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Six years after its founding at the University of Georgia, UGA HEROs became the highest fundraising collegiate philanthropy in Georgia, raising over $363,000 and involving more than 2,000 student members in 2008 alone.

The purpose of UGA HEROs is to support HERO (Hearts Everywhere Reaching Out) for Children, Inc.—headquartered in Atlanta—whose mission is to improve the quality of life for children infected with and/or affected by HIV and AIDS through enriching programs, unforgettable experiences, and connections to the community.

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Kampala SIX children were among 10 people killed in a gun battle between the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) and Jie warriors on Sunday in Kotido district.

The children, aged between 13 and 17, had accompanied their parents and siblings manning kraals. Several head of cattle, sheep and goats were also killed in the battle, but the army recovered 2,000 head of cattle.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201004290484.html

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A California judge, so repulsed by evidence found in the case of a sex molester obsessed with babies and very young children, sentenced him to life in prison using the state’s Three Strikes law.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/291348

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A California judge, so repulsed by evidence found in the case of a sex molester obsessed with babies and very young children, sentenced him to life in prison using the state’s Three Strikes law.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/291348

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Kampala SIX children were among 10 people killed in a gun battle between the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) and Jie warriors on Sunday in Kotido district.

The children, aged between 13 and 17, had accompanied their parents and siblings manning kraals. Several head of cattle, sheep and goats were also killed in the battle, but the army recovered 2,000 head of cattle.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201004290484.html

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Warren Buffetts reputation as a stickler for good business ethics has put the billionaire in an awkward spot because of an investment in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

In Sept 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. acquired $5 billion of Goldman preferred shares and warrants to purchase an equal amount of common stock. The investment throws off a fat $500 million of dividends a year.

Speaking on CNBC television, Buffett said on March 1 that he would buy the securities again under the same circumstances.

He also praised Goldman chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.

Its a very, very strong, well-run business, Buffett said. Goldman Sachs has a very strong market position. Lloyd Blankfein, you cannot find a better manager.

But that was before the US Securities and Exchange Commissions April 16 lawsuit accusing Goldman of civil fraud. Goldman officials told US senators Tuesday they did not mislead clients.

Buffett is in a tough spot, said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management. If you really feel something was done wrong and your investment reflects your values, then you have to think about reducing it.

Berkshire declined to comment.

At the companys annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska on May 1, Buffett will field more than five hours of shareholder questions. Goldman is all but certain to come up.

Buffett is savvy enough to know the environment can change in two seconds and that he need not make sudden, radical decisions, said Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management expert at Dezenhall Resources Ltd in Washington, DC

I WILL BE RUTHLESS

Even before the SEC lawsuit, Goldman was among the least admired US companies amid a perception its business practices contributed to the financial crisis and that it is tone-deaf to calls for change, and that it pay bankers and traders less.

In a Harris Interactive Inc poll released April 5, Goldman was the 56th most admired of 60 well-known large US companies. Behind it: Citigroup Inc, Fannie Mae, American International Group Inc and Freddie Mac. Ranked first: Berkshire.

Berkshire Hathaway is a powerhouse because it is associated with some great brands such as Coca-Cola, Geico and Procter amp; Gamble, Calkins said. The question is, does Goldman fit?

Buffett has forayed into Wall Street before. In 1987, Berkshire bought $700 million of convertible preferred stock in Salomon Inc. Four years later, Buffett became interim chairman to restore order after a Treasury auction bidding scandal.

On Sept. 4, 1991, Buffett testified before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about Salomon. Excerpts got into a movie created by Buffetts daughter Susie and shown to Berkshire shareholders at each annual meeting.

In part, Buffett said the following: In the end, the spirit about compliance is as important, or more so, than words about compliance.

I want the right words and I want the full range of internal controls. But I also have asked every Salomon employee to be his or her own compliance officer.

After they first obey all rules, I then want employees to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear the next day on the front page of their local paper, to be read by their spouses, children and friends, with the reporting done by an informed and critical reporter.

If they follow this test, they need not fear my other message to them: Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm and I will be ruthless.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; editing by Andre Grenon)

http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2010/04/29/109384.htm

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44 school kids stabbed in China in 2 days

Kazakhstan News.Net
Thursday 29th April, 2010 (IANS)

Twenty-eight children were stabbed Thursday by a 47-year-old man at a kindergarten in Chinas Jiangsu province, a day after 16 primary school students were attacked by a mentally-unstable man in Guangdong province.

An unemployed man, identified Xu Yuyuan, carried out the attack at 9.30 am local time Thursday in Zhongxin Kindergarten in Jiangsus Taixing city, in which two teachers and a security guard were also injured, Xinhua quoted government officials as saying.

