Here’s how the Washington Post Company makes billions of dollars:

Veterans, single moms, and working parents are lured in by admissions counselors at Kaplan University Online (a for-profit college owned by the Post). Students use federal loans to sign up for classes that can be 14 times more expensive than a comparable community college class.

It’s basically a scam. Sixty-nine percent of students drop out. A third of students default on their loans, meaning taxpayers are stuck with the bill and the students have their credit destroyed — while Kaplan keeps all the money.

Shannon Croteau, for example, was 11 classes away from a degree from Kaplan when she learned she was out of financial aid, $30,000 in debt, and that the degree she was working toward would be worthless in her state of New Hampshire.

She was billed for loans she never signed up for, enrolled in classes she didn’t choose and, when she complained, was given the runaround by a succession of fake “loan officers.” “They lied and cheated,” Shannon told Change.org. “It has ruined me.”

Shannon has started a petition on Change.org, demanding that the Washington Post Company change its practices or shut down Kaplan Online. More than 10,000 of us have already joined her. Click here to add your name.

A Kaplan University training manual uncovered by Senator Tom Harkin told employees: “If you can help them uncover their true pain and fear…You dramatically increase your chances of enrolling this prospective student.” A separate presentation to employees declared that single African-American mothers raising two children were the most profitable, because they were the most likely to drop out.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office even found last year that Kaplan and other for-profit schools “encouraged fraud and engaged in deceptive and questionable marketing practices.”

Instead of investigating these practices, the Post has instead tried to cover it up, personally attacking Shannon — even publicly disclosing her personal financial information in an effort to discredit her.

Shannon isn’t backing down — she’s widened her campaign to target the entire Washington Post board, which includes billionaire Warren Buffett; Columbia University President Lee Bollinger; and former General Motors CEO G. Richard Wagoner.

With a surge of attention, we can pressure the Washington Post Company to get out of the business of preying on people’s dreams of better educations and better careers.

Please take action today to tell the Washington Post Company to stop the predatory practices or shut down Kaplan University:

http://www.change.org/petitions/view/tell_kaplan_the_washington_post_stop_cashing_in_on_low-income_students

Thanks for taking action,

Judith and the Change.org team

Link to article: Stop Cashing In On Low-Income Students

Facing criticism that the proposed VAT rise could damage high street spending, Chancellor George Osborne has announced plans to “sex up” the economy with a newly-designed one pound coin.

In a speech delivered to the House of Commons, he declared that the coin “symbolises the need for a sensual relationship with money, something we lost under the previous Labour government.” He went on to argue that consumers have “shrivelled in fear” during the recession, and that the new coin will promote “a renewed sense of pride.”

Talking this morning on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme, the Chancellor insisted that the new coin would play a key role in Britain’s economic recovery.

“When the budget comes into effect, even if you do wind up having less money in your pocket, at least now when you take that money out of your pocket and have a look at it, you will now get what we economists call ‘fiscal stimulus’. Yet another example of how this coalition government is leaving the the old, boring politics far behind.”

Responding to suggestions that the new coin was a “gimmick” Osborne replied:

“It is essential that we all do our part to stimulate the economy right where it needs it, as soon as possible, and then keep on stimulating it, again and again. This new coin is crucial to that. Remember this is going to be a double dip recession. Perhaps multiple dips. We must stimulate the economy hard and long. Pound, pound, pound. We must all just keep on pounding.”

Link to article: Osborne unveils new plan to regenerate sterling

The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany’s standing in the NATO. The memo is a recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA. It is classified as Confidential/No Foreign Nationals.

Download the report from from Wikileaks here (PDF file)

Link to article: Classified CIA report into shoring up Afghan war support in Western Europe

PETA’s Andrew Cook and Adria Hinkle were arrested late Wednesday night after police saw them dump bags containing seven dead puppies and 11 other dead animals in a grocery store’s dumpster. Their PETA-owned van, seized by police, contained another 13 animal bodies.

