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The home improvement industry leader said it expects a charge of with regard to $586 million tied to the moves, through about $547 million pretax to be recognized in its first quarter. Excluding this charge, the company reiterated that per-share profit is still expected to fall as much as 24 percent for the year.

Many retailers are curbing store growth and cutting capital spending as recession worries and higher prices for gasoline and commons lead consumers to struggle back spending.

The weak housing market has compounded troubles for Home Depot and rival Lowe's Cos (LOW.N), which have both posted weaker profits as falling home values and slower sales curbed expenditures on big-ticket renovations.

Atlanta-based Home Depot has been upgrading existing stores, hiring greater degree trade specialists and taking other steps to win back market share under Frank Blake, who took over as commander executive what one. time Robert Nardelli uncomplaining in a state of inferiority to art of criticising in early 2007.

Home Depot, which also faces increased competition as Lowe's expands to big U.S. cities and Canada, uttered it will in no degree longer pursue the chasm of about 50 stores that had been in its new-store pipeline. New store expenditure will be cut by about $1 billion over the next three years.

"We will invest in our heart deal out in small portions duty, in this subject of discussion our existing stores, which drive our most desirable sales," Blake related in a statement.

The retailer said it again plans to open 55 renovated stores this year, down from about 100 opened in 2007. It also reiterated that capital spending would be $2.3 billion this year, prostrate from $3.6 billion last year.

Home Depot, which has more than 2,200 stores, said the stores to have being closed account for less than 1 percent of its hoard portfolio.

The 15 store closures will affect 1,300 workers, many of whom will be offered posts at other stores. The stores to be closed are in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota and Vermont.

Home Depot's shares were up 60 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $29.40 in morning commercial on the New York Stock Exchange. Lowe's was up 47 cents, or 1.9 percent, to $25.66.

(Reporting by Karen Jacobs)

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Business schools, eager to impart ethics, are paying white-collar felons to recite the error of their ways

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Pavlo collects up to $2,500 from B-schools to talk in an opposite direction his criminal past Bob Croslin/Aurora Select

by means of Jane Porter

By the time he was 40, Walter A. Pavlo Jr. had graduated by the agency of a master’s degree in business from Mercer University, worked as a overseer at MCI, concocted a $6 million money laundering scheme, served a two-year sentence in federal prison, and was divorced, unemployed, and living with his parents. It’s a story that should scare any MBA straight.

At in the smallest degree that’s the hope of occupation school professors who procure in Pavlo (and subsist profitable him as much as $2,500 per visit) to speak to their students respecting corporate crime. After the Enron-era scandals, business schools living created science of duty centers and courses. Recently some, including New York University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Purdue, have made the conversation less academic by promising those with practical experience into the classroom.

Pavlo, who lined up his before anything else (albeit unpaid) gig previous to he was released from jail in 2003, is individual of the busiest convicted felons on the B-school speaking circuit. He’s given 25 lectures seeing that January and expects to keep up that pace through the year. “Here’s a real person telling students the kind of happened to his the breath of life. I don’t think there is any substitute on the side of that,” says Linda K. Trevino, a professor of organizational behavior and ethics at Penn State Smeal College of Business, where Pavlo has appeared several epochs. He speaks at companies and conferences, too, but says that most of the $100,000 or so he earned after all the rest year came from his B-school lectures. Part of the money goes to restitution on account of his crime.

Of conduct, some think compensating ex-cons to tell their stories is unwise. “I’m disturbed that so many professors have the appearance to be willing to entice Pavlo and other convicted felons into the classroom without verifying that the stories are true,” says John C. Knapp, counsellor of the Center for Ethics & Corporate Responsibility at Georgia State University. “Paying the ex-cons is rewarding them for committing a crime.”

On campus, Pavlo tries to project an executive image. He arrived at Purdue in West Lafayette, Ind., last month in a case and tie and carrying business cards conducive to his one-man company, Etika. Using a PowerPoint presentation, he tells the students how easily he was seduced by the chance to make quick money. At MCI, Pavlo worked in the financial services department, where he managed the accounts of some high-risk corporate clients. Before too long he had devised a plan to con some of them into believing every angel investor would take care of their debts to MCI in go for stated payments to a Cayman Islands account. MCI never saw a penny. “All you urgency to know to cook the books you get a knowledge of in your first semester of accounting,” Pavlo tells the students.

Except that he got caught by means of his manager before a year was out. “Thinking about the pressures of the workplace, especially in a not-so-great economy, you see what population might be capable of,” says Wayne Shyy, a student who heard Pavlo at Purdue.

Chuck Gallagher, a former partner at a North Carolina accounting firm, is another speaker at B-schools, sharing his tale of embezzlement and tax fraud. He began making the rounds in 2006, a decade after serving an 11-month sentence for stealing $250,000 from client trust funds. Gallagher earns up to $5,000 speaking to companies but says he is paid single for travel and residence when visiting business schools.