Wednesday, a mentally-unstable 33-year-old man, named Chen Kangbing, had stabbed 16 students and a teacher at the Leicheng First Primary School in Guangdong provinces Leizhou city.

Thursdays attacker Xu worked in an insurance company until he was fired in 2001. Since then, he has remained jobless, they said.

The children have been admitted in hospital and five of them are in a critical condition. Many of the injured children were four years old and studied in the same class.

Xu broke into the kindergarten classroom wielding a 20-cm-long knife and attacked the children and the two teachers. The security guard was injured when he tried to stop the man, police said.

Meanwhile, five of the injured students in the Guangdong attack were still critical Thursday.

Authorities were assessing the mental state of Chen, an art teacher at Hongguan Primary School, in Leizhou city.

Chen had been on sick leave since February 2006, showed an inability to answer questions clearly, and was receiving a comprehensive psychiatric examination from the city public security bureau, Li Changwu, secretary of the city committee of the Communist Party of China, was quoted as saying Thursday.

He had sneaked into the campus with teachers from different schools who had come to attend a class on teaching methods at the school, Chen Riwen, spokesman with the provincial education department said.

One of the students injured in the attack said he tumbled and hurt himself when he tried to escape. I hid under the table in the classroom when he struck the knife. I didnt feel any pain at the time, Xiao Huang said.

He said his teacher blocked Chen and shouted Run, Run! to the students in the classroom.

Meanwhile, Xiao Wen, 12, was critically injured and was receiving a blood transfusion and oxygen for breathing, her father said, adding that she received cerebral injuries and suffered heavy blood loss.

Earlier, a mentally-unstable doctor who had stabbed eight schoolchildren to death in Chinas Fujian province was executed Wednesday. He was put in front of the firing squad.

Zheng Minsheng, 41, who murdered the eight children March 23 at the gate of the Nanping Experimental Elementary School, had admitted in court that he intentionally killed them.

Zheng had asked the court to pay more attention to what prompted him to commit the crime, rather than to the crime itself. Im willing to shoulder the responsibility for what I did, but only for 30 percent. The other 70 percent should go to the woman who dumped me, he was quoted as saying.

The doctor said he just wanted an ordinary life like others, but failed. He felt his life was meaningless as he was not married, had been unsuccessful in relations with women, his family and in his career. He repeatedly told the judge that he had been turned down by a woman and suffered unfair treatment from her wealthy family, which prompted him to carry out the attack.
http://www.kazakhstannews.net/story/629050

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The Starting Point is a snapshot of the news stories that occurred overnight. Look for updates throughout the day on Yahoo! News.

Top story overnight: A knife-wielding man entered a school in eastern China this morning and attacked more than two dozen children and three adults, The Associated Press reported. According to the official Xinhua News Angency, the suspect, Xu Yuyan, 47, burst into a kindergarten class in Jiangsu provinces Taixing city, waving an 8-inch knife. He allegedly stabbed two teachers and a security guard who tried to stop him, then stabbed 28 students. At the time of this writing, five of the children are in critical condition. It was the third episode of deadly school violence in that country in the past month.

In other news: A US panel has named 13 countries as serious violators of religious freedom, The AP reported. The countries of particular concern included all eight named last year — Myanmar, also known as Burma; China; Eritrea; Iran; North Korea; Saudi Arabia; Sudan; and Uzbekistan — plus Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam. The report also criticized current and former administrations in Washington for doing little to make basic religious rights universal.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled thousands of Simplicity and Graco cribs today. According to The AP, the Simplicity recall is for all full-sized cribs with tubular metal mattress-support frames. Those frames can bend or detach, causing the mattress to collapse and creating a space that a baby can roll into, become trapped in and suffocate. The 217,000 Graco dropside cribs being recalled have sides that can break or detach, creating a dangerous gap between the crib mattress and dropped side.

Lastly, US carriers will now have to let passengers off of planes after three hours or face fines, The AP reported. The new tarmac delay rule, which goes into effect today, was enacted by the Transportation Department after years of sparring between the airlines and passenger advocates. Airlines must also provide travelers with food and water as well as access to working bathrooms.

Most read stories: Violence in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez left 16 people dead on Wednesday, The AP reported. During one incident, gunmen stormed into a bar, dragged out eight people and killed them in the parking lot. In another, a shootout killed three people in front of an elementary school, causing a panic among students, teachers and parents. Battles between rival drug gangs have made Ciudad Juarez one of the worlds deadliest cities.

Readers were also interested in this AP article about a gang crackdown in Fresno, Calif. Police arrested 108 people during sweeps in a neighborhood known for gang activity. The arrests came just a few days after three people were killed in separate shootings over the weekend.

Todays poll:

Wednesdays poll:

Looking ahead: President Barack Obama is set to name Janet Yellen as vice chairwoman of the central bank and fill two other vacancies on the board. He will also deliver the eulogy for the late Dorothy I. Height, a woman he calls the godmother of the civil rights movement.

