National / International News

Wycombe goalkeeper Jordan Archer is attacked by a Gillingham supporter towards the end of his side's 1-0 win at Priestfield.

Pants-wearing Parisian women are finally fashionably legal: the law restricting women to dresses and skirts has been lifted. While the principle is exciting, Parisian women have been wearing pants for decades.

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Pants-wearing Parisian women are finally fashionably legal: the law restricting women to dresses and skirts has been lifted. While the principle is exciting, Parisian women have been wearing pants for decades.

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Being a public school teacher has never been the road to wealth. But there’s a public charter school in New York City that’s paying its teachers six figures.

Kristen VanOllefen was teaching music in New Jersey when she read about the school on a friend's Facebook post.

"And, I said, who gets paid $125,000?” VanOllefen remembered. 

After a few years, and a grueling hiring process, VanOllefen can now say she does.

The school is called The Equity Project Charter School, or TEP for short. Most of its students are low-income and from the Washington Heights neighborhood. Since it opened four years ago, it’s been at the forefront of an experiment to see if paying top teachers top-dollar leads to a better education.

Zeke Vanderhoek, TEP’s founder and principal, says he would have paid teachers even more, but “candidly, it was the maximum amount that would keep our budget in the black.”

Vanderhoek wants to prove that if you've got great teachers, little else matters, and, you can afford them, even on a public school budget. "Teachers are the critical lever in student achievement, in student growth. If we’re serious about this, let’s pay them what they’re worth,” Vanderhoek says. 

But that strategy has its own costs. For now, TEP is a just a group of red trailers. The kids walk outside between periods.

There are no small classes, and there aren't laptops on every desk. Vanderhoek hopes the school moves to a better building some day. But, to him, what matters is having top teachers in the classroom, so that’s where the money goes. 

In Kristen VanOllefen’s music class, there are also lessons in vocabulary and math. And Van Ollefen's job doesn't stop at the classroom. Last year, she also administered state achievement tests. This year, she has a different additional job. And that’s part of the secret to TEP's high pay: Most teachers are doing the work of, well, two teachers.

TEP saves money by not hiring the kind of support staff other schools have. There are no substitutes. That makes for long, demanding days. Casey Ash, for instance, is both the 8th grade math teacher and the assistant principal. “I certainly don’t think it’s the right fit for everybody,” Ash says. 

Judith LeFevre learned that lesson the hard way. She spent most of her teaching career in Arizona, where she was highly regarded, but the pay was lousy. “After 30 years, I was still making just over $40,000,” she said.

So she applied to TEP. During the year-long interview process at TEP, she was observed in the classroom several times. Many applicants also submit videos of their teaching, or samples of student work showing major improvements.

LeFevre was finally hired to teach special education, and serve as the dean of discipline. Expectations were high. She soon found that her Arizona skills weren't as effective with students in New York.

After her first year, she wasn’t asked back.

“I think the big unanswered question is 'gee, what would’ve happened the second year, now that I had those skills, and had made that improvement?'” she says. 

But for TEP founder Zeke Vanderhoek, there’s no time to wait. Teachers must bring their A-game on day one, or else.

“We give our master teachers one year to prove themselves,” Vanderhoek says. 

Teachers are judged on classroom management and student test scores. They're also evaluated by other teachers. Vanderhoek says about a quarter of them don't make it to the second year.

Michelle Fine studies urban education at the City University of New York. She says she’s “a little worried about sustainability of the model. [TEP] might, in fact, be getting highly qualified educators, but either they’re burning out, or it’s not working very well, or they’re dissatisfied," she said.

Teachers at TEP acknowledge the stress, but many insisted it’s worth it. And they commend the quality of their colleagues.

Fine says she doesn't expect the school to become a national model, even though it may work well for this one community in Washington Heights.

And even that isn't clear yet. TEP hasn’t even been open four years. And while student test scores are creeping up, it’s too early to declare it a success. 

This year, TEP’s first class of eighth graders will head off to high school. In a few years, we’ll know better if their highly paid teachers will have a lasting effect on their lives.

Ever since the Great Recession started more than five years ago, Americans have paid closer attention to how we bring in a paycheck every two weeks. But the American labor market started changing long before the financial crisis. Today we're starting a new series on Marketplace called "Disappearing Jobs" to examine the changing job market.

For the last 40 years I've been a motion picture projectionist. A film projectionist.

A friend of mine was managing a sleazy old theater called the Vagabond Theater and said "our projectionist just quit. Go in there and run it."

I didn't care about getting paid, I just wanted to go in there and do it. So for $3.50 an hour, I taught myself. I found a stable union job and I was told by my older peers that I could probably keep this job forever. I would never have to retire because it didn't require physical labor, it just required your know-how on the equipment.

Everybody in America went to the movies every week, so we were important. Also, "projectionist" was listed as the highest-paid industrial job in California. I like to remind people of that now that they're trying to pay us nothing.

Digital movies drive change
My favorite quote is still the studio executive who said "we have a robust system and we can pay any idiot $5 an hour to run it."

So why do away with the film projectors? The reason is everyone loves new technology, and now they have it.

I still intend to be the last projectionist alive. But it will be a real accident if I get more jobs.

In an experiment, Eurasian jays were able to ascertain their mates internal states — a trait that is usually thought of as uniquely human.

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US Open champion Andy Murray says tennis must learn from the Lance Armstrong doping scandal and invest in tighter controls.