Ahoskie’s police chief told reporters: “We’ve been investigating animal cruelty and illegal disposal of dead animals within our city for the last four weeks” — roughly the same period of time in which our popular PetaKillsAnimals.com website and giant Times Square billboard have been making news.

Responding to our website, PETA has claimed that most of the animals it kills are “broken beings” and that: “We refer every healthy, cute, young animal we can to shelters.” But the dead animals included a female cat and — according to a local veterinarian — her two “very adoptable” kittens. “These were just kittens we were trying to find homes for,” he told PETA’s hometown Virginian-Pilot. “PETA said they would do that, but these cats never made it out of the county.”

The animal-control officer responsible for the county where Cook and Hinkle were arrested told the Associated Press that PETA had picked up the animals just a few hours earlier. He added that PETA’s employees “told him they were picking up the dogs to take them back to Norfolk where they would find them good homes.”

Instead, the animals wound up being treated in a decidedly unethical fashion. This morning the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald began distributing a grisly photograph showing a police detective in hazmat garb removing a puppy carcass from a garbage bag found in the now-infamous dumpster.

Last night WAVY-TV’s coverage in Norfolk included heartbreaking details from the manager of the supermarket whose dumpster became an impromptu pet cemetery. “They just slung the doors open and started throwing dogs … beautiful cats. I saw a dead beagle last week that was pregnant … last week it was 23 or 24 dogs … it’s happened to us nine times … they drove straight from there, straight here, and disposed of the dogs in 30 seconds.”

Authorities told WNCT-TV in Greenville, NC that they’ve discovered more than 70 dead animals in the last month that may be connected to PETA. WKTR-TV reported today that Cook and Hinkle are out on bond, “thanks to the President of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”

In a story that eerily resembles the current charges facing PETA’s employees, the Associated Press reported on April 8 that an additional 150 euthanized dogs were found in rural Virginia, apparently dumped in trash bags near a riverbank. The Scott County, Virginia Sheriff is investigating.

Link to article: PETA found guilty of animal cruelty

kerdomeletia
n. an excessive desire for material wealth

lucrifaction
n. the process of becoming wealthy

Link to article: In a Word

Even after posting a $1.6 billion first quarter profit, Westpac was a melancholy bank shortly before 4pm today.

“Oh so very over it today,” Westpac announced to the world via its Twitter account.

The sullen tweet spread like wildfire and tugged at heart strings across the social networking site.

“Maybe you can go dive in a swimming pool full of my money to make you feel better,” said one concerned Tweeter in response.

“You’re a bank. You made a $1.6 billion first-quarter profit. Cheer up,” said another.

“Same, if only I had made a billion this quarter,” was another response.

Others found comfort in the bank’s new-found humanity.

“Finally! A bank that feels existential pain,” said one Tweeter.

Concerned about the bank’s well-being, brisbanetimes.com.au contacted Westpac’s media relations department to make sure it was OK.

Within two minutes of making that phone call at 4.26pm, the Tweet was pulled from the site, but not before thousands saw it.

Link to article: Who said banks were heartless?

Rob points out a pricing quirk on an album he’s after, noting that the physical CD is considerably cheaper than the digital download.

A little freaked out, he writes:

Forget about Target… Amazon is even worse with their pricing (note: I LOVE Amazon and I’m sure this has to do with licensing but still…wtf!?!). I was looking to get the new OAR CD, “Rain or Shine.” I was going to buy the CD when I thought to myself, “Wait…I’ll just get the download instead,” since I’m impatient. Well the PHYSICAL CD is $13.99 but the digital (NOT PHYSICAL) album is $20.99! Less work for them and yet they charge more! Ahhh! Amazon…please don’t turn evil like everyone else!

With an untold amount of CDs and their digital counterparts for sale on the site, there are probably several instances of this quirk. Does anyone have an explanation for it?

Link to article: Downloadable Album Costs More Than CD On Amazon

Are you infuriated every time you open your cell phone bill? Livid when you buy a snack at the movies? These are nine of the rawest deals around.

