Dunya TV
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- Clarke goads his team to regain rankings
- Afghan war not an issue in US elections
- Wind sensors damaged on Nasa's Curiosity
- South KoreaGlasses-free 3D cinemas technology under development
- Best Buy reports dramatic decline in profits
- Sri Lankan court jails French tourists over Buddha photos
- George Soros invests in football club
- Anonymous hits UK govt websites in Assange protest
- Star caught devouring planet
- Russia warns against unilateral intervention in Syria
- Media companies push into education
- Specially tailored tuition rate for illegal immigrants
- More Hispanics are enrolling in US College, Report
- Free online course will rely on multiple sites
- Number of executions in Iran for narcotics offenses rises sharply
| Clarke goads his team to regain rankings Posted: Clarke and the Australian team face emerging cricketing nation Afghanistan in a single one-dayer in the United Arab Emirates on Saturday before three matches against Pakistan and a Twenty20 series.Speaking ahead of his departure, Clarke said the players need to improve significantly on their 4-0 humbling by England in their last one-day series.I think its a good opportunity for us to get some of that consistency back in the one-day format, he said on the Cricket Australia website.We didnt play anywhere near as well as we wouldve liked in England.We learned a lot and it was nice for some of the guys who hadnt experienced those conditions to get over and do that, but we certainly didnt get the results we were after.So I think its a good opportunity to turn that around.Australia are taking an experienced squad to the UAE, which will be followed by the World Twenty20 tournament in Sri Lanka, and they have plenty to prove, having slipped down the rankings in all forms of the game.Earlier this month they lost the top spot on the International Cricket Councils one-day rankings for the first time in nearly three years.Going into the UAE series, Australia sit behind England, South Africa and India while things are even worse on the T20 ladder, with Australia ninth, below New Zealand and minnows Bangladesh.They are third in the Test stakes, adrift of South Africa and England.Its not about what you say now, its about what we do as a team, Clarke said.Its now up to us, as individual players and as a team, to do something about it.To realise that we sit fourth in the one-day rankings, we sit third in the Test rankings and I think we sit eighth or ninth in the Twenty20 rankings.Every player knows thats unacceptable for an Australian team.Coach Mickey Arthur will miss the one-day component of the UAE tour to focus on preparing for the Twenty20 World Cup, but will return for the Twenty20 series against the Pakistanis, which follows the one-dayers.Fielding coach Steve Rixon will be in charge in Arthurs absence.Yes, weve got these four one-dayers which are crucial to the one-day setup, said Clrake.But the bigger picture for the T20 boys is the Twenty20 World Cup and Mickey wants to make sure theres no stone left unturned to win that tournament.
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| Afghan war not an issue in US elections Posted: It was once President Barack Obamas war of necessity. Now, its Americas forgotten war.The Afghan conflict generates barely a whisper on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. Its not a hot topic at the office water cooler or in the halls of Congress even though more than 80,000 American troops are still fighting here and dying at a rate of one a day.Americans show more interest in the economy and taxes than the latest suicide bombings in a different, distant land. Theyre more tuned in to the political ad war playing out on television than the deadly fight still raging against the Taliban. Earlier this month, protesters at the Iowa State Fair chanted Stop the war They were referring to one purportedly being waged against the middle class.By the time voters go to the polls Nov. 6 to choose between Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, the war will be in its 12th year. For most Americans, thats long enough.Public opinion remains largely negative toward the war, with 66 percent opposed to it and just 27 percent in favor in a May AP-GfK poll. More recently, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 60 percent of registered voters felt the U.S. should no longer be involved in Afghanistan. Just 31 percent said the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting there now.Not since the Korean War of the early 1950s a much shorter but more intense fight has an armed conflict involving Americas sons and daughters captured so little public attention.Were bored with it, said Matthew Farwell, who served in the U.S. Army for five years including 16 months in eastern Afghanistan, where he sometimes received letters from grade school students addressed to the brave Marines in Iraq the wrong war.We all laugh about how no one really cares, he said. All the support the troops stuff is bumper sticker deep.Farwell, 29, who is now studying at the University of Virginia, said the war is rarely a topic of conversation on campus and he isnt surprised that its not discussed much on the campaign trail.No one understands how to extricate ourselves from the mess we have made there, he said. So from a purely political point of view, I wouldnt be talking about it if I were Barack Obama or Mitt Romney either.Ignoring the Afghan war, though, doesnt make it go away.More than 1,950 Americans have died in Afghanistan and thousands more have been wounded since President George W. Bush launched attacks on Oct. 7, 2001 to rout al-Qaida after it used Afghanistan to train recruits and plot the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.The war drags on even though al-Qaida has been largely driven out of Afghanistan and its charismatic leader Osama bin Laden is dead slain in a U.S. raid on his Pakistani hideout last year.Strangely, Afghanistan never seemed to grab the same degree of public and media attention as the war in Iraq, which Obama opposed as a war of choice.Unlike Iraq, victory in Afghanistan seemed to come quickly. Kabul fell within weeks of the U.S. invasion in October 2001. The hardline Taliban regime was toppled with few U.S. casualties.But the Bush