Dyson launches an all-in-one tap which offers both water and 430mph (692 km/hr) air jets to dry hands, but its high cost may deter some buyers.

For thousands of Hindu pilgrims, the spiritual experience of the Maha Kumbh Mela festival can turn into a nightmare as they get lost amidst the throng of millions of devotees.

The Bolshoi Ballet is deeply beloved in Russia. But a series of recent scandals — capped by a nasty acid attack on the company's artistic director in mid-January — has sent shock waves through artistic circles.

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Standard & Poor's says it is to be sued by the US government over the credit ratings agency's assessment of mortgage bonds before the financial crisis.

The US urges Egypt to investigate cases of police abuse after a man was stripped and beaten by uniformed officers during protests.

For a week, 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes held a 5-year-old boy hostage in an underground bunker. Authorities killed the gunman.

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Israelis and Palestinians often say that the other side uses school textbooks that ignore or demonize the other side. A three-year study examined the claims.

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Many of them have cut out smoking, and rates of heart attack and emphysema have declined. But baby boomers are burdened with diabetes, hypertension and many other chronic conditions. Researchers say too little exercise and a rise in obesity threaten baby boomers' golden years.

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Two foreigners, possibly Germans, are kidnapped in northern Colombia, left-wing ELN rebels allege in a statement on their website.

The Pakistani city where Osama Bin Laden was found and killed is building an amusement park in a bid to boost tourism, officials say.

As Safer Internet Day throws the spotlight on some of the potential dangers of the web, pupils from Tarporley High School report on the issues surrounding young people's use of social networking websites like Twitter.

By now you know that when you shop online, you’re being tracked. The data you hand over with every click helps e-tailers learn more about you. They use that information to do everything from recommend products you might like to tweaking prices.  Now the same thing is happening offline, too.

New "smart" security cameras can help stores do a whole lot more than stop shoplifters, says Brian Kiraly. His company, Infusion, just developed one of these cameras with Microsoft.

"What that does is a partial facial recognition. It takes cheeks, chin, eyes and basically gets gender and age," he said, demonstrating the camera at the National Retail Federation trade show in New York.

The camera records passersby, and a software program sorts them in real time, dividing them up by age category -- child, adult or senior -- and gender.

Retailers can use this information to decide what to stock, where to put it and where and how to advertise. Brick and mortar stores are hungry for all of the information they can get on their customers. The kind of information online retailers know. So many are trading security cameras in for smart cameras.

"We can actually look at your movements, such as how you go from a merchandise table in the front to a merchandise table in the back,"says Roseanne McCauley, vice president of Experian Footfall, a new business started by the big consumer credit report agencies. It supplies all kinds of foot traffic data to merchants. "Whether you go up the escalator or not. We can also do dwell time: How long did you stay in a specific area."

McCauley says big retailers like Lacoste, Crabtree and Evelyn and Adidas have used that information to improve sales and, on the whole, have seen customers spend up to 5 percent more in their stores -- huge in the slim profit margin retail business. That number could grow as retailers find new ways to step up shopper surveillance.

"The next wave of technology is mobile," explains McCauley. Experian is teaming up with cell phone companies to take customer tracking to the next level. When you walk into a participating store, your cell phone company will tell Experian who you are, Experian will tap into the vast pool of data it has on you -- things like age and credit history. Then, without telling stores who you are, Experian will hand some of that information over to stores.

"There are all sorts of privacy issues around cell phone data, so no one is able to take a cell phone number and bring it to a person," says McCauley. "But what we can do is profile groups of people and give people a demographic code."

Experian assigns shoppers one of 60 consumer profiles, such as Dream Weaver, people with six figure salaries and a penchant for tech gadgets, or Struggling City Center, people on tight budgets, who tend to like watching talk shows.

Which consumer profile do you fit? Check out Experian's breakdowns here.

Experian and Verizon are both piloting programs that could tell retailers even more.

"Through wireless technology, you can get the pattern of the person when they left the house, drove to the mall and the stores they went to," says McCauley.

We can expect to see retailers doing more and more of this, says Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School For Communication and author of "The Daily You: How The New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity And Your Worth."

"We are moving into a world where companies are going to judge us by our data," says Turow. "We will have people being put into what I call reputation silos, which would tell the store, 'This person is more likely to buy the cheap stuff and here’s the person who buys the premium stuff.'"

If you’re suddenly feeling the urge to wear a ski mask everywhere and ditch your phone,  you’re having exactly the reaction retailers are worried about, says digital marketing consultant Will Riegel.

"Every single day, people in data, are concerned about the ‘creep’ factor," he says.

Riegel says one way to target shoppers without freaking them out is to use loyalty programs, where customers essentially volunteer to have their purchases tracked in exchange for relevant discounts. The next stage would be to embed tracking chips in, say, your Target card.

"When you walk into a store, an in-store advertisement will adjust to say, 'Hey, you haven’t picked up Tide recently. It’s been over a month. Your clothes getting dirty? Check out aisle number 7,'" explains Riegel.

Of course, that’s at least a few years away.

For now, cameras are just starting to be able to separate boys from girls, which is proving challenging enough. Infusion's camera thought I was a man until I took my hair out of a bun.

The chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, Sir Winfried Bischoff, says its employees' bonuses this year will be the "lowest undoubtedly of any bank".