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BEIJING - Some elite American universities come to China to scout the smartest students possible. Other lesser known schools, particularly small private colleges around New England, arrive here with a far different motive: profit.
Which explains why Paul LeBlanc, president of tiny Southern New Hampshire University, flew 7,700 miles from Manchester last month as part of his years-long campaign to offer American online degrees to Chinese universities. He hugged a Chinese education official near a concrete statue of Mao. He took yet another tour of Beijing Sports University. They shared a song-filled Peking duck dinner to celebrate LeBlanc's birthday.
Success at reaching a partnership, LeBlanc believes, would lead to a multimillion-dollar windfall to his school.
A senior Obama campaign official shared with The Washington Note that in July 2008, the McCain and Obama camps began to work secretly behind the scenes to assemble large rosters of potential personnel for the administration that only one of the candidates would lead.
Lists comprised of Democrats and Republicans were assembled, sorted into areas of policy expertise, so that the roster could be called on after the election by either the Obama or McCain transition teams.
This kind of out-of-sight coordination is rare between battling presidential camps and provides some indication that both Obama and McCain intended to draw expertise into their governments from both sides of the aisle -- or at least they wanted to appear interested in doing so if the information leaked out about the list development process.
Fascinating tidbit on cooperation behind battle lines.
Originally posted by vapedson
Can someone please on this forum or u2u point me in the direction of the post reinhardt once made about the US revolution.
He discussed a European group and how they were still in control of US in a sense. And it showed a painting of G. Washington in the backround of the group but it was much later than the 1700's. It was some big names (maybe royals) from Europe.
I believe this was from r. If not, can someone point me to what im talking about if you know. Either the group of the name or something? I remember reading about the group on wikipedia if that helps...
Expectations gap
The expectation gap [fn] is the gap between the auditors' actual standard of performance and the various public expectations of auditors' performance (as opposed to their required standard of performance). Many members of the public expect that:
* auditors should accept prime responsibility for the financial statements,
* auditors 'certify’ financial statements,
* a 'clean’ opinion guarantees the accuracy of financial statements,
* auditors perform a 100% check,
* auditors should give early warning about the possibility of business failure, and
* auditors are supposed to detect fraud.
Such public expectations of auditors, which go beyond the actual standard of performance by auditors, have led to the term 'expectation gap’.
According to the auditing profession, the reality is that:
* management, as preparers of the financial statements, is primarily responsible for their content, even though management may request the auditors to prepare them;
* an audit only provides reasonable assurance that financial statements are free of material misstatement. (See The CPA Journal entitled The Past and Future of Reasonable Assurance);
* an audit is no guarantee of solvency or financial performance;
* auditors are only required to test selected transactions - it does not make economic sense, in to-days world, to check all transactions; and
* although auditors plan and conduct an audit engagement with an attitude of professional skepticism recognizing that circumstances such as fraud may exist that will cause the financial statements to be materially misstated, an audit does not guarantee that fraud will be detected.
In 1996, Richard Scrushy approached me about establishing a fifty (50) point checklist which became known as the "Pristine Audit." After Mr. Scrushy asked me to develop the checklist, I sent him a memo expressing my opinion about the checklist. I have attached a copy of my memo. Mr. Scrushy did not appreciate my opinion on the matter and again instructed me to develop the checklist for his approval. Mr Scrushy informed me the Pristine Audit was to be handled by Ernst & Young.
I developed the fifty (50) point checklist which Mr. Scrushy approved. I am attaching a copy of the checklist. As you can see, the Pristine Checklist has nothing to do with auditing the financial books of a field facility. The Pristine Audit was nothing more than a cosmetic, white glove, walk through of a facility. It was in the nature of quality control and had nothing to do with the financial viability of a particular facility.
Originally posted by vapedson
Can someone please on this forum or u2u point me in the direction of the post reinhardt once made about the US revolution.
He discussed a European group and how they were still in control of US in a sense. And it showed a painting of G. Washington in the backround of the group but it was much later than the 1700's. It was some big names (maybe royals) from Europe.
I remember the post you're talking about and pretty sure it was from r. Said that Us was still under lease to/from the Crown via some british charted shipping venture company. I think I can find it in the files I kept but can not start search until this evening. Will post it if you haven't found it by then.
Testing everyone for the AIDS virus in hard-hit African countries and treating all infections immediately may eliminate most of the disease’s spread, according to a computer simulation of the epidemic.
About 1.9 million people were infected with the AIDS virus, called HIV, in southern African countries in 2007, according to UNAIDS, the New York-based agency that coordinates the United Nations’ response to the epidemic. Universal testing and treatment might cut the spread of the lethal virus in southern Africa by 95 percent in 10 years, said researchers led by Kevin De Cock, director of HIV/AIDS for the World Health Organization in Geneva, in the Lancet journal.
For the first time since the U.S. declared a war on cancer in 1971, the rate at which Americans are diagnosed with the disease has started to decline, according to an annual report that tracks the illness.
New cases fell by an average of 0.8 percent a year for the five years ending in 2005 as increasing numbers of people in the U.S. gave up cigarettes and took advantage of improved screening techniques and better treatments. While death rates have been falling since 1991, this was the first time researchers saw a drop in new cases diagnosed for men and women since they started publishing the report in 1998.