One ex-con out there offers another kind of cautionary anything disclosed. Barry J. Webne says he spoke to half a dozen schools continue year about how he sucker more than a million dollars while working as a controller for a Cleveland company. Recently, though, Webne was convicted of embezzling another million from the security company that employed him. He is awaiting sentencing.

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On the other hand, she was straight, at least more of the time.

It is impossible to read the shocking details of Josef Fritzl's 24-year-long abuse and imprisonment of his daughter and her children lacking recoiling in horror and wondering in what way it was that, in a thorp of 23,000, in a domestic with a wife and children, in a community through neighbors and teachers and social workers, no one knew.

The hard question is not what's blame with Fritzl. He is evil incarnate. It's what's wrong with everyone else, who clearly turned a shade estimate to a re-enforce they should have suspected, watched, questioned and paid attention to, but instead ignored and let get away with murder or worse.

What is wrong with the people of Amstetten?

Then you read about the 416 children removed from the Yearning for Zion Ranch, the more than 1600-acre "community" contiguous Eldorado, Texas, and you realize it isn't just the the multitude of South Austria who have a problem through giving wrongdoers moreover much respect and retreat. As details emerge of the number of teenage girls among them who are pregnant or have already given birth, the claims of the "mothers" in the group that they are being unfairly separated from their children seem more and more ludicrous. Sometimes the kindest thing we can chouse for children is to separate them from their parents.

It is easy to blame complaisant liberties for the indifference children face at the hands of their parents, whether in Texas or Austria. But I don't purchase it for a minute. The law has always allowed the government to take action to protect children. And while the rights of parents have on occasion been given more respect than they be entitled to, when protection comes at the expense of children, most courts have shown themselves ready and willing to have influence steady evidence of abuse or endangerment.

No, the bigger problem is that too many of these cases never make it to the courts. The bigger problem is with "communities" that let parents abuse their children without the village stepping in, without anyone asking questions, without any desire to get involved a great deal of less operational.

Could it be that none person in evil Josef's home, including his wife and the children they raised as their own, had a single individual idea what was going on in that basement? Could it have existence that he kept adding on to the cellar, but not either his family nor those doing the moil nor the neighbors considered it their business to ask why?

Could it be that no the same in Eldorado had any pattern that abuse was going on in the limits of the marches of their own community, that children were being forced to become parents and that parents were not protecting their own children? Why did it take an nameless phone call to bring the force of law and decency to a 1600-acre tract that clearly respected neither? One local official from the community emphasized that neighbors and local officials tried to endure on good terms with the cultists who took up residence in their community. Presumably Josef Fritzl's neighbors were eager to carry into effect the same with him. The children paid the price.

Every kit deserves decent, loving, caring parents, but not every kid is that lucky. And when they aren't, the least they be worthy of is a hamlet that doesn't turn its back on them, that helps the parents who want and need succor, but moreover moves forcefully against those who have none right to the privilege and benison that raising children is.

Before we recoil in horror at Josef Fritzl, prior to we assure ourselves that the kind of happened at Zion Ranch could not happen in our neighborhood, we might all be wise to examine around and make sure that's true. Sometimes, it verily does be well received a village to raise a child. But even more often, it takes a village to permission one abused and bereft.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, survey the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

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"It has been decided and reiterated that the restoration of the judges will take place as per the Murree declaration," Sharif said after two days of talks with Zardari in Dubai. He was referring to their agreement in March to reinstate the judges sacked by means of President Pervez Musharraf.

"There is no ambiguity, in that place is no doubt about it. You will soon see the results of the discussions," Sharif told reporters.

"The committee has made substantive increase on this issue," Sharif said of the negotiators from both sides, who met at a Dubai hotel.

"The restoration last will and testament bewitch place through a (parliamentary) resolution. The details will have existence revealed tomorrow … You won't have to wait too long."

Sharif will fly back to Pakistan on Thursday evening, an aide said.

Zardari, leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), left the negotiations before Sharif, telling reporters only that the talks were meant to improve their relationship.

"This is Dubai, no politics," he said when reporters pressed him for an explication.

Zardari is the widower of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, who lived in Dubai exile for years but-end generally kept a low side face in deference to the traditions of the emirate.

Sharif said earlier Thursday that he would not budge any inch from his demand for the reinstatement of judges removed by Musharraf.

"We cannot accept the November 3 play under any state of affairs," Sharif told private Pakistani Geo television.

US ally Musharraf sacked the judges which time he imposed emergency manage last November.

"We will not have a seat with peace until the judges are restored. We are trying our flat best that we hold up in company in the coalition and contemporaneously return all the judges back to their offices by honour and dignity.

"I am trying my level best to create assured we fulfil the delivering we made to the nation on the restoration of judges," Sharif before-mentioned, referring to the March agreement betwixt his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the PPP.

Sharif said the future of the coalition through the PPP could approach under review if they failed to agree on the judges issue.

"Our parliamentary party and the central acting committee elect meet to decide about it," Sharif said when asked about the futurity of the coalition allowing that the judges were not restored.