administrations shift toward war with Iraq left the Western powers without enough resources on the ground, so by 2006 the Taliban had regrouped into a serious military threat.Candidate Obama promised to refocus Americas resources on Afghanistan. But by the time President Obama sent 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Western resources and sapped resolve to build a viable Afghan state.And over time, his administration has grown weary of trying to tackle Afghanistans seemingly intractable problems of poverty and corruption. The American people have grown weary too.While most Americans are sympathetic to the plight of the Afghan people, they have become deeply skeptical of President Hamid Karzais willingness to tackle corruption and political patronage and the coalitions chances of budging a medieval society into the modern world, says Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization in Washington.With millions of veterans home and talking with their families and friends some knowledge of just how hard this is has percolated down, said Marlowe, who has traveled to Afghanistan many times.
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| Wind sensors damaged on Nasa's Curiosity Posted: Damage has been sustained by sensor circuits on the robots weather station that take wind readings.The mission team stresses this is not a major problem and will merely degrade some measurements - not prevent them.It is not certain how the damage occurred but engineers suspect surface stones thrown up during Curiositys rocket-powered landing may have struck the circuits and broken their wiring.Nasa is describing the news as an isolated disappointment in what has otherwise been a spectacular start to the mission.Javier Gomez-Elvira, the principal investigator on the broken instrument - the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (Rems) - said he was hopeful of finding a good way to get past the issue.We are working to recover as much functionality as possible, he told reporters.Curiosity - also known as the Mars Science Laboratory - touched down in the equatorial Gale Crater two weeks ago.It will operate on Mars for at least two Earth years, looking for evidence that the planet may once have had the conditions suitable to host microbial life.Engineers are close to completing their programme of post-landing check-outs on Curiosity.This has involved powering up all of the machines instruments, and it was during this testing that the problem was found on Rems.The weather station is a Spanish contribution to the rover project. It records air and ground temperature, air pressure and humidity, wind speed and direction, as well the amount ultraviolet radiation falling on the surface.These parameters are measured from sensors distributed around the rover, but a number are held on two finger-like mini-booms positioned halfway up the vehicles camera mast. This is where the wind sensors are located.The Rems team first noticed there was something wrong when readings from the side-facing boom where being returned saturated at high and low values.Further investigation suggested small wires exposed on the sensor circuits were open, probably severed. It is permanent damage.No-one can say for sure how this happened, but engineers are working on the theory that grit thrown on to the rover by the descent cranes exhaust plume cut the small wires.It degrades our ability to detect wind speed and direction when the wind is blowing from a particular direction, but we think we can work around that, said Curiositys deputy project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada.
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| South KoreaGlasses-free 3D cinemas technology under development Posted: It uses a barrier with slates so that when a viewer looks at the screen each of their eyes sees the image differently.As a result their brain creates an illusion of depth.TV makers have tried to use a similar approach, but require viewers to be in a particular spot to see a 3D image.This would not be possible in a cinema where the audience needs to be able to watch the screen from a wide variety of angles.The study was carried out at Seoul National University and appears in the journal Optics Express of the Optical Society.This new method seems to be a viable one for providing glasses-free 3D environment with front-projection technology - instead of using multiple projectors, it only uses one, said Prof John Koshel from the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, who edited the study for publication.He explained that the standard way to create 3D-images on a movie screen was to use stereoscopy: the technique involves projecting two 2D-images through a special filter.To the naked eye the two offset versions of the footage appear to be superimposed over each other. But if the viewer wears polarised glasses the left lens only lets in one of the images, and the right lens the other, creating a sense of depth.This involves placing a barrier in front of the image source which has slats in it similar to those of Venetian blind.These slats are angled so that light from one set of the TV screens pixels shines through and is directed to one of the viewers eye, and light from another set is shown to the other eye - with no overlap.But this only provides a 3D-effect if the watcher is sat in a specific spot.Manufacturers have created televisions showing several pairs of images - allowing a single screen to support several family members sat in specific positions. But they cannot support the dozens - or even hundreds - of people sat in a cinema at the same time.The South Korean team mimicked this technique, but adapted it to support a much wider variety of viewing angles.They did this by creating the slat-effect using polarisers - similar to those used in the lenses of 3D cinema glasses.Their screen was also covered with a special coating, and this combined with their adapated barrier produced many pairs of images - enough in theory to accommodate a cinema audience.The lead scientist Byoungho Lee, professor at Seoul National University, said that more research was necessary, but the technology might constitute a simple, compact, and cost-effective approach to producing widely available 3D cinema, while also eliminating the need for wearing polarising glasses.
