asianculturalfestival.org

* Deal valued at at least $385 mln

* Part of Lehman’s $13.2 bln real estate portfolio

NEW YORK, July 27 (Reuters) – Lehman Brothers Holdings
(LEHMQ.PK) has made a preliminary deal to sell most of a
commercial real estate property in Rosslyn, Virginia, to a
Goldman Sachs (GS.N) unit, raising at least $385 million to
help pay back creditors, according to court documents.

Lehman, which filed for bankruptcy in September of 2008 at
the height of the financial crisis, has been selling its assets
as it raises money to pay back creditors.

The property is part of Lehman’s real estate holdings,
sales of which are expected to bring in $13.2 billion by the
end of 2014, according to other Lehman court filings.

Lehman has already made $3 billion from real estate sales
since filing for bankruptcy, according to court filings.

The company is also expected to sell or do an initial
public offering for its stake in an apartment building owner
Archstone, sources have previously told Lehman.

Lehman, which has asked the court to approve the privately
arranged Rosslyn sale, said in a court filing late on Tuesday
the deal values the Rosslyn portfolio, which includes 3 million
square feet of commercial real estate at 10 properties, at
$1.257 billion.

Lehman plans to sell its 78.5 percent limited partnership
interest in the Rosslyn site.

Real estate investment firm Monday Properties and
affiliates of Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners II – which
is partly owned by Lehman Brothers Holdings – each own 10.8
stakes in the company that are not included in the Lehman
deal.
(Additional reporting by Nick Brown)
(Reporting by Caroline Humer, editing by Dave Zimmerman)

Originally Published On: www.reuters.com – Original Article Here

LONDON (Reuters) – A new use for carbon dating will aid the production of energy from wood and waste, said a bio-energy group on Thursday after British regulatory approval of the new test.

Carbon dating is commonly used to estimate the age of ancient artifacts, exploiting the fact that a particular type of carbon disappears, or decays, at a fixed rate, so that the amount left behind clocks how much time has passed.

A recently adapted technique, developed by the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands, takes monthly samples of the carbon-14 in the smokestack of power plants.

It tallies that with the energy produced to estimate how much carbon dioxide in the flue gas came from burning ancient fossil fuels and how much from greener, younger fuels such as wood, crop waste and other so-called biomass.

The practice of co-firing biomass with coal is increasing as power plants try to pare carbon costs and earn green energy incentives.

“(This) is enabling easy and accurate differentiation between CO2 emissions created from fossil and biogenic, renewable fuels,” said the UK’s National Center for Biorenewable Energy, Fuels and Materials (NNFCC), a lobby group.

The technology is already used in Belgium and the Netherlands, the NNFCC said.

It may be a simpler way of disentangling green from coal-fired power than the alternative, which is to measure the amount of biomass and coal fuel fed into a furnace.

“Independent reports concluded that the 14C technique is based on mature and well understood technology,” said Britain’s energy watchdog Ofgem last Friday, explaining its approval.

“The reports also concluded that results from this technique would be at least as accurate as the existing sampling methods used.”

From 2013 all fossil fuel power plants in western Europe will have to pay for every tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, under the European Union’s emissions trading scheme.

By contrast, energy producers in Britain are rewarded for burning biomass. Burning wood and plant waste is viewed as contributing less to climate change because it only returns to the atmosphere the same CO2 that the plants incorporated while they were growing.

(Reporting by Gerard Wynn; editing by Jason Neely)

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Climate scientists have turned to the United States and Australian navies to deploy robotic measuring devices in the Indian Ocean where pirates have made the area too dangerous for researchers.

About a quarter of the Indian Ocean is now off limits to climate scientists trying to complete a global network of deep ocean devices that gather data crucial to climate change studies and weather forecasts.

“We can’t send anybody in that area. Research voyages have been canceled and I know there’s a report of at least one ship that hired an armed escort,” said Ann Thresher, an oceanographer with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

“That’s pretty extreme when you’re talking about climate research,” she told Reuters from Hobart.

Thresher said the northwest Indian Ocean played a crucial role in weather patterns in Australia and South Asia, where droughts or floods can cause major disruption to global food prices and trigger large insurance losses.

In particular, data from the Indian Ocean such as salinity and water temperatures and weather observations from ships were crucial for long-range forecasts. It was crucial to fill the gap, otherwise climate scientists were flying blind, she said.

