Accredited online colleges stand for the educational institutions duly authorized by government to teach various courses and award certificate and degrees. Online colleges are the preferred choice for high school graduates, working professionals, housewives and everyone who has a desire to learn. Looking at the growing number of students aspiring for online college courses, there emerged a number of online universities that can rightly be called fake or pseudo universities. Such colleges have a single agenda-earn money by making fool of innocent people. If you are an online college aspirant then beware of such false colleges. Look for accredited online universities only.

How can a student look for Accredited online colleges in the crowd would be the probable question in your mind. Getting accreditation is a matter of pride for any online college hence the online college would highlight its accreditation in its website. There are online directories that contain the name and addresses of online colleges that have accreditation. Students can visit these directories and get first hand information about online accredited colleges. Students can further clarify the accreditation status of an online college by writing to the college and asking for clarification on whether it is accredited or not. One can even make a call to the online college office and ask questions regarding accreditation to the appropriate authority.

Online colleges get accreditation for a limited period and they need to renew their accreditation from time to time. Accreditation means that the online college has the requisite infrastructure and staff to teach specific courses. There are instances when an accredited online college in denied accreditation for second term. So there are chances that you get enrolled in an accredited online college but after sometime you may find that the college is no more accredited. To avoid such mishap, look for Accredited online colleges whose accreditation has never been revoked.

Going into the history of Accredited online colleges would provide great help in tracking the colleges with trustworthy accreditation record. Remember the corporate world recognizes only accredited courses and if you happen to earn an unaccredited course then you can imagine the future. There is no dearth of online accredited colleges with reliable accreditation history. Kalpan University, Ashford University, Liberty University, American International University and Arizona State University are some of the best online accredited universities in US. You can choose the online university that is close to your residence so that you can visit its physical office as and when needed.

London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) – Britain’s High Street retailers are suffering from the recession that has hit the United Kingdom and caused consumers to cut spending.

Flooring retailer Carpetright reported on Tuesday a 70 percent fall in the company’s full-year profit as Britons stick to their old carpets instead of buying new rugs. Carpetright is the country’s largest floor coverings retailer and is considered a bellwether of the British economy. The company plans to close at least 50 stores.

Lord Harris, the company’s chief executive, said he expects the tough retail conditions to last for another two years. Carpetright has been selling floor covers for the past 53 years.

On the same day, chocolate retailer Thorntons announced a restructuring that would result in the closure of at least 120 outlets and shedding of up to 1,000 jobs.

The tight finances are not limited to the two retailers. Other stores face similar declines in sales and revenues such that up to 10,000 jobs are projected to be lost as Britons further tighten their belts in response to austerity measures by the coalition government.

Last week, Habitat called in bankruptcy administrators and placed 750 jobs at risk. Electronics retailer Comet announced plans to shutter some stores, while department store chain TJ Hughes said it also plans to appoint an administrator, which would place in peril the 4,000 workers at the store’s 58 outlets in England and Wales.

Experts warned that the number of retailers that may downsize will likely increase this year as households face insolvency due to unemployment and higher prices.

The squeeze on the retail industry is a confirmation of the report by the Office for National Statistics that said Britain was on the road toward lower living standards since the 1970s as household disposable income dipped for the first time in almost 30 years.

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Jerusalem, Israel David E. Miller – Weeks before Israeli Prime Minster Binyamin Netanyahu declared he was putting an end to college-level studies by Palestinian prisoners, the inmates had already stopped making notations in textbooks on Islamic history and studying for final examinations in international relations.

But both the students and their teachers are angry and perplexed by the decisions.

About 300 Palestinians among the 5,640 security prisoners currently held in Israeli jails had been hitting the books, taking courses ranging from Basic Concepts in International Relations to Islam: An Introduction to the History of the Religion. In an unusual arrangement, they are taught by professors from Israel’s Open University while their tuition was covered by the Palestinian Authority.

Muhannad Anati, a Palestinian field researcher with the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, completed his bachelor’s degree in political science and international relations while serving a nine-year prison term in the 1990s. Netanyahu’s decision would be counterproductive, he said.

“It’s a stupid idea,” Anati told The Media Line. “As the saying goes: ‘a wise enemy is better than a foolish friend.’” He said an academic education teaches prisoners to think differently and change their behavior. “Prisoners have lots of time on their hands. If they don’t occupy themselves with studies, they will do other things that won’t necessarily be in Netanyahu’s benefit.”