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| Best Buy reports dramatic decline in profits Posted: Net profits plunged to just $12m (£7.6m) on revenues of $10.6bn in the second quarter. Profits were $150m in the same period a year earlier.The profit fall was exacerbated by a $91m one-off charge, primarily related to cost of closing stores.Best Buy said uncertainty over its future sales meant it could not provide any guidance on its full-year profits.The company, which owns 50% of UK-mobile phone chain Carphone Warehouse, has also suspended share buybacks.The two opened 11 Best Buy outlets in the UK in 2010, but they all closed a year later. Best Buys shares, which have lost almost 70% since their peak of $56.66 in May 2006, fell another 4% after the latest financiel results.The firm is struggling to compete with online rivals such as Amazon which are able to sell goods cheaper.In March, Best Buy announced a major restructuring that included closing 50 stores, cutting 400 corporate jobs and trimming $800m in costs.Despite these changes, sales have continued to fall.Sales at stores open at least 14 months fell 3.2% in the three months to 4 August, including a 1.6% drop in the US and an 8.2% fall in international sales.This means same-store sales have now fallen in eight out of the past nine quarters.The firm said on Monday that talks with the firms founder, Richard Schulze, over taking the company private had broken down.Best Buy said that Mr Schulze had rejected an offer to conduct due diligence on the deal.Mr Schulze, who owns just over a fifth of Best Buy, had wanted to buy the rest of the chain for between $24 and $26 a share.He said he was shocked and disappointed that discussions over a possible buyout had broken up.Best Buy has been trying to cut costs to improve its profit margins.It said in June that one of its priorities was to stop its large stores simply becoming a showroom, where shoppers browse electronic products, but then buy them cheaper online.Best Buy has seen annual declines in revenue at stores open at least a year for two of the last three years.
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| Sri Lankan court jails French tourists over Buddha photos Posted: Two women and one man were detained in the southern town of Galle after a photographic laboratory alerted police.The pictures show the travellers posing with Buddha statues and pretending to kiss one of them.Most of Sri Lankas majority ethnic Sinhalese are Theravada Buddhist.Mistreatment of Buddhist images and artefacts is strictly taboo in the country. The incident is alleged to have taken place at a temple in central Sri Lanka.Police spokesman, Ajith Rohana, told the BBC the French party had visited the laboratory to get pictures printed.The images were impounded after the owner of the photographic laboratory alerted police, but they were later posted on a Sri Lankan website.On Tuesday a magistrate sentenced the trio to six months in prison with hard labour, suspended for five years - which means they will not actually serve any time in jail. The court also levied a small fine on them.They were convicted under a section of the Penal Code which outlaws deeds intended to wound or insult the religious feelings of any class of persons through acts committed in, upon or near sacred objects or places of worship.Last month there were reports that five Arabs visiting the island were arrested for distributing literature insulting to Buddhism.In 2010 two Sri Lankan Muslim traders were given suspended jail sentences for selling keyrings containing an image of Buddha.That same year Sri Lanka denied a visa to the R&B star Akon, who had been due to perform a concert. It happened after public protests over one of his music videos which briefly showed scantily-clad women dancing in front of a Buddha statue.There is currently widespread excitement in Sri Lanka as the Kapilvastu Relics - believed to be bones of Lord Buddha - have been brought to the island from India for a two-week tour of temples.