Today in history: In 1983, Harold Washington was sworn in as the first black mayor of Chicago.

Birthdays: Football player Tommie Harris, 27. Musician Mike Hogan (The Cranberries), 37. Actress Uma Thurman, 40. Tennis player Andre Agassi, 40. Singer Carnie Wilson (Wilson Phillips), 42. Melody Barnes, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, 46. Actress Eve Plumb, 52. Actress Michelle Pfeiffer, 52. Actor Daniel Day-Lewis, 53. Actress Kate Mulgrew, 55. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, 56. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), 60. Singer Tommy James (The Shondells), 63. Princess Benedikte of Denmark, 66. Singer Duane Allen (The Oak Ridge Boys), 67. Conductor Zubin Mehta, 74. Baseball Hall of Famer Luis Aparicio, 76. Poet Rod McKuen, 77. Singer Carl Gardner (The Coasters), 82.

Notable deaths: Director Alfred Hitchcock died in 1980 at age 80. Tenor James McCracken died in 1988 at age 61. Columnist Mike Royko died in 1997 at age 64. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith died in 2006 at age 97. Baseball player Josh Hancock died in 2007 at age 29. Scientist Albert Hofmann died in 2008 at age 102.

–Jade Walker is the overnight editor of Yahoo! News.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100429/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1848

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Cameron vows to focus on TV debate

Apr 29 2010

Gordon Browns unguarded comments about pensioner Gillian Duffy speak for themselves, David Cameron said as he expressed hope the gaffe would not overshadow the televised debate.

The Tory leader, speaking as he visited Birmingham Childrens Hospital with wife Samantha, refused to directly criticise the Prime Minister.

He said: Im not going to comment on all of that - the words speak for themselves - Ill leave that to others.

I think the debate will stand on its own. Its a very important moment in the election and I want to try to get across how we can build a better, stronger economy, thats what its really about - the future; how we get jobs going; how we get business going.

That, I think, is what the country is asking.

http://www.formbytimes.co.uk/news/formby-breaking-news/2010/04/29/cameron-vows-to-focus-on-tv-debate-66401-26343570/

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By Gene Borio, www.tobacco.org

Tobacco in some form has been around for eons.

About 6000 BC: Experts believe the tobacco plant, as we know it today, begins growing in the Americas

1492-10-15: Columbus mentions tobacco. We found a man in a canoe going from Santa Maria to Fernandia. He had with him some dried leaves which are in high value among them, for a quantity of it was brought to me at San Salvador — Christopher Columbus Journal

1499: Amerigo Vespucci noticed that the American Indians had a curious habit of chewing green leaves mixed with a white powder. First, they put leaves in their mouths. Then, after dampening a small stick with saliva, they dipped it in the powder and mixed the adhering powder with the leaves in their mouths, making a kind of chewing tobacco.

By 1586, tobacco had arrived in English Society. In July 1586, some Virginia colonists returned to England and disembarked at Plymouth smoking tobacco from pipes, which caused a sensation.

1600: ENGLAND: Sir Walter Raleigh persuades Queen Elizabeth to try smoking

1612: John Rolfe raises Virginias first commercial crop of tall tobacco. In 1613, the first shipment of Rolfes tobacco arrives in England.

1730: First American tobacco factories begun in Virginia–small snuff mills

1794: The U.S Congress passes the first federal excise tax on tobacco products. The tax of 8 cents applies only to snuff, not the more plebian chewing or smoking tobacco. The tax is 60 percent of snuffs usual selling price. James Madison opposed the tax, saying it deprive poorer people of innocent gratification

1861-1865: During the Civil War, tobacco is given with rations by both North and South; many Northerners are introduced to tobacco this way. During Shermans march, Union soldiers, now attracted to the mild, sweet bright tobacco of the South, raided warehouses–including Washington Dukes for some chew on the way home. Some bright made it all the way back. Bright tobacco becomes the rage in the North.

1880s: US Womens Christian Temperance Movement publishes a leaflet that discusses evils of tobacco, especially cigarettes. Cigarettes are doing more to-day to undermine the constitution of our young men and boys than any other one evil.

1893: Cigar-smoking President Grover Cleveland is secretly operated on for cancer of the mouth.

1901: 3.5 billion cigarettes and 6 billion cigars are sold. Four in five American men smoke at least one cigar a day.

1902: Philip Morris sets up a corporation on Broad Street in New York to sell its British brands, including one named Marlboro, named after Great Marlborough Street, site of Philip Morris original factory in London.