Text messages – 6,500% markup

Text messages are short, quick and cheap to transmit. So why are they adding so much to your wireless bill?

The messages are such a tiny piece of data that they cost carriers only about one-third of a cent to deliver, according to computer scientist Srinivasan Keshav, who testified before U.S. senators on the issue last summer.

But on a pay-per-text plan, the 160-character messages typically cost 20 cents outgoing and 10 cents incoming. That’s a markup of as much as 6,500%. OMG!

“It’s pretty much pure profit,” Keshav says. “Carriers would argue they put that money toward investing in new technology.”

Even if customers sign up for an unlimited texting plan for, say, $10 a month, carriers are still cashing in considering that their overhead is basically $0. That’s a lot to pay for a few LOLs.

Movie theater popcorn – 900% markup

A medium bag of popcorn costs just 60 cents to make but retails for $6, a whopping 900% markup. That’s enough to make “Avatar” fans turn blue.

Richard McKenzie, an economics professor at University of California-Irvine, says theater owners mark up the snack so much because they don’t make a profit elsewhere.

McKenzie, author of the 2008 book “Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies: And Other Pricing Puzzles,” says that out of your $10 movie ticket, only a tiny percentage goes to the theater’s profits.

“Popcorn is what pays for a lot of stuff in the movie theater,” McKenzie says. “A lot of theater owners tell me, ‘I consider myself working in concessions, not movies.’”

‘Free’ credit reports that’ll cost you

There’s nothing free about forking over $179 a year for information at Freecreditreport.com.

Instead you can go to AnnualCreditReport.com, which is run by the Federal Trade Commission, and get a truly free report once a year from each of the credit agencies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

Freecreditreport.com’s catchy ditties can get stuck in your head for days — but subscribing to the service will haunt your credit card bill for a year. When you sign up, you’re asked for your credit card number. Then the site automatically enrolls you in its “Triple Advantage credit monitoring,” which pledges to continuously track your credit status for $14.99 per month.

A rep for Experian, which owns Freecreditreport.com, says: “We do realize there are a very small percentage of consumers who genuinely do not understand they have signed up for a credit monitoring service. We work to resolve issues with these consumers on a case by case basis.”

Technically, you have nine days to cancel the credit monitoring service before being charged, but many consumers have felt duped. The Better Business Bureau has received more than 11,000 complaints, and the site recently made its policy more prominent on its Web pages.

Name-brand painkillers – 60% markup

Is Advil’s sleek design worth 60% more than the same medicine in a plain package?

A 50-count bottle of 200 mg Advil tablets costs $8.49, versus just $5.29 for the exact same bottle of generic ibuprofen at a Duane Reade drug store in New York.

Brand names may give us more peace of mind, but the cheaper stuff works just as well, and in exactly the same way. It’s required to, by law.

The Food and Drug Administration mandates that generic drugs must be as safe and effective as brand names. Generics have to use the same active ingredients, however they may contain different inactive ingredients like coloring or flavor agents. For its part, the company says it “stand[s] firmly behind the value Advil brings to consumers.”

But at a time when many of us are already feeling the pinch financially, a fancy package just doesn’t seem worth the headache.

Wine at restaurants – 500% markup

Ordering wine in a restaurant can cost six times as much as drinking the same bottle at home. At the Olive Garden in Manhattan’s Times Square, a bottle of Sutter Home’s White Zinfandel goes for $24 — but it retails online for as little as $4 per bottle.

Restaurants mark up cheaper bottles by an average of three times the retail price, while the prices of higher end wines are typically doubled, says Ronn Wiegand, a master sommelier who runs the industry newsletter RestaurantWine.

For instance, a 1985 “La Grande Dame” Veuve Cliquot that goes for about $495 online is marked up 222% to $1,600 at the swank New York City restaurant Per Se. Olive Garden didn’t return calls for comment, but for its part Per Se says: “The total cost of the wine and service is calculated up front…the beverage team sets the highest standards to be sure that the quality of the wine and experience exceeds our guests’ expectations.”