Netanyahu thinks otherwise. In a bid to pressure Hamas, the Palestinian group holding Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit hostage, the prime minister declared last week he would tighten conditions of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli penitentiaries.

This week, some Hamas prisoners have been transferred to solitary confinement, visitation rights have been limited and meat was reportedly removed from the prison menu. But academic education is the issue Netanyahu chose to highlight.

“We will stop the practice whereby terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons for murdering innocents enroll in academic studies,” Netanyahu told a conference in Jerusalem last Thursday. “There will be no more masters-degree students for murder and PhD students for terrorism.”

Netanyahu has been under public pressure to strike a deal with Hamas, which kidnapped Shalit five years ago this week, that would entail exchanging the soldier for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas has continually refused to provide the International Red Cross access to Shalit or proof of his wellbeing.

In fact, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) already decided a few weeks ago to end the study program, although it didn’t offer a reason for the move.

“The decision to stop enrollment in academic studies was taken over the past few weeks by the IPS Commander and there is currently no new enrollment,” Lt. Col. Sivan Weizmann, an IPS spokeswoman, told The Media Line in a written statement.

Tal Shoval, a faculty member at the Open University who teaches Palestinian inmates, said cancelling the studies was wrongheaded.

“If the move is retaliation for the behavior of Shalit’s captors, it’s not only silly and cynical, it is also immoral,” Shoval told The Media Line.

Sufian Abu-Zaida, a former Palestinian minister of prisoners’ affairs and now director of a think-tank called Gaza for Political and Strategic Studies (GPSS), regretted not being able to study while he was in prison in Israel from 1981 to 1993. Instead, he and his fellow prisoners taught themselves Hebrew using self-study textbooks.

“I first started learning Hebrew to ‘know my enemy’, but it became much more than that,” Abu-Zaida told The Media Line. “It’s about widening your knowledge.”

Security prisoners began enrolling in university in 1994 after a number of them launched a hunger strike demanding the same right to study as criminal prisoners, who had enjoyed that right since 1978. The Open University doesn’t require students to have a high school matriculation certificate (bagrut), so Palestinian prisoners could study without prep courses.

Learning was considered such a privilege, Anati said, the prison administration would punish misbehaving inmates by barring them from study.

“There are certain courses that were banned altogether, like one called The Age of Revolutions, which discusses the history of the American and French revolutions.”

In 2002, the IPS singled out 30 courses that it tried to ban Palestinians from taking, but the move was struck down by Israel’s Supreme Court following an appeal by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).

The Palestinian Authority funds the academic tuition of Palestinians in Israeli jails, Anwar Shihab of the media department in the Palestinian Ministry of Detainees, told The Media Line. The tuition is part of a larger package that includes a monthly stipend and spending money for the prison canteen.

“We have just signed a new agreement with the [Palestinian] Al-Quds Open University, but the agreement has been frozen following the Israeli decision,” Shihab told The Media Line.

Not everyone thinks letting Palestinian prisoners get an academic degree is a good thing. Mordechai Kedar, a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Tel-Aviv’s Bar Ilan University, said the courses were being used as a tool to make Palestinian inmates happy and content rather than assert control over them by ordinary prison discipline.

“When I first heard they were allowed to get degrees I nearly fell off my chair,” Kedar told The Media Line. “How did we come to this? Do they allow academic studies in Guantanamo Bay or in any of the European prisons? … We always try to appease people in order to be loved, but it simply doesn’t work.”

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Jerusalem, Israel Arieh O’Sullivan – The United Nations is warning of a “serious food crisis” and aid workers say malnutrition levels have doubled as drought, rising food prices and armed conflict have struck the Horn of Africa all at once, leaving more than 10 million people at risk.

“‘Are people starving?’ Yes, people are increasingly hungry. Malnutrition levels are in some places in the Horn are double or more the emergency threshold, which is 15 percent of children malnourished,” Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for World Food Programme (WFP), told The Media Line. “There are malnutrition levels in parts of the Horn of up to 40 percent so that is an extremely worrying situation.”