1904: A judge in New York sends a woman is sent to jail for 30 days for smoking in front of her children. 1908: New York city passes Sullivan Act, forbidding women to smoke in public. Managers of public establishments must not permit females to smoke. An earlier ordinance which would have forbidden men to smoke in the presence of women failed to pass. One Katie Mulcahy is arrested for lighting up. Two weeks after enactment, Mayor George B. McClellan vetoes the ordinance.

1929: Fritz Lickint of Dresden publishes the first formal statistical evidence of a lung cancer-tobacco link, based on a case series showing that lung cancer sufferers were likely to be smokers. Lickint also argued that tobacco use was the best way to explain the fact that lung cancer struck men four or five times more often than women (since women smoked much less).

1931: Cigarette Price Wars begin. Cigarettes sold for 14 cents a pack, 2-for-27 cents in the depths of the depression.

1940: Adult Americans smoke 2,558 cigarettes per capita a year, 2.5 times the consumption of 1930.

1940-1950: Muckraking pioneer George Seldes exposes the suppression of tobacco stories by the nations press As most tobacco-ad-laden newspapers refused to report the growing evidence of tobaccos hazards, Seldes starts his own newsletter in which he covered tobacco. For 10 years, we pounded on tobacco as one of the only legal poisons you could buy in America, he told R. Holhut, editor of The George Seldes Reader.

1947: Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette) hits airwaves. Written by Merle Travis for Tex Williams, is national hit.

1950: In the May 27, 1950 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association, Morton Levin publishes first major study definitively linking smoking to lung cancer.

1950: American cigarette consumption is 10 cigarettes per capita, which equals over a pack a day for smokers.

1951: TV series I Love Lucy begins its run at 9:00 PM. It is sponsored by Philip Morris. The animated titles that open the show each week feature stick figures of Lucy and Desi climbing a giant pack of Philip Morris cigarettes. It is the top-rated show for four of its first six full seasons.

1954: Marlboro Cowboy created for Philip Morris by Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett. Delivers the Goods on Flavor ran the slogan in newspaper ads.

1955: Smokers: Males: 56.9 percent; females: 28.4 percent

1955: CBS See It Now airs first TV show linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer and other diseases. (For the first time on TV, Edward R. Murrow is not seen smoking. He had not quit; he felt it was too late to stop. Murrow died of lung cancer in 1965.)

1964: First Surgeon Generals Report linking smoking and lung cancer: Smoking and Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. 1965: Congress passes the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act requiring the following Surgeon Generals Warning on the side of cigarette packs: Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.

1969: Pan American Airlines creates the first nonsmoking sections on its jumbo jets; United Airlines did the same two years later.

1971-01-02: REGULATION: TV: Cigarette ads are taken off TV and radio as Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969 takes effect. Broadcast industry loses c. $220 Million in ads (Ad Age, History of TV Advertising). The last commercial on US TV is a Virginia Slims ad, aired at 11:59 pm on the Johnny Carson Tonight show, Jan. 1, 1971. The ad featured actress Veronica Hamel.

1987: Aspen, Colo., becomes the first city in the United States to ban smoking in restaurants.

1992: Nicotine patch is introduced.

1993: VERMONT is the first state in the nation to ban indoor smoking; bars are exempt.

1993: Smoking prevalence among US adults (18 years of age and older) is estimated to be 25 percent, compared with 26.3 percent for 1992. Forty-six million adults currently smoke (24 million men, 22 million women).

1997: Forty-eight million Americans have quit in the 21 years since the first Smokeout in 1976; 48 million still smoke; about 34 million say they want to quit. Between 1965 and 1990, adult smoking declined from 42 percent to 25 percent. The average age of a first-time smoker is 13. More than 3 million American adolescents smoke cigarettes.

1997: Attorneys General, tobacco companies come to landmark settlement. Agreement provides for unprecedented restrictions on cigarettes and on tobacco makers liability in lawsuits. Industry to spend $360 billion over 25 years, mainly on anti-smoking campaigns, use bold health warning on packs, curb advertising and face fines if youth smoking drops insufficiently. Subject to congressional approval.

1997: President Bill Clinton signs Executive Order 13058 mandating smokefree government workplaces. The order states that tobacco use is to be prohibited from all government-owned, rented or leased interior spaces or in exterior spaces near air intake ducts. The order also prohibits smoking in all recreational buildings and clubs aboard military installations.

2006: Judge releases final order, finding that the tobacco defendants (except Ligget) are racketeers, having lied for 50 years, and deceived the American public on health issues and marketing to children. All that judge can do under civil RICO, however, is enjoin them from lying in the future, or using light type descriptors. She orders them to issue corrective statements, and expands the Minnesota document disclosure requirements. If this injunctive relief is ever implemented, it will only be after years of appeals.

2010: By May 1, 38 states are either smokefree or have some type of smoking ban.

http://www.dailytribune.com/articles/2010/04/29/news/doc4bd980ee1552b689511867.txt

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