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Exploding demand for higher education worldwide

International student enrollment is on the rise at U.S. colleges.

In total, 764,495 international students were enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States during the 2011-2012 school year, up 5.7 percent from the previous year, according to a November 2012 report from the Institute of International Education.

The U.S. News Best Colleges rankings can help prospective American and international students refine their list of target schools in the United States, but some of the world’s best universities can be found outside the U.S. as well.

China, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and France all attract more than 100,000 international students each year, according to IIE data.

Latin America, the Middle East and other parts of Asia have also seen an uptick in international student enrollment over the past decade, according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

One explanation for the trend toward international education: an “exploding demand for higher education worldwide,” the OECD notes.

Studying in a foreign country – whether for a semester, a year or for an entire degree – also helps prepare students to enter a high-tech and highly global economy, says Allan Goodman, president of IIE.

Executives at multinational corporations might work in nine or 10 different countries throughout their career. Those who stay closer to home will likely still work with people from other cultures on a regular basis, says Goodman, who co-authored “A Student Guide to Study Abroad.”

“If you’re the top student, but you’ve never sat next to a Chinese or Brazilian, or had an argument with an Indian or a discussion with a Frenchman, you’re not going to be prepared to be a worker in the global marketplace,” he says.

Sorting out where to study and why can be a multipronged equation.

For some, language is a primary factor. Students either want to learn in their native language or become fluent in another. Others want to gain business expertise abroad in order to get a leg up in an increasingly competitive workforce.

Many international students also choose where to study based on where they hope to start their careers, says Daniel Obst, IIE’s deputy vice president of international partnerships in higher education.

“There’s a great opportunity in another country to do academic work, but also then connect it to your first job,” he says.

Obst has personal experience as an international student. Born and raised in Germany, Obst earned his bachelor’s degree in the United States and his master’s in England. His academic interests motivated him to study outside of Germany, he says.

“I wanted to do international relations, and back then they didn’t have that as a degree program in Germany. They had political science,” he says.

Whatever the motive to study overseas, each major region has something to offer students bent on studying overseas.

Europe

International students accounted for 18.6 percent of total higher ed enrollment in the U.K. in 2010-2011, according to IIE.

Students can venture outside of the U.K. and still get a great education in Europe.

Schools such as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg in Germany also have strong global reputations.

Asia

Students from China, India and South Korea account for 52 percent of the 4.1 million international students worldwide, according to the OECD. But the region has also emerged as a top destination for foreign students.

Galaxy S5 and Note 3 almost ready for Android 4.4.3 updates

According to a purportedly leaked internal document, the Android 4.4.3 updates for both Snapdragon and Exynos versions of the Galaxy S5 have been finalized and are due out before the end of this month.
In the case of the Galaxy Note 3, development has reached the final testing stage. If all goes well, the new bits should be ready to roll out to users sometime in July.

Previous such leaked documents surfaced last month, when the Galaxy S5’s update was still being worked on. Now that it’s finalized, the guessing game begins – which will be the first territory (or carrier) to get Android 4.4.3?

Further complicating things is the fact that Google has just released Android 4.4.4 to its Nexus devices, a version that seems to contain a pretty important security fix.

That leads us to wonder: will Samsung first release 4.4.3 for its devices only to then start working on what is now the latest version of the OS? Or will it choose to skip 4.4.3 altogether and simply come out with a 4.4.4 build, even if that means delaying the release for a short while?

Since the newest iteration of Android isn’t bringing new things to the table, just fixing bugs, the latter hypothesis isn’t completely implausible.

Source: gsmarena.com

Britain could ban Muslim school governers

A set of rules aimed at promoting “British values” in schools could ban conservative Muslims from becoming governors, a religious rights group says. The new regulations follow allegations of a “Trojan Horse” plot to Islamisize schools in the UK.

The UK has also banned the teaching of creationism theory in free schools.

The Department of Education has introduced a new set of rules governing free schools and academies in Britain. The regulations dictate that school governors and trustees should demonstrate “fundamental British values” and give the state powers to close the schools if they do not toe the line.

“The Academy Trust must ensure that principles are promoted which support fundamental British values,” say the rules. These include respect for democracy and the democratic process, support for gender equality and tolerance of different faiths and religions.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MBC) argues the new rules are discriminatory and allocate too much power to the Department of Education to define “British values.”

Source: RT

Gold posts biggest daily gain in nine months

Gold prices posted the biggest daily gain in nine months on Thursday, driven by investors who were caught flat-footed by the Federal Reserve’s outlook for continued low interest rates.

