H-1B VISA PROGRAM GAO-11-505T Multifaceted Challenges Warrant Re-examination of Key Provisions Statement for the Record by Andrew Sherrill, Director Education, Workforce, and Income Security http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11505T.pdf

MEDICAID GAO-11-395 Improving Responsiveness of Federal Assistance to States during Economic Downturns Report to Congressional Committees http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11395.pdf

Russia permanently switched its clocks to summer time on March 27. The move means that Moscow will be permanently four hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The Soviet Union started switching to daylight saving time in 1981, with the aim of saving energy. The country had already switched all its time zones one hour ahead under Stalin in 1930, meaning that Russia will now be permanently two hours ahead of its original time zones. Last year President Dmitry Medvedev abolished an entire time zone in central Russia and moved time back in the country's easterly-most region of Kamchatka, so that it is now eight instead of nine hours ahead of Moscow. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110327/ts_afp/russiapoliticssocietytime_20110327213614
The virtue of a conservatively tailored pension plan is that contributions, appropriately invested, will be sufficient to pay the promised benefits in perpetuity. The vice arrives, firstly, from that modifier, "promised." Unlike that of a 401[k], a pensioner's annual stipend is guaranteed. If the fund is insufficient, the responsibility to make up the deficit falls solely on the employer. The government -- the taxpayer -- is the party at risk. Human nature being prone to exuberance, the problem of pension insufficiency (or irrational expectations that lead to insufficiency) has proved chronic. Consider an example from the private sector, Studebaker -- after World War II a struggling automaker. Unable to increase wages from the mid-1950s through the early 60s, Studebaker struck repeated deals with the United Auto Workers, according to which pension benefits were raised no fewer than four times. This was cynical in the extreme; both sides knew the money to pay those benefits wasn't there. Studebaker's collapse went a long way toward reforming practice in the private sector. Shocked by the sight of destitute workers, Congress set about regulating pensions, which it accomplished with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) in the early 1970s. Among its other requirements, ERISA mandated that corporations that offered pensions also had to fund them. The law was hardly perfect: In the 1990s and '00s, various steel, auto, and airline failures left pension funds with huge deficits, which federal insurance only partly covered. One could argue that ERISA actually hastened the demise of the private system -- that, in other words, once corporations faced the burden of supporting a pension honestly, they switched to 401(k)s, which impose no future commitment. ERISA did not address public pensions. In the 1960s and '70s, as the private system was undergoing reform, municipal and state workers were rapidly unionizing, leading to a wave of demands for richer benefits -- health care as well as pensions. Legislators across the U.S. quickly grasped that, by the time the benefits they were voting on came due, they would be pensioners themselves. The burden of funding thus fell to their successors, creating an insidious moral hazard. Pensions became a "free" political favor -- free to the officials in power, though not to future taxpayers. The pressure to ratchet up benefits was almost irresistible, since public unions hold considerable power to influence the elections of the very legislators who determine benefits. Read much more at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20110401/bs_bw/1115b4223078651500

The Toledo Museum of Art
The Baroque World of Fernando Botero in Galleries 28a-c through June 12
Frank Stella: Irregular Polygons in Canaday Gallery April 8-July 24

A regular polygon has all sides and interior angles the same. Regular polygons are always convex. Many polygons have names based on the number of sides. A 5-sided polygon is called a pentagon for example. There are some that wish to name every possible polygon, but there seems little point in doing so. For example a 42-sided polygon is called a "tetracontakaidigon". Beyond about 10 sides, most people call them an "n-gon". For example a 15-gon has 15 sides.
Triangle 3 sides
Quadrilateral 4 sides
Tetragon 4 sides
Pentagon 5 sides
Hexagon 6 sides
Heptagon 7 sides
Octagon 8 sides
Decagon 10 sides
Dodecagon 12 sides http://www.mathopenref.com/polygon.html

An irregular polygon is any polygon that is not a regular polygon. It can have sides of any length and each interior angle can be any measure. They can be convex or concave, but all concave polygons are irregular since the interior angles cannot all be the same. http://www.mathopenref.com/polygonirregular.html

Q: How much gold is stored at Fort Knox? And is it all the property of the American public?
A: The U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox holds 147.3 million ounces of gold, worth more than $200 billion, all owned by the federal government. The depository, part of the U.S. Mint, is a secret facility and no visitors are permitted. But it isn't the nation's largest depository of gold. About 216 million ounces, worth more than $300 billion, is stored at the Federal Reserve in New York. Tours are available there. This gold belongs to foreign governments, central banks, and international monetary organizations, with only a small portion belonging to the U.S. government. Jeannine Aversa, AP, Washington.

Q: How long did it take Don Larsen to pitch his perfect game in the 1956 World Series?
A: Just two hours, six minutes, and 97 pitches, or an average of only 3.6 pitches per batter. Various sources http://www.thecourier.com/Opinion/columns/2011/Apr/JU/ar_JU_040411.asp?d=040411,2011,Apr,04&c=c_13