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| George Soros invests in football club Posted: Mr Soros investment fund bought a 7.85% stake in Class A shares - about 3.1 million - in the club, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.Class A shares carry less voting power than Class B shares.His shares equate to a 1.9% stake in the entire club, worth about $40.7m (£25.8m) at Mondays closing price.Manchester United floated on the US stock market earlier this month, at $14 a share, valuing the club at more than $2.3bn (£1.46bn), making it one of the biggest sports clubs in the world.But since its 10 August listing, its share price has fallen 6.7%. Its share price was up 1.6% to $13.26 in London afternoon trading, a day after hitting a fresh low of $12.91.Manchester United has been controlled since 2005 by the Glazer family, the billionaire US sports investors who also own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers American football franchise.About half of the $233m that the club raised from its flotation will go to paying off the clubs debts - of about some £417m - with the rest going to the Glazers.The Glazers have voting control over the club through their ownership of Class B shares that enjoy 10 times the voting rights of Class A stock that are sold to the public, of which Mr Soros investment fund took out the 7.85% stake.That means Mr Soros and his fund do not have voting power nor can benefit from payouts, as Manchester United does not issue dividends.The 82-year-old investor, who oversees $25bn in assets through his Soros Fund Management LLC, has in the past eyed other football clubs as lucrative investments.He considered a takeover of Italian club AS Roma in 2008 but decided against it due to the clubs debt problems.Mr Soros was likely attracted to Manchester United because of the teams profitable media rights deals.This could be a play by Soros on the strength of Manchester Uniteds brand and the English Premier Leagues growing media rights, said Philip Hall, a partner at Inner Circle Sports, an investment bank focused on the sports industry.The domestic rights are set to increase 70% for the 2013-2014 season and the international media rights, set to be announced in late October or early November, are also expected to come in at a very robust uplift, he added.Richard Hunter, head of equities at Hargreaves Lansdown, told the BBC that Mr Soros is banking on the clubs ability to become a merchandising machine through its fanbase, estimated to be 700 million worldwide.Another factor behind Mr Soros decision could be the growing popularity of football in the US, which was given a boost thanks to the gold medal-winning US womens football team during the Olympics.Given that it is still a long way behind the three major sports in the States (American football, baseball and basketball), I can only imagine that is the attraction for him, Mr Hunter said.But football clubs in general are notoriously difficult investments, he said, adding: Ultimately although United has a track record, their fortunes are very much tied to whats going on on the pitch. If United has a few poor seasons, clearly that would start eating into their income. Its a high-risk investment strategy.Mr Soros became prominent in 1992 when he successfully bet on the devaluation of the British pound, netting about $1bn in the process and earning him the moniker: The man who broke the Bank of England.
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| Anonymous hits UK govt websites in Assange protest Posted: It claimed responsibility on Twitter for the denial-of-service attacks.Websites affected include the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office.The Wikileaks founder is staying at Ecuadors embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex assault claims, which he denies. He was granted asylum by the country last week.He has been at the embassy since June and on Sunday addressed crowds of his supporters from the embassys balcony, thanking Ecuador and other South American countries for their support.The UK has insisted it is obliged to extradite Mr Assange, 41, and wants a diplomatic solution, making clear that Assange will be arrested if he leaves the embassy.But Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said the UK would be committing diplomatic suicide if it tried to enter his countrys embassy.Meanwhile, Swedish prosecutors told the BBC they remain determined to question Mr Assange in Sweden, rejecting a suggestion from Mr Correa that prosecutors could travel to London to question Mr Assange.Anonymous, a loose collective of computer hackers, has gained notoriety by launching denial-of-service attacks, which flood websites with requests, causing them to operate more slowly or fail, on international government and corporate websites since 2010.The latest attacks were launched on Monday and most of the affected websites appear to be operating normally now.A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice website said it had been experiencing some disruption.A later statement said: The Ministry of Justice website was the subject of an online attack last night at around 20:00 BST.This is a public information website and no sensitive data is held on it. No other Ministry of Justice systems have been affected.Measures put in place to keep the website running mean that some visitors may be unable to access the site intermittently.We will continue to monitor the situation and will take measures accordingly.In an interview with state television, Mr Correa was asked if he thought there was now no possibility the UK authorities would enter the embassy premises to arrest Mr Assange, as they had previously indicated they might in a letter to Ecuadorean officials.Mr Correa said: While the United Kingdom hasnt retracted or apologised, the danger still exists.He said such a course of action would be suicide for Great Britain because then people could enter their diplomatic premises all around the world and they wouldnt be able to say a thing.There was very little said on what the next diplomatic step might be regarding removing Mr Assange from the embassy.But Mr Correa said, if needed, he was prepared to take the issue to the United Nations.He also said Ecuador was hoping for strong support from a meeting of the Organization of American States on Friday.Remember that David beat Goliath. And with many Davids its easier to bring down a number of Goliaths, he said.So were hoping for clear and coherent backing because this violates all inter-American law, all international law, the Vienna Convention and all diplomatic traditions of the last, at least, 300 years on a global scale.The UK Supreme Court in May dismissed Mr Assanges bid to reopen his appeal against extradition and gave him a two-week grace period before extradition proceedings could start.The US is carrying out an investigation into Wikileaks, which has published a mass of leaked diplomatic cables, embarrassing several governments and international businesses.In 2010, two female ex-Wikileaks volunteers accused Mr Assange, an Australian citizen, of committing sexual offences against them while he was in Stockholm to give a lecture.He claims the sex was consensual and the allegations are politically motivated and fears extradition to the US if extradited to Sweden.