Gold for August delivery, the most actively traded contract, rose 3.3%, the biggest one-day percentage gain since September 2013. The contract rose $41.40 to $1,314.10 a troy ounce, its highest level since April 14.

Meanwhile, silver for July delivery gained 4.4% to $20.648 an ounce, its highest settlement since March 19.

Source: WSJ

Soros meets with the President of Ukraine

Multibillion dollar loans don’t come without a few strings attached.

President Petro Poroshenko held a meeting with billionaire crony opportunist George Soros, at which Soros informed the head of state about his initiative to create a “strategic plan of reforms” for Ukraine.

“We set up a strategic consultative group for immediate reactions to challenges as they arise,” the press service of the Ukrainian president reported on Monday, citing Soros.

Source: economicpolicyjournal.com

Confidence in US news media reach new lows

Level of faith in each of three major US news media platforms tumbles

Americans’ confidence in the news media has tumbled to fresh lows — and it doesn’t much matter whether the source is newspapers, television or the Internet.

A Gallup poll released Thursday found the level of faith in each of three major news media platforms — television news, newspapers, and news on the Internet — is at or tied with record lows, extending a longstanding trend

Confidence in US newspapers was marginally better than rival media, but dropped to 22 percent in the June 5-8 survey — declining more than half from a 1979 peak of 51 percent.

For television news, the percentage of respondents with a good deal of confidence was 19 percent, extending the decline from its 1993 peak at 46 percent.

Just 18 percent said they trusted online news, which compares with 21 percent in the only prior Gallup survey in 1999.

Those identifying themselves as liberals had slightly more confidence in newspapers, while conservatives had a higher level of trust in TV news.

“The field of news media has changed dramatically since Gallup first began measuring the confidence the public held in newspapers or TV news decades ago,” Gallup’s Andrew Dugan said in a blog post.

Source: Yahoo

Class-based affirmative action?

The US Supreme Court in April upheld Michigan’s ban on race-based affirmative action in university admissions.

Indeed, affirmative action as we know it is probably doomed: voters have banned it at universities in at least eight states, and four more look likely to follow suit.

The Economist has argued against race-based admissions policies. Instead, we encourage selection procedures that offer modest preferences to economically disadvantaged students. This is the plan set out in “Place, Not Race”, a new book from Sheryll Cashin of Georgetown Law School.

She proposes a race-blind, class-based type of affirmative action whereby students who have thrived in poor schools or rough neighbourhoods are given special consideration. Some worry that this may lead colleges to accept ill-prepared applicants, who may then drop out (a problem that has plagued some universities with race-based preferences). But new research suggests that these concerns may be unjustified.

In an article published in the latest issue of the Economics of Education Review, Sigal Alon of Tel Aviv University and Ofer Malamud of University of Chicago write about the promising results of a colour-blind, class-based affirmative-action programme in Israel. In the early 2000s, four of Israel’s most selective universities began giving preferential treatment to poorer students, as indicated by an applicant’s neighbourhood and high school. Based largely on these two factors, an applicant is scored on an index of socioeconomic disadvantage; those who meet a pre-determined threshold are eligible for special consideration, but not guaranteed admission. After analysing the academic outcomes of more than 5,000 students, the authors found three particularly noteworthy results.

First, those who met the threshold were more likely than average students to have come from deprived neighbourhoods, to be of Asian, African or Arabic origin, to have immigrated and to be poor. Second, the policy had a significant impact on admissions; applicants who met the threshold were 13% more likely to have been accepted to one of the four elite institutions than those who fell just short of the required number of points. Third, the students who were likely to have been admitted in part because of their disadvantaged backgrounds did not fall behind; they had the same average GPA and graduation rate as their peers who were ineligible for the programme. The researchers concluded that the programme works. It has increased the diversity of the student bodies at top universities by helping the poor without increasing the risk of admitting unqualified applicants. Students admitted through the programme “are not falling behind academically, even at the most selective majors,” the authors found.

Israel is a unique—and uniquely small—country with its own social complications, and there is no guarantee that a programme that works there would work in America. But the study offers some hope for those who seek to create more diverse student bodies and perhaps improve social mobility without explicitly privileging groups based on race.

Source: The Economist

Amcu miners eating human flesh for muti commission hears

“We took some of the flesh of the security [officer]. It was to make our muti strong.”

This was one of the confessions made by Mr X during his first day of testifying at the Marikana commission on Thursday.

Mr X, who was one of the striking miners at Marikana in 2012, is under police witness protection and his long-awaited testimony is now being heard in-camera.

