was this going to end? As 2022 draws to a close, the fighting continues and peace talks look as distant as ever — which probably means that the debates will continue.

☆ Workers and consumers say they're likely to favor pro-LGBTQ businesses, study finds
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-13 | by ( Rebecca Picciotto | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +4 min

American workers and consumers are more likely to prefer brands that publicly align with LGBTQ causes, according to a new analysis. In a separate Edelman survey fielded in May, 34% of consumers said they were more likely to buy from a brand that expressed support for LGBTQ rights, versus 19% who said they were less likely. LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD partnered with Edelman to analyze the survey data to gather LGBTQ-specific insights. Though this year has brought more corporate hesitation around LGBTQ support, some employees and customers have nonetheless succeeded in pressuring brands to enter the conversation in ways that go beyond rainbow logos. Soon after, then-CEO Bob Chapek announced that the company would donate $5 million to LGBTQ support organizations and vowed to help repeal Florida’s anti-LGBTQ policies.

☆ Workers and consumers say they're likely to favor pro-LGBTQ businesses, new study says
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-13 | by ( Rebecca Picciotto | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

American workers and consumers are more likely to prefer brands that publicly align with LGBTQ causes, according to a new analysis. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation partnered with Edelman to analyze the survey data to gather LGBTQ-specific insights. The survey responses came from 1,000 consumers and 1,000 workers in the U.S. It found that young shoppers especially tend to find brands that pledge support to LGBTQ communities more "relevant" and "relatable." Soon after, then-CEO Bob Chapek announced that the company would donate $5 million to LGBTQ support organizations and vowed to help repeal Florida's anti-LGBTQ policies.

☆ People are actually less worried about losing their jobs than they were before the pandemic
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-12 | by ( Juliana Kaplan | Madison Hoff | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Still, workers are more worried about losing their jobs than they were earlier in the year. Of course, some are more worried than others about losing their jobs. When broken down by age, workers over 59 years old were the most worried about losing their jobs, while fears among those 40 to 59 went down a bit in November. Those under 40 also got a bit more worried about losing their jobs, although all age groups were less worried than they were in November 2021. However, workers with a high school education or less are less concerned about losing their jobs than workers with some college education or a BA and higher.

Trinidad Gonzales, a professor of history and Mexican American studies at South Texas College, has been honored with the 2022 John Lewis Award for History and Social Justice. Refusing to Forget's work spurred an award-winning exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin — the first time the state had publicly addressed "La Matanza." He played a role in a five-year battle to help change state standards for high school Mexican American history classes. “We all knew internally that it wasn’t just simply a fight for Mexican American studies,” Gonzales told South Texas College. "We're fearful that they're going to try to eliminate Mexican American studies, African American Studies, Indigenous Studies and Asian American studies," Gonzales said in the interview.

☆ At Trump Org, a 'generous,' 'forgiving' Trump reigned over thankful executives, the defense theory claims
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-24 | by ( Laura Italiano | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

Manhattan jurors are being asked by the defense to see Donald Trump as a forgiving, generous boss. In summations, prosecutors may call the 'Trump is just generous' defense a total turkey. The tuition schemeTake the total $359,000 in tuition checks Trump or his son, Eric Trump, signed for ex-CFO Allen Weisselberg's grandchildren. Instead, under the "generous Trump" defense, the checks, written from Trump's personal account, are explained away as not a suspicious, tax-dodging perk at all, but a "gift." Here, the defense can be expected to tell jurors that Trump is not only a generous boss, but a forgiving one, too.

Students at a Missouri elementary school where "unacceptably high" levels of radioactive waste were found will switch to virtual learning, the school board has announced. Many said they first found out about the radioactive waste in their children’s school from Facebook posts or news reports. It has been testing the area around the creek for years, but never tested inside or within 300 feet of the elementary school. Hazelwood School District Board Meeting announces Jana Elementary School educational measures, in Florissant, Mo., on Wednesday. Karen Nickel, co-founder of environmental activist group Just Moms STL, attended Hazelwood School District as a child and told the school board she has several autoimmune conditions.

☆ China's Xi downplays need for rapid growth, proclaims Covid achievements
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-16 | by ( Evelyn Cheng | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

Xi was speaking at the opening ceremony of the ruling Communist Party of China's 20th National Congress, held once every five years. In contrast, Xi on Sunday began his remarks with greater emphasis on China's "national rejuvenation" and opposition to Taiwan independence. watch now"Without solid material and technological foundations we cannot hope to build a great modern socialist country," Xi said in Chinese, according to an official English translation. China's Xi previously announced plans to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, and carbon neutrality in 2060. Those measures, on top of China's Covid controls, have made foreign investors increasingly cautious about the potential growth opportunities in the country.

☆ Fact Check-Video does not show missile hitting Ukraine President Zelenskiy’s office
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-12 | by ( Reuters Fact Check | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

A tweet dated Oct. 10 (here) that had 6,500 likes at the time of writing, shared the video with the claim: “ZELENSKY'S OFFICE WAS DESTROYED BY A MISSILE STRIKE: UKRAINIAN MEDIA”. Reuters found no evidence that the presidential office building in Kyiv was struck by a missile on this day. Kyiv City Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko released a statement on messaging app Telegram (here) listing the affected areas in Kyiv, which did not include the presidential office building. The area where the smoke is seen billowing from is likely close to Saksahanskoho St, behind a residential building (bit.ly/3SQOyWE), about two kilometers from the presidential office building on Bankova Street (bit.ly/3SQVdQT) (goo.gl/maps/ihUygBudbTguqi4z5). The video shows a missile strike in central Kyiv.

☆ Russia turns to recruiting trucks, big wages to woo volunteer soldiers
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-18 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Soldiers in camouflage and black masks showed their guns to interested passersby and handed out colour brochures titled "Military service on a contract - the choice of a real man." "Patriotically-minded citizens are choosing to sign contracts for three or six months to take part in the special military operation," major Sergei Ardashev said, promising training for everyone. 1/5 A Russian service member stands next to a mobile recruitment center for military service under contract in Rostov-on-Don, Russia September 17, 2022. Inside the truck, Yakunin sat down with Ardashev, who told him the next step would be a mental examination. If all went well, Yakunin would "arrive at a military unit, enroll in a specific division, (and) from that moment you begin military service".

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