“Without those observations, we can’t monitor that as accurately. Which means the predictions that scientists make that tell farmers how much rain they are going to get or if there is going to be flooding in Queensland is not as accurate,” she said.

The robotic measuring devices, called Argos, are about two meters (six feet) long and drift between the ocean surface to a depth of about 2,000 meters, before resurfacing to send data via satellite.

About 3,000 Argos have been deployed globally and about 30 countries contribute to the multi-million dollar program that deploys the $19,000 floats.

The Argos measure salinity and temperature and the network monitors how the world’s oceans, which soak up large amounts of heat, are responding to a warming world. Oceans shift heat around the globe and drive the world’s weather.

The program is heavily reliant on commercial shipping and chartered vessels to deploy Argos globally but the threat from Somali pirates meant navies were the only option this time.

The devices will be deployed over the next few months in parts of the northwest Indian Ocean.

(Reporting by David Fogarty; Editing by Sugita Katyal)

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Armchair astronauts can take their dreams to the dining table on Thursday — NASA is hosting a virtual dinner with the shuttle Atlantis crew.

The dinner will include brie cheese, sausage and crackers to start the meal, grilled chicken or barbecue brisket, Southwestern corn and baked beans for the main course and apple pie for dessert.

Orbital dining enthusiasts will have to do their own cooking but NASA will provide the recipes on its website — go.nasa.gov/AllAmericanMeal.

The astronauts’ version is thermostabilized, or dehydrated, to prevent spoilage and packed in pouches to be mixed with water or warmed in a small oven.

Atlantis astronaut Sandy Magnus, who developed a skill for space cuisine during her 4.5-month stay on the International Space Station, provided the impetus for what has been dubbed the “All American Meal.”

“Originally this was planned as a July 4th meal,” said Vickie Kloeris, manager of NASA’s Space Food Systems Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “Now, it’s been renamed the ‘All-American Meal.’”

Atlantis’ launch was rescheduled for July 8 after delays to the previous mission, but NASA decided to go ahead with the special meal.

“We’re offering an opportunity for the public to see some of what the crew is going to be eating on orbit,” Kloeris said.

The Atlantis astronauts are halfway through a planned 13-day mission to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. The flight is the 135th and last for NASA’s 30-year-old space shuttle program. The crew is due back at the Kennedy Space Center on July 21.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Patricia Reaney)

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Former chief astronaut Steve Lindsey announced his retirement on Thursday, the latest in a series of departures from the ranks of NASA’s elite corps spurred by the end of the space shuttle program.

For the U.S. space agency’s newest astronaut recruits, however, the departure of veteran fliers means less competition for a dwindling number of assignments on the International Space Station.

Instead of about 30 astronauts flying on shuttle missions each year, only about four will be needed to fill U.S.-allotted posts on the station now that the U.S. space shuttle fleet is being retired.

The 30-year shuttle program will end when the crew of NASA’s final space shuttle, Atlantis, returns to Earth for a planned landing on July 21.

The space station, an orbital research outpost, is a $100 billion project of 16 nations that was finished this year after more than a decade of construction.

“We knew as we were going through the interview process that there was no suggestion any of us would fly on the shuttle. We knew we were being hired to work on the space station, to do long-duration spaceflight,” said Kjell Lindgren, 38, one of nine U.S. members of NASA’s newest class of astronauts.

STUDYING RUSSIAN AND ROBOTICS

Instead of learning shuttle systems, Lindgren and his colleagues are taking Russian and robotics classes. If and when he gets a flight assignment, Lindgren, a 38-year-old former NASA flight surgeon, can look forward to at least 2-1/2 years of training spanning five countries.

He doesn’t mind flying on Russian rockets, the astronauts’ only ride to the station until fledgling U.S. commercial carriers are ready to launch. NASA is investing a total of $269 million in four prospective space taxis, including designs from Boeing, Space Exploration Technologies and Sierra Nevada Corp.

“If those folks back in the ’60s could see where we’re at now, I think they’d be very surprised that our main competitors would be major partners in an endeavor like the space station,” Lindgren said. “I think that’s really a natural progression and an important one,” he added.

The astronaut corps, which had about 140 members a decade ago, probably will be down to about 50 or 55 by year’s end, said chief astronaut Peggy Whitson. She hopes to make small additions to the corps over the next several years to bring staffing up to as many as 60 astronauts.

In addition to six-month postings on the station, astronauts will be assigned a variety of technical jobs, including working with the aspiring commercial space transportation companies.