The Horn of Africa encompasses war-torn Somalia and Sudan as well as Ethiopia, Eritrea and Kenya – areas that are impoverished, under developed and politically unstable even when environmental conditions are favorable. A UN map of the areas show the epicenter, defined as “emergency” zones, covering wide swathes in Somalia and Ethiopia. Designated “crisis” zones extend into northern Sudan.

At a press briefing in Geneva, Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), warned that one out of every three children in Somalia is suffering from malnutrition.

“We see an increase of more than 30 percent of people affected by this drought since the beginning of 2011,” Byrs said. “Over 10 million people are affected and 9 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.”

“It’s currently estimated that because of weak rains the drought situation has worsened and in certain places we haven’t seen any rain at all. We haven’t seen such a drought in 60 years. One can even go back to the 1950s to find a situation so dramatic. More than 10 million people need assistance, and there is a serious food crisis,” Byrs said.

Aid workers have said the situation is getting worse. Starving Somalis have flooded into refugee camps in Kenya. Save The Children’s Sonia Zambakides told the BBC that the situation is desperate.

“A mother arrived at one of our feeding centers saying she’d actually left her children behind in a village because she couldn’t watch them die. She’d walked away and left her six children in a house – two of them ended up dying and we managed to reach four others,” Zambakides was quoted as saying.

She added that children are arriving barefoot after six-week treks and were covered in sores and wounds and dehydrated. “These people are absolutely desperate. We don’t know how many people are not surviving,” she said.

Smerdon of the WFP explained that famine early-warning systems in June found that 2010-2011 would be the driest year in the region since 1950 -1951. He said the so-called “long rains” ended in June and in many areas they failed or were well below normal.

“That is the driver behind this crisis but of course, in Somalia, conflict makes things a lot harder and people already suffering from drought and displaced by conflict then suffer more and more,” he said.

Byrs stressed that more funding is needed, noting that the $39 million Djibouti appeal “is only 30 percent funded, which is almost nothing.” OCHA also warned that appeals for Somalia and Kenya, each about $525 million are barely 50 percent funded.

Some experts say the drought could be as severe as the one that caused mass starvation in Ethiopia in the early 1980s although the international community is better prepared to deal with it.

However, Smerdon said that while this was the driest year on record for over half a century, the humanitarian crisis was worse in 2009 when some 22 million people needed assistance. Smerdon said the high food prices were also a factor, particularly in northern Somalia.

“In normal years – and they haven’t had a normal year for many, many years – they import 60 percent of their food. Currently food prices are extremely high and that is making the number in need of humanitarian assistance increase.”

He said the WFP is trying to feed 1.2 million people in Mogadishu and central and northern Somalia. Since 2010 they haven’t been able to operate in the more volatile southern Somalia, which was under control of the Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents.

“We have large shortfalls of contributions for both Ethiopia and Somalia and in February we had to start cutting rations. In May we only had enough food left to feed 63 percent of the almost 1 million people we had planned to be feeding that month in Somalia,” he said.

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A college degree could make a big difference in your life-raise your earning potential, lead to a new career or job promotion, or open the door to knowledge you’ve always yearned to possess. But can you afford to put your life on hold in order to go back to the classroom? If the answer is no, this guide may be the key to achieving your educational goal. Here’s all the information you need to earn your online distance learning degree from a fully accredited college or online university in your own home and on your own time.

Discover which colleges and universities nationwide offer online degrees that require you to spend little or no time on capus. Match your interests to the wide range of programs available. Then go on to earn the same degree that traditional students earn.

The World Wide Web (also known as the Web) is a system for viewing and using multimedia documents on the Internet. Web documents are created in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and are interpreted by Web browsers (software that enables you to view HTML). In online distance learning, instructors can create Web sites to deliver lectures, assignments and tests as weel as message boards where students can share information and questions. Students can also search the Web for online databases to use on assignments.

At first glance, online distance learning resembles education through correspondence courses. This shouldn’t be surprising – after all they are, in essence, an outgrowth of correspondence courses and involve a delivery method that isn’t face-to-face involve a delivery method that isn’t face-to-face with the instructor of a course. However, upon closer examination, you’ll see that online courses are actually more like traditional classes or a hybrid of traditional and correspondence courses. For many courses, instructors post assignments (readings, lectures to watch, projects, etc.) via the Web or e-mail and students have a certain amount of time in which to work on or complete them outside of class. Upon completing an assignment, the student submit it – usually via e-mail. Then all of the students are expected to log-on to the web (to a particular chat room or discussion board) at a given time to discuss assignments – this gives the students direct interaction with each other and immediate feedback from the instructor. And many of the online distance learning programs adhere to the same academic schedule as their traditional counterparts – they are based on semester or quarter terms.

