Word: pointing
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...Short-term literacy and vocational programs, popular with donors, abound. As do school buildings up to the latest Western standards - some even have wheelchair-accessible ramps, in a country where there are few sidewalks and even fewer wheelchairs. Politicians back in the U.S. like to point to these projects as examples of taxpayer dollars being put to good use, and often cite the exponential number of girls in schools, some 2 million today compared to zero in 2001, as proof of success. But those schools are meaningless if there are no good teachers. In many rural parts of the country...
...Experts point to Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; and Denver as big-city school districts that have rebounded in the hands of strong managers. Detroit presents a very different situation. The tax base is nearly gone. Poverty and unemployment are far more pervasive than in most other major American cities. Many adults lack the basic skills necessary to qualify for the high-tech jobs officials are desperately trying to attract to Michigan, which has the U.S.'s highest unemployment rate. Home values, on which property-tax revenues are based, have plunged to pennies on the dollar. Over the past decade, the Detroit...
...David Ho was sitting in the audience during an AIDS meeting in 2007 when the presenter flashed a cartoon onscreen to make a point. Along with his colleagues, Ho chuckled at the image of a blindfolded baseball player swinging mightily at an incoming pitch. But as amused as the scientists were, they were sobered too; they knew that the player in the cartoon was them. A swing and a miss, the image was saying, one of many in the long battle against AIDS...
...however, that his conclusion was premature. Other cells had contaminated his results, and he was forced to issue a "retraction of an interpretation" of the paper describing the study. "It was an embarrassing moment for us, but we fixed it ourselves," says Ho. "It was certainly a low point in our history here...
...playing both sides is an ancient one. Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, in his 4th century B.C. classic The Art of War, mentions double agents as a source of useful information. In 1779 infamous turncoat Benedict Arnold offered to surrender the fort at West Point to the British for £20,000. While his conspiracy was quickly discovered, that of Edward Bancroft, who spied both on and for Benjamin Franklin, didn't come to light for more than 100 years...