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| Posted: This can be fate that will befall Earth in billions of years.The team uncovered the signature of a planet that had been eaten by looking at the chemistry of the host star.They also think a surviving planet around this star may have been kicked into its unusual orbit by the destruction of a neighbouring world.Details of the work have been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.The US-Polish-Spanish team made the discovery when they were studying the star BD48 740 - which is one of a stellar class known as red giants. Their observations were made with the Hobby Eberly telescope, based at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.Rising temperatures near the cores of red giants cause these elderly stars to expand in size, a process which will cause any nearby planets to be destroyed.A similar fate may await the inner planets in our solar system, when the Sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earths orbit some five billion years from now, said co-author Prof Alexander Wolszczan from Pennsylvania State University in the US.The first piece of evidence for the missing planet comes from the stars peculiar chemical composition.Spectroscopic analysis of BD48 740 revealed that it contained an abnormally high amount of lithium, a rare element created primarily during the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.Lithium is easily destroyed in stars, so its high abundance in this ageing star is very unusual.Theorists have identified only a few, very specific circumstances, other than the Big Bang, under which lithium can be created in stars, Prof Wolszczan explained.In the case of BD48 740, it is probable that the lithium production was triggered by a mass the size of a planet that spiralled into the star and heated it up while the star was digesting it.The second piece of evidence discovered by the astronomers is the highly elliptical orbit of a newly discovered planet around the red giant star. The previously undetected world is at least 1.6 times as massive as Jupiter.Co-author Andrzej Niedzielski of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, said that orbits as eccentric as this one are uncommon in planetary systems around evolved stars.In fact, the BD48 740 planets orbit is the most elliptical one detected so far, he added.Because gravitational interactions between planets are often responsible for such peculiar orbits, the astronomers suspect that the dive of the missing planet toward its host star before it became a giant could have given the surviving massive planet a burst of energy.This boost would have propelled it into its present unusual orbit.Team member Eva Villaver of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain commented: Catching a planet in the act of being devoured by a star is an almost improbable feat to accomplish because of the comparative swiftness of the process, but the occurrence of such a collision can be deduced from the way it affects the stellar chemistry.The highly elongated orbit of the massive planet we discovered around this lithium-polluted red giant star is exactly the kind of evidence that would point to the stars recent destruction of its now-missing planet.
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| Russia warns against unilateral intervention in Syria Posted: Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said there should be no outside interference and countries should strictly adhere to the norms of international law.On Monday, President Barack Obama said the deployment of chemical weapons represented a red line for the US.Meanwhile, troops are reported to have stormed a western suburb of Damascus.On Tuesday, Russias foreign minister held talks in Moscow with Chinas top diplomat, State Councillor Dai Bingguo, and a Syrian government delegation to discuss the conflict, which the UN says has left 18,000 people dead.After meeting Mr Dai, Mr Lavrov said Moscow and Beijing based their diplomatic co-operation on the need to strictly adhere to the norms of international law and the principles contained in the UN Charter, and not to allow their violation.I think this is the only correct path in todays conditions, Mr Lavrov added.He said only the UN Security Council could authorise the use of force against Syria, and warned against imposing democracy by bombs.He also told Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil that he wanted to hear his plans for further actions to shift the situation into the channel of political dialogue in order for Syrians themselves to decide their fate without external interference.Mr Jamil said external interference was hindering efforts for Syrians themselves to resolve this problem.Russia and China have opposed intervention in Syria since anti-government protests erupted in March 2011. They have vetoed three Security Council resolutions seeking to press President Bashar al-Assad to end the violence.On Monday, President Obama warned Syrias government at a news conference that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.Mr Obama said that he had not ordered military engagement at this point, but added that the US was monitoring the situation carefully and had made contingency plans.In July, the Syrian government admitted that it had chemical and biological weapons and might use them in case of any external aggression. But it insisted they would never be used in the Syrian crisis, no matter what the internal developments.Correspondents say there is also growing unease in Washington that Syrias chemical weapons may fall into what Mr Obama termed the hands of the wrong people.On Tuesday, soldiers were said to have stormed the western Damascus suburb of Muadhamiya.At least 23 people were killed and shops and houses were set on fire after government forces entered Muadhamiya at dawn, looking for rebel fighters, opposition activists said.The bodies of several men who had been shot at close range were found inside buildings after the troops withdrew from the town, they added.There was reportedly also heavy shelling and fierce fighting in the southern town of Herak and in the northern city of Aleppo, where the Japanese journalist, Mika Yamamoto, was killed on Monday.A commander in the Free Syrian Army, Col Abdul Jabbar al-Ukaidi, told the AFP news agency that its fighters now controlled more than 60% of Aleppo, although a security source in Damascus dismissed the claims.