While his evidence was being led by Advocate Frank Mathibedi, who represents the South African Police Service (SAPS), Mr X told how they took pieces of flesh from one of the Lonmin security guards who was killed by the striking miners on August 12 2012. They did this on the instruction of inyangas (traditional healers) to make the muti, used during the rituals with the strikers, strong.

According to Mr X, the muti and rituals were to protect the strikers. “An inyanga would make people brave, who would lead the warriors,” he told the commission through an isiXhosa interpreter. “The inyanga was going to make us not subject to being shot [and] lock the fire arms if we’re being shot at.”

Upon being shown a photo of the inyangas’ rag with lions printed on it, Mr X slowly started singing a song the strikers made up while on the koppie taking part in the rituals. “The lion from Bezana, the lion that eats people,” he sang in his low, husky voice. The significance of this song has not yet emerged.

A “committee” of 15 people were chosen by the strikers to undergo these rituals. It was these 15 who were the leaders of the strikers, and responsible for conveying messages between the inyangas and other strikers.

March to NUM
When questioned by Mathibedi on why the mine workers marched to National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) offices on August 11 2012, Mr X insisted that “we had gone to kill [them]”.

Mathibedi referred to three instances where other mine workers testified to other reasons why they had marched to the NUM offices, namely to ask them why the union was preventing the mine workers from talking to Lonmin management; and to deal with allegations that strikers had been assaulted and forced to go to work by NUM officials while they were on strike.

But Mr X remained insistent that the reason they marched to the NUM offices was to kill the people inside. “We were armed, Mr Chairperson, with pangas and spears. We were going to kill [them] in the office,” he said.

Initial meetings
Mr X also spoke about the initial meetings held by the mine workers on August 9 and 10 2012 to discuss their wage demands and plan of action with each other.

It was on August 10 that miners marched “peacefully” to the offices of Lonmin management to make their requests known, by writing their wage demands on a piece of cardboard.

Mr X told how after 15 minutes a “white man” – one of Lonmin’s management – emerged from the office. “He said the demands would be addressed by the union in 2013, and that is the agreement with the union. [He said] go back to work [and that] our strike is illegal.”

The miners then decided they would take action against those miners who returned to work and would also take steps against the refusal of Lonmin to address their wage demands.

Objection
The testimony of Mr X got off to a slow start, as technicians fine-tuned the video link through which he is testifying, but also due to a lengthy objection by Advocate Dali Mpofu, who represents the injured and arrested mine workers.

Mr X, a miner under police protection, has testified about removing “pieces of human flesh” from a murdered security guard to make their muti stronger.

They did this on the instruction of inyangas (witchdocters) to make the muti, used during the rituals with the Amcu-strikers, strong.

The significance of this song has not yet emerged.

When questioned by Mathibedi on why the mine workers marched to National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) offices on August 11 2012, Mr X insisted that “we had gone to kill [them]”.

Mr X’s testimony continues on Friday.

Source: M&G

Gardener guilty of raping 3-year-old

A former gardener at the Lesedi Day Care Centre in Floors was on Thursday found guilty of sexually assaulting a 3-year-old girl in the centre’s bathroom.

Cedric Golding, 31, a coloured man on Thursday appeared in the Kimberley Magistrate’s Court’s sexual offences courtroom where magistrate, Jesse Clarke, explained his verdict.

Golding was initially charged with two counts of rape following the incident in September 2011. He pleaded not guilty.

The young victim testified during the trial that Golding, who worked as a gardener at the centre, took her from the playground to the centre’s bathroom, where he touched her vagina and anus, while the teachers “were busy inside”.

She also illustrated, with the aid of anatomically-correct dolls, what exactly happened.

The child’s mother also testified that the normally vibrant child had come home from the centre one afternoon and was “not her usual self”.

Source: IOL

Cannibal a ‘very nice man’

Cannibal was polite, well-spoken and a ‘very nice man’.

An alleged cannibal accused of killing a Gugulethu man and eating his heart with a knife and fork, cried in court.

Andrew “Master Benson” Chimbozo, 34, appeared in the Athlone Magistrate’s Court on Thursday. His bail application was postponed until next month, and he was referred to the district surgeon to determine if he needed mental observation.

Chimbozo, a black Zimbabwean who lives in Langa, visited Nomonde Tshabalala in Gugulethu on June 10, and gave her money to buy liquor at a local shebeen.

It is alleged that while she was gone he stabbed her partner Mbuyiselo Manona, 62. Police arrived to find him eating Manona’s heart with a knife and fork.