They’ll find more than a few familiar faces. Former NASA astronauts Ken Bowersox and Garrett Reisman now work for Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, which is owned by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk. And Lindsey, 50, a veteran of four shuttle flights, has a new job at Sierra Nevada.

“I think it’s a testament to American ingenuity and drive that we have a private sector that can even take on a task like this, to transport humans to space and back,” said Lindgren.

“I can only hope we get to a point where we can have the success that we’ve seen in civil aviation, but I don’t think spaceflight will ever become easy,” he said.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Eric Beech)

Nitin Nohria celebrated his first anniversary as dean of Harvard Business School on July 1, making it a fitting time to reflect on the considerable changes underway at the venerable b-school. From major innovations to its curriculum and shifts both subtle and major within the class of 2013 profile, to huge surprises—some might say upsets—in M.B.A. admissions, the past 12 months have been anything but business as usual.

While curriculum tweaks and overhauls have taken place almost across the board at elite M.B.A. programs, the innovations ushered in by Nohria are particularly progressive. Given Harvard’s position as a leader among the business school community, I’ll highlight some of the key changes that the school has made, which stand to further alter the business school landscape in the future as other schools follow Harvard’s lead.

In perhaps the most significant change, HBS has opted to reduce its dependence on the case study method of teaching, which has been in place since the 1920s. The changes will also impact every single M.B.A. candidate as well as the majority of the school’s faculty.

"We think now is the right time to act to take the Harvard Business School M.B.A. Program to the next level," Nohria said of the curriculum changes in an alumni bulletin this spring. "The case method will always be a central part of what we do, but we’re now at a point in history when we can do some really interesting things in the field. Both methodologies—case and field—are absolute complements," he added.

[See U.S. News's rankings of Best Business Schools.]

In order to prepare self-aware leaders for a global economy, this fall all first-year students will take a yearlong Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development (FIELD) course offering small-group learning experiences that are experiential, immersive, and field-based.

According to Youngme Moon, senior associate dean and chair of the M.B.A. Program, the FIELD course "ups the ante" in three key content areas: leadership, globalization, and integration based on experiential learning. Self-reflection, hands-on learning, and teamwork are the process skills that unify the three content areas and define the FIELD experience.

[See other schools that are reinventing their M.B.A. programs.]

The curriculum isn’t the only thing that will look different at Harvard this September. The school made headlines last month when it revealed that women will constitute 39 percent of the class of 2013—its highest percentage ever—and that there will be substantially fewer candidates from the fields of finance and consulting.

[See which business schools are trying to shatter the glass ceiling.]

The Wall Street Journal cites preliminary figures from Harvard admissions, which notes that about 25 percent of the 919 students in the class of 2013 are from finance industries—including private equity, banking and venture capital—compared with 32 percent last year. Meanwhile, students with manufacturing backgrounds make up 14 percent of the class of 2013, up from 9 percent in the previous year.

Deirdre Leopold, Harvard’s managing director of M.B.A. admissions and financial aid, explains in the WSJ that the school doesn’t "run with quotas or targets." Rather, Harvard seeks to compose a diverse class that can contribute to the overall learning.

The talk in admissions circles this year has been that the type of applicants that were typically accepted weren’t admitted and those presumed to be "sure things" faced unexpected disappointment. However, as an admissions consultant, in my view what we’re seeing are surface "shifts" that are helping Harvard refocus more clearly on its founding principles. This is not a program where a certain profile or pedigree is guaranteed admission. It’s a place that seeks out incredibly ambitious, world-changing leaders of all stripes.

The Atlanta school board has suspended a search for its next superintendent as the city tries to figure out what to do amidst one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history.

School board officials decided Thursday to give interim chief Erroll Davis Jr. a one-year term to clean up a school system that suffered from widespread cheating on state standardized tests, according to a report released Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal. More than 75 percent of the 56 schools investigated cheated on a 2009 state standardized test. More than 80 teachers confessed to changing students’ answers and other misconduct.

Davis outlined his initial plan for cleaning up the school district at a special school board meeting Thursday, which was open to parents. Key action points include a plan to investigate all schools whose test scores increased by a larger-than-usual percentage. These "trigger points" haven’t been set, but would set off an "automatic" investigation, Davis said. The board also plans to assess the culture at schools in the district, after the report said a "culture of fear and conspiracy of silence" kept many teachers from speaking up about cheating.