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Trollhattan, Sweden (AHN) – Saab is set to receive a pre-payment for an order of vehicles this week that will let it pay wages and some bills from suppliers but not resume production.

The beleaguered automaker’s owner, Swedish Automobile, which this month changed its name from Spyker Cars, said a Chinese firm has ordered 582 Saab vehicles for 13 million euros ($18.5 million).

Swedish Automobile did not identify the name of the Chinese firm. The short-term financing will allow the company to make payroll for about 1,500 workers before the end of the month as well as make a partial payment to some suppliers.

Discussions with other firms are continuing so production at the company’s Saab plant in Trollhattan, Sweden, may resume.

“We very much regret the current cash shortage which is causing undeserved hardship to all and we are working relentlessly to resolve the current situation,” Victor Muller, chief executive of Saab and Swedish Automobile, said in a statement on Monday.

Swedish Automobile, which acquired Saab from General Motors last year just as the U.S. carmaker was to discontinue the iconic brand under a government bailout plan, revealed last week that it had no funds to pay workers.

The announcement prompted IF Metall and Unionen to warn that it would give the automaker one week to pay wages before seeking court action.

Two weeks ago, the troubled automaker secured 245 million euros ($352 million) in long-term financing from Pang Da Automobile and Zhejiang Youngman.

The investments give the two Chinese firms control of 24 percent and 29.9 percent, respectively, of the company while assuring the continuation of Saab, which currently has 10,000 pending orders. However, the funds were not enough to resolve all of Swedish Automobile’s liquidity issues.

Pang Da, China´s largest publicly traded car distributor, agreed early this month to buy 30 million euros worth of Saab vehicles to help the company pay suppliers and restart operations at its Trollhattan plant.

The pre-payment ended the seven-week production halt. However, assembly lines stopped once more even as Swedish Automobile secured financing from Youngman, which makes trucks for German-based MAN and cars and spare parts for British-based Lotus.

Swedish Automobile is still working to sell Saab property in Sweden, a transaction that requires regulatory approval.

Russian banker Vladimir Antonov, a former Spyker chairman who acquired the automaker’s luxury brand unit in February, is said to have asked for Swedish authorities’ approval to buy Saab real estate in Trollhattan.

Muller said on Monday Antonov’s interest in investing in the company “remains unwavering.” The Swedish National Debt Office approved Antonov’s proposal eight weeks ago, and Muller said the Russian banker is awaiting clearance from “parties at interest.”

“We are pushing hard to obtain this vital clearance as soon as practically possible,” Muller added.

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Islamabad, Pakistan (IRIN) – Confirmation that a two-year-old has polio in Diamer District of Gilgit-Baltistan region, northern Pakistan, has raised fears that the disease could have spread to areas previously believed to be free of it, despite a national polio emergency plan launched by the government in January.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently confirmed the case: “This is the first polio case reported from Gilgit Baltistan after over 12 years. The last case was also reported from the same district, Diamer, in 1998,” WHO spokesperson Gul Afridi told IRIN.

Since Diamer District is outside the zones previously thought to be affected by the virus, WHO has immediately initiated a number of aggressive vaccination measures to help “stop the polio virus circulation in the area, limiting further spread to neighboring areas”.

The affected child, Afridi said, was a female from a family originally from Mohmand Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Pakistan-Afghan border, but who settled in Gilgit Baltistan four years ago. “The child reportedly missed the OPV [Oral Polio Vaccine] dose due to the refusal of the family,” he added.

In March, the Speaker of Gilgit Baltistan Assembly, Waris Baig, said: “The region was polio free for the past 13 years and, God willing, we will keep the region free of this disease in the future too.” Baig was inaugurating a three-day anti-polio drive targeting more than 200,000 children.

“Refusals” by parents to have their children vaccinated have been a frequently reported problem, notably in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa Province (KP), with campaigns by militants opposed to vaccination further complicating the situation.