On Thursday, Chimbozo emerged from the holding cells to the jeers of a packed public gallery.

Chimbozo cried silently throughout the brief proceedings and did not utter a word. As he turned to face the public benches on his way back down to the holding cells, disparaging comments from the crowd were audible.

A legal aid consultant remarked that after spending some time with Chimbozo, she felt sorry for him. She said he was polite, well-spoken and a “very nice man”.

Outside court, Letisha Vapi was coming to terms with the idea that the alleged cannibal was her niece’s partner.

Linetti Vapi, who has been in a relationship with Chimbozo for two years, is in hospital with tuberculosis.

Her aunt said Chimbozo had always treated her well, and visited her in hospital every day. “Even the day he killed somebody, he went to hospital first,” Letisha said. “He treated Linetti as a lady. He gave her everything. We were surprised when we heard about this.”

Source: IOL

Blackberry Passport will launch in September

BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen at the company’s earnings report and annual meeting confirmed that the long-rumoured square-shaped ‘Windermere’ smartphone will be officially called BlackBerry Passport.
Chen showed off the yet-to-be-announced Passport which will launch in September at an event in London. Crackberry reports that the company chief also showcased the BlackBerry Classic QWERTY smartphone that is slated to hit the market shelves before end of this year, but did not give an exact release date.

Unfortunately, the Canadian handset maker did not reveal any details about the pricing and of the BlackBerry Passport, previously codenamed Windermere.

Based on a BlackBerry developer listing, the Passport smartphone is said to sport a 4.5-inch display with a resolution of 1440×1440 pixels and offer a pixel density of 453ppi. Other than the screen information, company has not shared any more details of the device.

Other rumoured innards of the BlackBerry Passport include 3GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel rear camera, and a 3450mAh battery. BlackBerry on Wednesday, along with the announcement of its deal with Amazon for 240,000 Android apps, also said that it would be shutting down its music and video stores on BlackBerry World.

The Canadian handset company also confirmed the launch of its low-cost touchscreen smartphone, the BlackBerry Z3 in India on June 25. The company started sending invites for the event scheduled next week with a tagline that said, “Join us to witness the unveiling of the next generation BlackBerry 10 device.”

For the BlackBerry Classic, the company has revealed that it will run BlackBerry 10.3.1 OS, for which a separate SDK would be released for developers.

Source: gadgets.ndtv.com

Discrediting SA only benefits US

The downgrading of South Africa by rating agencies Standard & Poor’s and Fitch is a bitter pill to swallow, which has possibly severe consequences for our country.

Admittedly, there are significant negatives retarding the country’s growth potential. The government, organised labour and the oft intransigent business community require a lot of introspection. However, I fail to understand which entity benefits from a downgrade.

The result of punitive downgrades can only have the effect of being hugely detrimental for the targeted country and the biggest losers are the poorer sections of the community.

Downgrades will result in the depreciation of an already weak rand, products and services become more expensive, and a general malaise ensues as investors look elsewhere.

Conspiracy theories can be noisome and a distraction from reality, but my scepticism gives rise to a very real perception of an all-pervasive American influence.

We have observed over the years that when the US isn’t maintaining its international dominance by military adventurism, it uses its financial muscle to manipulate the global economy to its own selfish advantage.

That’s why no western country dares rocking the boat by criticising Uncle Sam.

The only entity that will benefit from a downgrade of South Africa is the US and the wealthy Western bloc who control the purse strings of world finance, because we will then be paying a lot more to them servicing our current and future borrowings.

The three major rating agencies are, unsurprisingly, American companies, and experience has shown that such businesses are invariably hugely partisan to the American national interest.

One can appreciate the need for rating agencies to regulate personal credit worthiness as companies need to know their lending for goods or services is safe.

But loans to parastatals like Transnet are safeguarded by the government’s guarantees, so one has to query the necessity to downgrade such state enterprises.

Also, no one realistically expects the government to default on loans in the current financial climate.

The ICC (International Chamber of Commerce) and the World Bank should rather worry about the European countries in real financial distress, the ones that have shown a worrying tendency of a possible default, such as the aptly termed Pigs, namely Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

In such instances, a financial watch alert could be sent out to international investors.

And the rating agencies could pay more attention to their host country’s $16 trillion national deficit.

Could the reason for the rating agencies’ downgrading of Brand SA be American displeasure of our fraternity with our Brics partners and the intention to establish a Brics Bank to finance economic growth in that club of nations? Is this a warning shot across our bows? Think about it.