"I plan to take the time required to painstakingly go over the state report so that we address each and every issue it identifies," Davis said in a statement. At the meeting, he said anyone involved in the scandal has "forfeited their right to remain in [Atlanta's] system."

The district says test security restrictions implemented in 2010 will be continued and expanded next year and in the future; additional adults will monitor schools and classrooms during tests, answer sheets will be sealed in envelopes, and the amount of time teachers have access to the tests will be reduced. Additionally, teachers will undergo extra training focusing on testing protocols before proctoring exams.

Students affected by the scandal will also undergo academic reviews—thousands of struggling students may receive extra tutoring and attend after-school programs, according to Davis.

Davis formerly served as chancellor of the University of Georgia system and has also served on the board of the University of Wisconsin system and Carnegie Mellon University.

See how your school stacks up in our rankings of Best High Schools. Have something of interest to share? Send your news to us at highschoolnotes@usnews.com.

When President Obama promised 100,000 new science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) teachers over the next 10 years during his State of the Union address in January, it may have seemed like an unrealistic goal. However, officials at several nonprofits, businesses, and universities saw it as a call to action.

Dozens of organizations, led by the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation of New York, have banded together to form 100kin10, a coalition that hopes to increase the number of qualified teachers, retain top performing teachers, and build a movement to improve STEM education in the U.S., which has fallen to the middle of the pack globally.

"We thought if we don’t take action to respond to that call, then no one will," says Talia Milgrom-Elcott, program officer for urban education at the Carnegie Corporation. "In a few years we’d find ourselves in the same situation we’re in now."

100kin10 will focus on three challenges of improving STEM education: increasing the supply of qualified teachers, keeping teachers in the classroom with incentive programs for top performers, and getting the public to realize that STEM education is an important issue.

[Learn about underqualified STEM teachers.]

The coalition will provide money and support to organizations that already promote STEM teacher training, like the National Math and Science Initiative, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and Teach for America. By putting them into an open-source environment, the organizations can share ideas and information.

Milgrom-Elcott says it’s an approach that worked for cystic fibrosis (CF) research and treatment practices. During the mid 1990s, CF patients at different clinics had wildly different life expectancies and lung capacities. As doctors began to share the best practices for treating patients, the life expectancy gap narrowed, and CF survival rates improved. 100kin10 hopes to mimic this transparency and openness.

"Why should everyone be running their own experiments?" she asks. "We’re designing a high level, continuous review of the projects inside this effort to see what’s working."

Chitra Krishnan, director of knowledge and learning at Ashoka, a network of "social entrepreneurs" who attempt to solve some of the world’s problems through business, says the openness of the project should improve STEM education nationwide.

[Learn about corporations that are promoting STEM education.]

Changemakers, an affiliate of Ashoka, is running a STEM education contest in conjunction with 100kin10. Companies such as Google and ExxonMobil are sponsoring the contest, which runs through early August. The parameters are purposefully broad—entries are public, and anyone who has an idea of how to innovate STEM learning methods or improve teaching can enter.

"We’ve connected with people who learn from each other; we’re creating a community of practice," she says. "There are people who have done things differently, successfully." The biggest challenge, she says, is finding a way to scale up the ideas of successful teachers. "What is the barrier that doesn’t allow [scaling] to happen? What are the solutions that work?"

Carnegie’s Milgrom-Elcott says partners in the project are ready to start helping now. Carnegie is not creating a new infrastructure or trying to train teachers on its own—it’s merely connecting organizations that are already working on the problem. "We’re mobilizing these organizations," she says. "They’re ramping up. Some of them can hit the ground running."

She says many more organizations have shown interest in joining 100kin10, and the movement, which currently has 28 partners, hopes to grow to about 100 by the end of the summer. Milgrom-Elcott says interested organizations will have to meet criteria designed by the University of Chicago‘s Urban Education Institute before they are allowed to join.

"We want to ensure there’s a community of learning," she says. "There will be an initial bar for entry."

See how your school stacks up in our rankings of Best High Schools. Have something of interest to share? Send your news to us at highschoolnotes@usnews.com.

Jamie Noonan, a political science and philosophy major and rising junior at Villanova University, wanted the flexibility to be able to excel in any workplace, but felt that with dual majors rooted in the liberal arts, she lacked the requisite skills to do so. To remedy that, she turned to the school’s Summer Business Institute, which immerses students in the intricacies of accounting, management, and marketing, among other topics, during six hour days over the course of 10 weeks. 

