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It’s a lottery nightmare: You decide not to kick in for the office Powerball pool — and your coworkers strike it rich.It happened at a real estate agency in Florida. Jennifer Maldonado, who started working at the firm two weeks ago and had yet to receive a paycheck, opted out of the $20 buy-in because she was watching her money. She showed up for work Sunday to find the rest of the office screamin...
Wonkblog's Ezra Klein published 21 charts yesterday from the International Federation of Health Plans that illustrate just how ridiculous our health care prices are in the United States.Klein writes:This is the fundamental fact of American health care: We pay much, much more than other countries do for the exact same things. For a detailed explanation of why, see this article. But this post isn’t about the why. It’s about the prices and the graphs.
The AFT and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been working on finding a better way to evaluate and develop teachers, using research to determine the best ways to train teachers and ensure that students get the best educational experience possible. Although the AFT and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation don’t always agree on everything, they share the firm belief that students have a right to effective instruction and that teachers want to do their very best.
HOUSTON -- A Louisiana man denied on Tuesday that he used his daughter to lure a college professor into a sexually explicit online relationship and then blackmailed him.The professor, James Arnt Aune, of Texas A&M University, jumped to his death from the roof of a campus parking garage in January after paying part of an alleged demand for $5,000, sending a text to the man saying "Killing mysel...
LOS ANGELES -- A nationwide search for a convicted killer ended in Los Angeles when police spotted a fugitive who has been on the lam for months after escaping prison in Louisiana, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.Keana Barnes broke out of the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in January. She was arrested on Monday near Skid Row, some 1,800 miles west of the prison where she was bei...
A man who reportedly walked through a Tacoma, Wash., neighborhood spraying gunfire was taken into police custody after a standoff at his residence, Seattle TV station KING 5 reported.Police had surrounded the home Tuesday afternoon, where the man with at least four high-powered weapons was holed up, a sheriff's official told NBC News.Pierce County Sheriff's Department told KING that the suspect wa...
The math is mean. Post-9/11 veterans lug a steep unemployment rate that's a point-plus taller than the civilian rate. Add to that the 34,000 troops who soon will return from Afghanistan. Bottom line: The existing bulge of ex-military job seekers threatens to further swell in a world where stripes carry no sway. How to crack that cold equation? Just a little face time, says unemployed veteran Ruty ...
As the end of her afternoon shift collecting tolls on the Golden Gate Bridge ended, Dawnette Reed felt the tears begin to come.She stepped out of her booth at lane three and made the walk back to the office for the last time. After 18 years collecting tolls at the bridge, her job was done."I always say I know customers from the [baby’s] car seat to the driver's seat," Reed said of her regular cust...
SEATTLE -- A suspected drunken driver slammed into a family crossing the street in a residential Seattle neighborhood, critically injuring a baby and his mother and killing his grandparents, authorities said. The grandparents had recently moved from the Midwest to be near the newborn child. Karina Schulte, 33, and her 10-day-old son were in critical condition Tuesday afternoon, said Liz Hunter, a ...
An 83-year-old former IBM programmer is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a law that cost her more than a quarter of a million dollars and deprived her, and thousands of other gay couples, of federal marriage benefits.At issue is the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, passed by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress in 1996 and signed by President Bill Clinton. It bars fed...