Think that’s rough? Prices for wine sold by the glass are tripled or even quadrupled, Wiegand says, since restaurants have to account for the chance that they won’t sell the whole bottle before it spoils.

At prices like that, guess we’ll be skipping dessert.

College textbooks – $900 a year!

Each semester, college students shell out hundreds of dollars on textbooks they’ll use for only a few months. According to a House Committee on Education and the Workforce, the average estimated cost of books and supplies is approximately $900 per year.

And a separate study conducted by the Government Accountability Office found that textbook prices nearly tripled from 1986 to 2004 — a jump that’s twice the rate of annual inflation over the last two decades.

Public-interest groups say this is a rip-off. They blame greedy publishers and bookstores for driving up prices by issuing unnecessary new editions that render older texts worthless without adding much new information, as well as by “bundling” books with other materials like CD-ROMs.

Students have no choice but to buy the textbooks for their courses. But don’t worry, kids — at the end of the semester, you can probably sell that $250 calculus tome back to the bookstore for a buck or two.

Super gasoline – 15% markup

If you’re filling up your tank with super gasoline, chances are your wallet will soon be running on empty.

The special stuff costs up to 20-40 cents more per gallon than regular gasoline, even though it doesn’t do anything to improve the performance of most cars. With regular gas averaging about $2.72 a gallon, that translates to a 15% premium.

“It’s like feeding your dog more expensive food and expecting it to jump higher,” says Gabriel Shenhar, senior auto test engineer at Consumer Reports.

When Shenhar tests cars, he doesn’t put much stock in the manufacturer’s “recommendations for optimal performance” — instead, he uses the fuel grade that’s explicitly required. You can find the requirement printed on the inside flap of your car’s gas tank.

The bottom line: Read your owner’s manual. While some high-performance or luxury cars may need super gas, your average Celica doesn’t.

Hotel mini-bars – 1,300% markup

The chocolate bars and sodas in a hotel mini-bar can look alluring to tired and hungry travelers. But you’ll rack up a huge bill if you open up that fridge. Gummy Bears for $14, anyone?

Oyster Hotel Reviews (oyster.com) sends senior editor Will Begeny to hotels across the country, undercover, to get the skinny on hotel stays — and he’s found some egregious examples of price-gouging. Across the board, items are usually marked up by 3-4 times the retail price.

Among his findings in Manhattan: a $10 pint of water at the Mansfield Hotel; $150 “wood-smoke” candles at the Gramercy Park Hotel; and a $12 toothpaste kit at W New York’s The Tuscany.

“The minibar has turned into a sort of status symbol, especially for higher end hotels,” Begeny says. “They’ll include rarer products, like those candles, so people don’t realize how overpriced they really are.”

And yes, there really is a 1,300% markup on Gummy Bears at the luxury Manhattan hotel Omni Berkshire Place. None of these hotels returned requests for comment, but a rep for the American Hotel & Lodging Association said guests pay a premium for the mini-bar’s convenience.

“People have started to realize this is a scam, that they can walk to a store a block away and spend half as much,” Begeny says. “Of course, if hotels have to toss some of the older inventory because no one’s buying it, they could mark it up even more.”

Hotel in-room movies – 200% markup

In addition to the overpriced mini-bar, in-room movies are another quick way you can jack up the cost of your stay without even leaving the hotel.

That’s because there’s a high premium on the convenience: You could find yourself paying anywhere from $10-$15 based on how new and popular the movie is, says a rep for LodgeNet, a company that provides hotel programming.

By comparison, Blockbuster rents DVDs for about $5. LodgeNet notes that some of its offerings are still in theaters and not yet available for home viewing.

So instead of shelling out money to sit in bed and watch “The Hangover” for the tenth time, bring your own DVDs. Many hotels include DVD players in the rooms and some will even let you borrow a unit.