Pakistan, one of four remaining polio endemic countries in the world, reported 32 cases in 2007, but that number rose to-4 in 2010, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) – the highest in any country in the world.

Cases over wide area

This year, 51 cases have already been reported. To add to the difficulties, according to GPEI, “five new positive environmental samples were reported from across the country, including from Karachi, further confirming widespread geographic transmission of wild poliovirus.”

While the disease had mainly been restricted to three groups of districts – Karachi city, a group of districts in Balochistan Province, and districts in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and KP – new evidence points to a spread across a wider area.

“Oral Polio Vaccine will be given to all the targeted children in Gilgit-Baltistan during the measles-Maternal Neonatal Tetanus campaign running 4-9 July. The target children of Gilgit Baltistan will have their fifth dose of OPV during the next National Immunization Days campaign on 18-20 July,” WHO’s Afridi said.

Medical experts say “irresponsible” media reports, such as one stating that a 16-day-old infant died in Punjab Province this month after receiving expired polio drops, have added to fears among parents and encouraged “refusals.”

“It does not seem likely the vaccine caused the death, but rumors about such incidents spread fast,” Hassan Ali, a general practitioner in Lahore, said.

Chaudhry Muhammad Aslam, director-general for health in Punjab, said in a statement: “The death of a baby due to the polio vaccination is out of [the] question. The polio vaccination is an oral treatment in the form of liquid which remains in the bowels while the other medicine is administered through the veins or stomach to be mixed in blood.”

kh/eo/cb

– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – Initial jobless claims remained above the 400,000 mark for the 11th consecutive week and moved up slightly by 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 429,000 for the week ending June 18.

It was another sign that the jobs sector has not begun a recovery from the recession that ended for the financial services sector of the economy in 2009.

The less volatile four-week moving average also remained above the 400,000 mark at 426,250, which was unchanged from the previous week’s revised average.

Economists say that one signal of a jobs sector recovery will come when first time claims for unemployment compensation insurance benefits drop below 400,000 and remain there for a prolonged period.

In addition, the total number of people claiming jobless benefits in all programs for the week ending June 4, the most recent for which data is available, increased by 137,220 from the week before to 7,538,448 claimants.

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Oakland, CA, United States (AHN) – A Georgia-based group opposed to Planned Parenthood has launched an anti-abortion advertising campaign targeting inner city African-Americans.

The Radiance Foundation recently paid for 60 billboards in East and West Oakland, California area. The billboards feature the slogan “Black & Beautiful” above the photo of a black baby with the message “too many aborted” incorporated into a website address.

Radiance Foundation is a registered non-profit. It is working with the California-based non-profit Issues 4 Life Foundation in this advertising campaign.

Both groups blame the non-profit health care provider Planned Parenthood for the high rate of abortions in the black community.

Although Planned Parenthood offers abortions at some of its clinics nationwide, most of its clinics do not offer abortions and abortions only account for 3 percent of the services the agency provides each year. The other 97 percent of its health care services include cancer screenings for both men and women and other health care services, including birth control.

Planned Parenthood serves provides health care services for low-income men and women primarily in inner city and rural areas.

Radiance Foundation’s co-founder, Ryan Bomberger, who created the TooManyAborted.com campaign, gave some of his reasons for targeting Planned Parenthood in a statement posted on the Radiance website.

In the statement, Bomberger said that the advertising campaign was to expose “Planned Parenthood’s racist and eugenics-based history and its unaltered course.”

Furthermore, Bomberger said, “Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain, is a failure. They haven’t budged the national unintended pregnancy rate since 1995 but are relentlessly dedicated to increasing their annual share of abortions.”

Although abortions only account for 3 percent of the services Planned Parenthood provides, its share of abortions has increased over the years because so many abortion clinics and abortion doctors have been targeted in violent attacks, which included the murders of several doctors over the years, and resulted in some doctors and clinics no longer offering abortions. Those conditions resulted in shrinking the number of clinics offering abortions, which increased Planned Parenthood’s share of abortions to 27 percent of the annual total.

In some areas, Planned Parenthood is the only source of health care services available to poor minorities. Therefore, many people in the black community have criticized the attack on Planned Parenthood, particularly in areas where the local Planned Parenthood clinic does not offer abortions.

Radiance Foundation previously put up the billboards in Atlanta, Chicago, Lost Angeles and New York.

 

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