A Spring-Break Legacy: Swine Flu Hits Colleges

Swine flu is going to college. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed that a Notre Dame student tested positive for swine flu — school officials in Indiana said the undergraduate had not been to Mexico recently — and the University of Delaware has started screening students in a special clinic after four cases of influenza that meet probable definitions for swine flu popped on campus

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Forget Math. Women Lag in Becoming English Professors!

So much for the theory that maternity leave and childrearing are responsible for slowing women’s climb up the employment ladder. Despite increasing efforts to mint more female professors in recent years, a new report from the Modern Language Association of America shows that women take longer than men to get promoted from associate professor to full professor — regardless of whether they are married or have children.

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Countries take steps to prevent swine flu outbreak

As more cases of swine flu are reported in various parts of the world, governments and health officials have scrambled to take precautions to prevent the outbreak from entering their borders. The World Health Organization urged countries worldwide to look out for “unusual” outbreaks of flu following an emergency meeting. It said it will decide on Tuesday whether to raise the pandemic alert level

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Paying for College: What to Do When Your 529 Is Tanking

Buoyed by a run of good news in the stock market, I recently decided to check the balance in my son’s 529 college savings account for the first time in many months. To my dismay, the account was still down some 40% from a year ago, far below the amount my husband and I had originally invested. Given the extent of the losses, I couldn’t help but wonder: would it make sense to just ditch this thing?

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Obama addresses economy, tax plan on filing day

President Obama touted his tax cut Wednesday as an important component of his plan to right the U.S. economy and put working families on a more prosperous path. “My administration has taken far-reaching action to give tax cuts to the Americans who need them while jump-starting growth and job creation in the process,” Obama said

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Washington Wrestles the Somali Pirate Problem — On Land

The celebrating over Sunday’s daring rescue of Richard Phillips, the ship captain held hostage by Somali pirates, didn’t last too long at the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged Monday that the kind of Navy snipers who took out the three captors are only a stopgap way of dealing with pirates now sailing the Gulf of Aden. “There is no purely military solution to it,” Gates told an audience of the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va.

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