Noonan’s parents footed the $9,000 bill for the program, but she is confident their investment will yield a significant return. "Any job that you do, you’re going to be working for a company that is trying to maximize profits," she says. "Just knowing how that system works, you can be a much better employee." 

Villanova’s program is celebrating its 15th anniversary this summer, and some programs have been in place much longer, such as the University of Virginia‘s McIntire Business Institute, which was the first of its kind when it launched in 1982. However, career and life coach Jim Weinstein notes that numerous summer business programs, including ones hosted at the University of California—Berkeley Haas School of Business and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, have been popping up in recent years to capitalize on a market of qualified college students and graduates who are having difficulty finding work, but don’t want to fully commit to graduate school. 

[Follow these 5 tips to use the summer before college wisely.] 

The programs typically range from 4 to 10 weeks; most are offered only to students hailing from nonbusiness backgrounds and are available to recent college graduates or students enrolled at the host college or any other school. The bulk of what is taught is on par with material covered in introductory business courses at the undergraduate level.

"It’s down in the trenches," says Brenda Stover, director of professional development and business institutes at the Villanova School of Business. "Students are not focusing on anything else but this business curriculum during the 10 weeks that they’re here. They don’t have jobs. They’re not taking other courses." 

And while the programs completely immerse students in business, students say instructors realize most students have limited business backgrounds and instruct accordingly. Though she’s a history major at the University of Pennsylvania, rising junior Jesse Reich, who completed New York University‘s Stern Foundations: Business Essentials for Non-Business Students program this month, claims that the business professors understood how to frame the difficult concepts in ways that she could understand. 

"Nonbusiness majors oftentimes truly need to start from the very beginning," she says. "The teachers had the perfect combination of teaching to those who had never taken a business class before while also covering an enormous amount of material." 

[Learn about master's in management programs for liberal arts majors.] 

The programs cost between $4,000 and $10,000, a seemingly heavy price to pay for a new line on a résumé. School officials maintain that because many of the programs are attached to highly regarded schools, employers have been impressed by that new résumé entry. Jack Lindgren, director of the UVA’s 4½ week McIntire Business Institute, says the program has had success in placing graduates in business positions, in part, because of the school’s reputation. 

As early as mid-July, U.S.News & World Report will begin a first-ever effort to collect in depth data from all online bachelor’s and five master’s degree level education programs in the United States. To that end, U.S. News Editor Brian Kelly reached out to college presidents to inform them about the new and exciting online education project and to urge them to help facilitate a response from their campuses. Below is the full text of the letter:

Dear ________,

I’d like to ask for your help. Later this year, U.S.News & World Report will be publishing an expanded directory of online education programs with more detailed information including rankings and other searchable data. With the rapid growth of online programs in higher education, prospective students are asking for more, and more useful, data to make informed choices. We are creating a site that will bring the same quality of information to online consumers, and the same opportunity for schools to connect with those students, that we’ve brought to brick and mortar institutions over the last three decades. I’d like to make sure that we’re able to represent your school with the most accurate, updated information.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sending surveys about the makeup, requirements, and quality of your online education programs. Each discipline-specific survey will be sent to the appropriate departments at private, public, and for-profit regionally accredited higher education institutions in the United States.

The questions are based on academic and industry literature reviews, as well as consultation with numerous heads of online degree programs in multiple disciplines. The questions will be categorized among six distinct program-specific surveys: the master’s levels in business, computer information technology, education, engineering, and nursing, as well as an online bachelor’s degree program survey. These program and degree levels were chosen because they are among the highest enrollments in online education. We’ll be expanding the list of programs in coming versions. In addition, this will be the first initiative to collect program level data from all online degree programs in these disciplines. With your help, the rankings will become much more sophisticated in each succeeding year.

The data we collect will be part of a redesigned online education section at usnews.com. As with our Best Colleges and Best Graduate Schools sites, we see this as an essential starting point for students looking to find the best online programs for them. We’ll be including profiles of online degree programs, advanced online program searches, and online program rankings or evaluative lists.

Our education rankings have attracted many millions of users over the years because people trust and value the information we provide. At the same time, many schools have benefited from the exposure our coverage has given them. With your help, we will maintain that same credibility and value for the online education community.

For more information about the data surveys, online program rankings or new online education site, please check our Morse Code blog for updates or contact OnlineEd-Official@usnews.com. We look forward to continued collaboration and cooperation with you in the future.

Sincerely,

Brian Kelly