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| Media companies push into education Posted: As another academic year starts, about 500,000 children across the country will find themselves learning subjects like middle school history or high school biology from a new line of digital textbooks.These manuals, branded Techbooks, come with all the Internet frills: video, virtual labs, downloadable content.But the Techbook may be most notable for what it does not have — backing from a traditional educational publisher. Instead it has the support of Discovery, the cable TV company.Conventional textbooks for kindergarten through 12th grade are a $3 billion business in the United States, according to the Association of American Publishers, with an additional $4 billion spent on teacher guides, testing resources and reference materials. And almost all that printed material, educators say, will eventually be replaced by digital versions.“It’s kind of perfect for us,” said David M. Zaslav, chief executive of Discovery Communications, which owns networks like Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and TLC. “Educational content is core to our DNA, and we’re unencumbered — unlike traditional textbook publishers, we’re not defending a dying business.”Mr. Zaslav is not the only media executive talking grandly about education these days. Movies, television, newspapers and magazines are in decline or facing headwinds, putting pressure on media companies to find new areas of expansion.Education is emerging as an answer, largely because executives see a way to capitalize on the changes that technology is bringing to classrooms — turnabout as fair play, given the way that the Web has upended major media’s own business models.“We think the opportunity continues to be to use digital technologies to be disruptive to an enormous business stuck decades in the past,” Chase Carey, News Corporation’s chief operating officer, told analysts this year.News Corporation is betting on just that. This month, the company said it would infuse its fledgling education division, Amplify, with $100 million.Amplify, focused on digital teaching and assessment tools, is run by Joel I. Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor. Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, has said he would be “thrilled” if education were to account for 10 percent of its revenue five years from now.Old-line education companies, however, may be more difficult prey than Mr. Zaslav and Mr. Murdoch think. Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are introducing digital educational products of their own, and these stalwarts have a technology giant on their side: Apple, seeking to bolster iPad sales, recently started selling digital high school textbooks through its iBooks store, with those three publishers as partners.“Over the last 10 years alone, we’ve invested $9.3 billion in digital innovations that are transforming education,” said Will Ethridge, chief executive of Pearson North America, part of Pearson P.L.C., the world’s largest education and learning company. “One way to describe it would be an act of ‘creative destruction.’ By this I mean we’re intentionally tearing down an outdated, industrial model of learning and replacing it with more personalized and connected experiences for each student.”On a smaller scale, NBCUniversal has been building a service called NBC Learn, which digitizes and archives video and articles from NBC News to sell as a database and digital blackboard learning system; NBC Learn now operates in 5,000 schools in 43 states.The Financial Times, owned by Pearson, is pushing MBA Newslines, a subscriber-only feature on its Web site that lets business students and professors create and share annotations on articles, allowing case studies to be built around real-time news events.And then there is the Walt Disney Company. It is building a chain of language schools in China big enough to enroll more than 150,000 children annually. The schools, which weave Disney characters into the curriculum, are not going to move the profit needle at a company with $41 billion in annual revenue. But they could play a vital role in creating a consumer base as Disney builds a $4.4 billion theme park and resort in Shanghai.Media companies have dipped their toes into education before, of course, only to find chilly waters. Discovery in 2006 promoted Cosmeo, an Internet-based service that offered children videos and other tools to help them with their homework; a year later, Discovery decided to stop marketing the product, which cost $99 a year, and laid off much of its staff.