America tolerated Saddam Hussein until he threatened to demand payment for Iraq’s vast oil production in alternate currencies to the American dollar.

The Americans then invaded his country under false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction and took control of the Iraqi oil fields.

Similarly with Muammar Gaddafi who was an avid proponent of breaking the international dominance of the dollar by establishing an African financial bloc with a regional AU bank. And as the Afrikaans saying goes: “Kyk hoe lyk hy nou” (loosely translated as “Look where he is now”.)

This is the glaring lesson – you mess with America’s hegemony at your peril.

As part of the global village, we must honour our international commitments, but we need to insist on mutual respect from the major Western powers and the establishment of a Development Bank will go a long way to preserving our domestic sovereignty from the bullying of American surrogate financial agencies.

Imogen Larsen

NATO: Russia funding anti-fracking groups

Russian intelligence agencies are covertly funding and working with European environmental groups to campaign against fracking and maintain EU dependence on Russian gas, the head of Nato has claimed.

Answering questions after a speech in London, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato secretary-general, said improving European energy security was of the “utmost importance” and accused Moscow of “blackmail” in its dealings with Europe.

“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” Mr Rasmussen, former Danish prime minister, told an audience at Chatham House, the international affairs think-tank.

Mr Rasmussen did not detail the nature of his suspicions about Russian involvement with environmental groups.

The 28-nation EU bloc depends on Russia for about a third of its oil and gas needs.

Shale gas enthusiasts want curb the EU’s high dependence on Russian imports.

A Nato official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Financial Times that “some allies worry that Russia could try to obstruct possible projects on shale gas exploration in Europe in order to maintain Europe’s reliance on Russian gas.”

Royal Dutch Shell last year struck a production-sharing agreement to develop the Yuzuvska field, which spans 8,000 square kilometres in and around Donetsk.

Denis Pushilin, from the Donetsk People’s Republic organised rallies against shale gas exploration in Donetsk. In May, Mr Pushilin said the Donetsk People’s Republic had banned the extraction of shale gas in territory it controlled in eastern Ukraine.

Protests against fracking have been held in Bulgaria and Romania but green groups in both countries have angrily rejected charges that they are puppets and dismiss the idea of Russia’s influence as a conspiracy theory.

Romania’s president, Traian Basescu, suggested that Russia was playing a role in trying to thwart Chevron’s shale gas development near the village of Pungesti.

Environmentalists reject the charges and accuse the Romanian police of acting as a private security force for Chevron.

Demonstrators have vented their outrage about the danger that shale development would pose to drinking water and geological faults.

Source: FT

Gold prices up

Gold was up $42.70 per ounce in trading today.

The New York spot price was $1,320.20

Also on Wall Street, investors remained in a record-setting mood Thursday.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index closed at an all-time high for the second time in two days and notched its fifth gain in five days.

The Dow Jones industrial average and Nasdaq composite ended mixed after drifting between small gains and losses for much of the day.

The three key stock indexes all opened higher, holding on to tiny gains in premarket trading as investors sized up the latest data on unemployment aid applications and an index of economic indicators.

The Labor Department reported that applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to 312,000, the lowest in more than six years. The Conference Board added to the good news, saying its index of leading indicators rose 0.5 percent in May from the previous month.

The market began to drift lower, however, as investors looked beyond the economic data and focused instead on a mixed bag of corporate earnings from companies such as Kroger, Rite Aid and Pier 1 Imports.

By midday, stocks veered into the red, where they remained until halfway through the final hour of trading, when a late push elevated the S&P 500 and Dow barely higher on the day.

The S&P 500 index rose 2.50 points, or 0.1 percent, to 1,959.48. That’s slightly above the prior day’s record close of 1,956.98. The last time the index closed at a record high was June 9th.

The Dow Jones industrial average added 14.84 points, or 0.1 percent, to 16,921.46. The Nasdaq composite slipped 3.51 points, or 0.1 percent, to 4,359.33.

The three indexes are all up for the year.

The U.S. economy shrank at an annual rate of 1 percent in the January-March quarter, the victim of a severe winter which slowed business activity in a number of areas. Many analysts anticipate growth rebounded strongly in the April-June quarter.

The market will get a sense of that next month, when the next round of corporate earnings begins. Until then, the next key market mover will likely be the June jobs report, due out the first week of July.

Bond prices fell, sending the yield on the 10-year Treasury note up to 2.63 percent from 2.59 percent late Wednesday.

Source: Elko Daily Free Press