Link to article: America’s Biggest Rip-offs

Theresa had a contract with Helio/Virgin Mobile that ended this month, putting her in a position to negotiate. She writes that by comparison shopping and politely asking for the customer retention department, she and her girlfriend were able to knock $35 per month off the bill for their family plan. Here’s how she did it.

Just thought I’d share a success story about the power of being a smart, polite, well-informed consumer!

My girlfriend and I have a family cell phone plan with Helio (now owned by Virgin Mobile) and our two-year contract ended this January. We like our service, but we wanted to pay less. Our company was already offering a new phone or $20 off our bill per month, but I thought I could do better.

So we started shopping around. We found a comparable plan at metroPCS that would cost us about $30 less per month. I didn’t want to end my service, but I know it’s important to be well-educated about other offers.

I called Helio to see if they could give me a better deal. They offered me $25 off my bill each month instead of $20–not enough for me. They also offered free extra minutes, but I explained that we don’t use up the few minutes we do buy each month, so that wouldn’t help us. The customer service rep said they couldn’t offer me anything more and I ended the call.

I called back a little while later and asked to speak to customer retention. Apparently that’s the magic word! I was soon connected to a friendly, helpful customer service rep. I explained that we like our service, but found a better deal elsewhere, and we were thinking of cancelling. She quickly escalated their offer to $35 off our phone bill each month! We got to keep the service we like while paying much less, and we didn’t even have to commit to a new one-year contract. My only regret is that I didn’t try to hold out for even more.

Keys to my success, which I’ve learned from Consumerist
1. I was unfailingly polite but firm in what I wanted.
2. I had researched my options and was able to back up my threat to cancel with proof of a better offer.
3. I didn’t give up before reaching someone with the power to give me what I wanted.
4. I didn’t jump at the first offer I received.
5. I was nice to the service reps–after I got the final offer, I even asked to speak to the manager to praise the woman who had helped me.

Link to article: Save Serious Money On Your Cell Phone Bill By Making One Phone Call

Google is to pay up to $1,337 for each confirmed vulnerability in Chrome or Chromium - although it's first come, first served.

According to a post on the official Chromium blog – via PC World – the advertising giant is looking to pay $500 (£313) per confirmed vulnerability found in the Chromium codebase, as used in the Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux and also in the still-early Linux-based Chrome OS.

As a further incentive, any bug deemed “particularly severe or particularly clever” by the company’s panel of security experts will be boosted up to the rather amusing sum of $1,337 (a rather more prosaic £837). While the company hasn’t given an indication of exactly what criteria will be used for this judgement, the blog posting does refer to “High and Critical impact bugs” as being of particular interest.

This isn’t the first time an open-source project has had money thrown at it in order to increase the number of eyes checking for security holes: Google readily acknowledges that its latest venture is based on a Bug Bounty already in place at the Mozilla Foundation – creator of Firefox and Thunderbird – which also pays $500, along with a Mozilla T-shirt. Unlike Mozilla’s version, Google doesn’t plan to equitably split the proceeds in the event of multiple independent researchers submitting the same bug – operating instead on a first-come first-served basis.

Likewise, anyone who has worked on the particular section of code affected by the bug is disqualified from applying – in order to prevent bugs being planted for later ‘discovery.’

The act of paying for vulnerability reports often gets a mixed reception from the security community, with some seeing it as a way for companies to ‘hush’ security researchers and prevent public embarrassment while others see it as a way of encouraging ‘responsible disclosure’ of critical security flaws. As a way of pointing researchers toward the latter point of view, Google has stated that it has no problem with the details of security bugs being made public “once fixed,” although hints darkly that bugs disclosed publicly before being brought to the company’s attention are unlikely to see any cash.

The move comes as Google beefs up Chrome’s security, offering support for the Strict Transport Security HTTP header, the Origin header, the anti-clickjacking X-Frame-Options header, an in-built cross-site scripting filter, and support for the security enhanced postMessage API.

Link to article: Google to pay for Chrome bugs