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| Specially tailored tuition rate for illegal immigrants Posted: Monday is the first day of the school year for Metropolitan State University of Denver, a compact, urban campus in the heart of the city’s downtown.It also signifies the dawn of a controversial new policy for this institution of 24,000. Among the crowd of students who will show up for class next week are dozens of illegal immigrants who, as part of a specially tailored tuition rate, can now qualify for a reduced fee if they live in Colorado.The new rate, approved by the university’s board of trustees in June, has garnered praise from immigrant rights advocates here who have tried for years to get legislation passed that would allow state colleges to offer discounted tuition to local, illegal immigrant students.But the policy has also drawn the ire of conservatives who are threatening to sue the university to keep the rate from being put in place and have accused Metro State of openly defying Colorado law.Stephen Jordan, Metro State’s president, said the board took action after Colorado lawmakers failed to pass a similar tuition proposal this year. “Clearly, from our perspective, these are young people who were brought here of no accord of their own,” he said.“I think what our board was saying was, ‘Why wouldn’t we want to provide an affordable tuition rate for these students?’ ” he added. “So that they can get a college degree and become meaningful contributors to the economy of Colorado.”Under the new rate, illegal immigrants will pay $7,157.04 per year at Metro State. That is nearly $3,000 higher than the tuition for legal Colorado students but about $8,000 lower than what out-of-state students pay.Only those students who attended high school in Colorado for at least three years and received their high school or general equivalency diplomas here are eligible. So far, more than 100 have qualified, university officials said.Dalia Quezada, 18, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, will start her freshman year at Metro State on Monday.Ms. Quezada, whose family brought her to the United States when she was 6, said she could not afford college if not for the discount.“My dream was always to attend a big university,” she said. “But realistically, it was too expensive. But when Metro made the change, it opened up an opportunity. It’s like my dream is becoming a reality.”Still, in a state where about 20 percent of residents are Hispanic and where the tuition issue generates rancor in the legislature, the new policy has provoked a furor, largely among Republican lawmakers.On June 20, university officials were called before a hearing of the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee to defend their plan.That same week, Colorado’s attorney general, John W. Suthers, issued a nonbinding legal opinion criticizing the policy.“The decision by Metropolitan State College of Denver to proceed on its own to create a new tuition category, undeterred by the legislature’s repeated rejection of specific authorizing legislation, is simply not supported by governing law,” Mr. Suthers said in a statement at the time.According to the Higher Education Alliance, a coalition of Colorado groups that supports the new policy, 13 states offer in-state tuition for students who are in this country illegally. But opponents have defeated similar measures in Colorado six times.A spokeswoman for Mr. Suthers, a Republican, declined to address Metro State’s tuition rate, saying in an e-mail that the attorney general’s office would not comment on “matters that may potentially be litigated.”Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman and presidential candidate who now heads the Rocky Mountain Foundation, a conservative research organization, said his group intended to sue the university in the next few months.Mr. Tancredo, a fierce proponent of tightening immigration laws, said: “There was a proposal to allow this in the legislature. It failed. In its failure, it seems to me that a pretty strong signal was sent that you can’t do this in the absence of law.”Terrance Carroll, a Metro State board member and former Democratic speaker of the state House of Representatives, said there was always a concern about legal action, but the school remained confident the policy was lawful.University officials also said they were heartened by President Obama’s executive order deferring deportation of young illegal immigrants who have been in the United States since they were children.Though the deferral program, which began accepting applications this week, does not directly affect Metro State, advocates hope it will help bolster support to expand the tuition policy to other Colorado colleges.Sarahi Hernández, 19, who is poised to start her sophomore year at Metro State, said the reduced tuition would allow her to focus on school, rather than worrying about drumming up enough money to enroll.“It doesn’t mean I won’t have to work,” Ms. Hernández said. “But it will allow me to get my dream going.”
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| More Hispanics are enrolling in US College, Report Posted: By some measures iy is reaching levels similar to those among young blacks, according to a study.Among Americans ages 18 to 24 with a high school diploma or equivalent, 46 percent of Hispanics were enrolled in college last year, up from 37 percent in 2008, according to the report by the Pew Hispanic Center. The report was based on data from the Census Bureau and the Department of Education.Black enrollment last year in the same age group stood at 45 percent, the first time the nation’s two largest minority groups were roughly even on that score in the decades that the information has been collected. Among whites, 51 percent of 18- to 24-year-old high school graduates were in college; 67 percent of Asians in that group were in college.The number of young Hispanics enrolled in college, which surpassed black enrollment for the first time in 2010, jumped to almost 2.1 million last year, from about 1.3 million in 2008. That is partly a product of a swelling Hispanic population, as well as the increased rate of college attendance.But it also reflects a fast-rising high school graduation rate. In the 1990s, fewer than 60 percent of Hispanics 18 to 24 had a high school diploma, but that figure hit 70 percent for the first time in 2009, and 76 percent last year.That high school completion rate, however, still remains below the national rate of 85 percent (81 percent for blacks), limiting the number of Hispanics who are eligible for college.In addition, Hispanic students, compared with other groups, are far more likely to attend community colleges and less likely to go to four-year colleges, according to the study.
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| Free online course will rely on multiple sites Posted: A group of online-learning ventures is collaborating on a new kind of free class.Te site known as a mechanical MOOC (for “massive open online course”), that will teach a computer-programming language by patching together existing resources from open-learning sites.Unlike courses already available online, the new class will not require a traditional instructor, or a large start-up investment.The new course, “A Gentle Introduction to Python,” will blend content from M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare, instant-feedback exercises and quizzes from Codecademy, and study groups organized by OpenStudy, and will be coordinated through an e-mail list operated by Peer 2 Peer University.“The MOOCs that have come out in the last six months are really incredible and have truly moved the needle for online learning, but they are based on very sophisticated central platforms and require significant resources to develop,” Philipp Schmidt, Peer 2 Peer University’s co-founder, said in a statement.“The mechanical MOOC is an attempt to leverage the power of the open Web, by loosely joining together a set of independent building blocks,” he said.The mechanical MOOC will not be as tightly structured as the free courses now offered by leading universities like Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania through Coursera or edX, which have enrolled more than a million students. (While M.I.T. is involved in both edX and the new project, they are separate.)Unlike edX courses, the mechanical MOOC will not offer a certificate of completion. However, students can earn a badge from Codecademy to document their achievement.The collaborators say that the components of education — content, community and assessment — all exist online, although not in one place. Combining top sites for each, they say, should result in a course that is as good as the far more costly approach taken by Coursera, edX and others, albeit a less polished experience, where the pieces are not custom-created to fit together neatly. If the first course works, they say, it could spur many more similar offerings.OpenStudy will provide a forum where all learners in the class can choose to participate in a mass study group, or can be assigned to a study group of 10.The creators of the mechanical MOOC hope that the new model will help increase the percentage of students who complete their courses.Currently, only one in 10, or fewer, who sign up for MOOCs make it all the way through, either because they signed up while casually browsing, or because they are unable to keep up with the hours of work required each week.In the mechanical MOOC, those who fall behind can repeat units where needed and work at their own pace.“We want to do more than sign up tens of thousands of students and have only a fraction succeed,” Preetha Rom, the co-founder of OpenStudy, said in a statement. “Our goal is to have everyone who participates succeed.”
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| Number of executions in Iran for narcotics offenses rises sharply Posted: They say it was bolstering a rise in executions.In 2010 and 2011, Iran executed more than 1,000 drug offenders, more than triple the number in the previous two years, according to Harm Reduction International, a narcotics lobbying group which issued the call with Human Rights Watch.UN agencies, Canada, Japan and European nations have provided millions of dollars in the past decade to support drug control efforts in Iran and neighboring countries that are intended to reduce the supply and demand of illicit drugs, the two groups said.However the assistance has made it easier to prosecute alleged offenders based on unfair trials, and even apply the death sentence under the draconian drug laws of Irans revolutionary courts, said Rebecca Schleifer of HRW.Draconian laws, secret trials, no appeals, and death sentences for possession of small amounts of drugs should warn off any donor that wants to do the right thing, the health and rights expert said.The number of people executed in Iran for narcotics offenses has risen sharply in recent years, the groups said.In 2011, Iran executed at least 600 people, second only to China. Eighty-one percent of these executions were for drug-related crimes, including for personal use, the two groups said in a statement.According to figures from the Amnesty International rights watchdog, 166 of the 389 executions recorded in 2009 were drug-related. This is almost 43 percent of the total.Foreigners, particularly refugees and unlawful migrants from Afghanistan, are at special risk of being deprived of their right to a fair trial and ultimately executed, Human Rights Watch and HRI said.Between 2005 and 2009, 16 Afghan children were arrested by Iranian authorities for drug offenses and later sentenced to death, the statement said.Scores of those executed for drug-related crimes in recent years, many of them at the Vakilabad prison in the northeastern city of Mashhad, are believed to have been Afghans who did not get access to lawyers or consular officials, the rights groups said.Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Ireland and Japan have all provided money bilaterally to Iran or through the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the groups said.The money has been used to strengthen border posts, buy equipment such as body scanners and to train sniffer dogs.
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