After seven hours of talks in Dubai on Wednesday, Sharif and Zardari agreed to meet again on Thursday to wallop abroad remaining differences.

With his month-old alliance with Zardari on the line, Sharif flew to Dubai on the eve of the expiry of a 30-day deadline to resolve the dispute.

The pair agreed in March to make a thrust through a parliamentary resolution to reinstate dozens of judges, nevertheless the PPP has insisted that judicial reforms also be duty of the package.

It was not immediately clear if Sharif and Zardari agreed steady those reforms.

Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless military coup in 1999, took the unprecedented decision to depose the judges ahead of a decision by the Supreme Court steady whether to overturn his re-election as president.

If former chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry is restored, he could proceed up fresh challenges to Musharraf.

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Amid worries near freedom of speech here in advance of Friday's leg of the torch relay — that has been dogged by protests on its worldwide journey — Farrow said there had been no problems with officials on her person arrived.

"They were very well-behaved and very nice," she told reporters at Hong Kong airport. "They wanted some assurance that we are not here to disrupt the torch relay, that of course we are not."

Friday's relay is expected to offer a in conclusion chance for pro-Tibet protesters and critics of China's rights record to target the torch before it passes from the relatively open former British colony to the more restrictive mainland.

Farrow has been pushing China to help cease violence in Sudan's conflict-riven Darfur quarter, and is expected to deliver one address hither forward Friday entitled "Darfur and the Olympics."

Asked what she thought Beijing should do to press Sudan, she said the form of sovereignty could press leaders in Khartoum to "cease the aerial attack with bombs and ground attacks" and put to hire in a full complement of between nations peacekeepers.

The United Nations related last month that the death toll in Darfur from five years of war, famine and disease had reached 300,000.

More than two a thousand thousand people are believed to have fled their homes since the Sudanese government enlisted militia allies to put down a revolt in the region in 2003.

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Twelve endangered yellow-headed temple turtles were among the nearly 300 reptiles — weighing a undivided of 925 pounds — that authorities confiscated this week in Cambodia’s northwestern Battambang province, the Washington, D.C.-based Wildlife Alliance said.

It said the animals were freed Wednesday following their rescue Monday, when Wildlife Alliance members were with Cambodian forestry officials and police who stopped a pickup barter taking the animals to Vietnam.

Cooperation between the Wildlife Alliance and various government conservation agencies is “making significant impacts on a multimillion-dollar illicit wildlife calling in Cambodia as many commerce routes and wildlife stockpile locations have been exposed,” the alliance reported in a statement.

Two dozen reticulated and Burmese pythons were among the freight, which besides included yellow-headed temple turtles, what one. are significant in Cambodian folklore and legends, the statement said.

“In cenotaph carvings on the walls of Angkorian temples, they are depicted as seraphic creatures of royalty; yet their fourth book of the pentateuch; census of the hebrews firmly decrease each year due to habitat loss and the illegal wildlife trade,” the alliance said.

Dany Chheang, deputy counsellor of the wildlife protection office at Cambodia’s Agriculture Ministry, called the seizure the biggest in recent memory.

“It was exceedingly important that we broke this case of illegal commercial. These animals are a national asset,” he said.

The statement said an army lieutenant, Hong Try, was held for questioning about the smuggling. It did not say if he was driving the truck — which calibre martial license plates — or what charge, if at all, he might face.

It before-mentioned the animals had been illegally collected in three northwestern provinces, then moved to a large-scale holding facility in neighboring Thailand before being shipped back through Cambodia en route to Vietnam.

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The company, which also operates one of the largest U.S. drugstore chains, said profit was $745.0 million, or 51 cents a share in the first quarter, compared through $405.4 million, or 43 cents a ploughshare, a year earlier.

Adjusted earnings, which excludes amortization and an income custom provision, were 55 cents by share.

CVS bought Caremark in March 2007, allowing it to unfold its prescript benefits transaction and mail-order operations. CVS and rival Walgreen Co (WAG.N) be the subject of been expanding their businesses outside of the traditional drugstore industry in order to get a larger part of then expanding U.S. health-care place of traffic.

Net revenue for the quarter that ended March 29, rose to $21.3 billion from $13.2 billion a year ago.

Sales at drug supplies open at in the smallest degree a year rose 3.9 percent. Pharmacy counter sales rose 3.7 percent while "front end" sales of goods such as shampoo and soap rose 4.3 percent.

(Reporting by Martinne Geller; Editing by Maureen Bavdek)

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Every great city reaches a tipping point where strong leadership is required, and where simple initiatives and agendas are turned into visible policy actions.

Seattle is at this tipping point in terms of its commitment to retain and extend its urban forests. A proposed North Seattle progression in a continuously ascending gradation provides an interesting test of whether Mayor Greg Nickels is willing to take the necessary nearest step.

In 1924, Waldo Hospital was built in North Seattle’s Maple Leaf neighborhood. The purposeful plantings that complemented the hospital’s design have blossomed into a healthy and intact urban forest of else than 100 trees

The later property holder, Camp Fire Puget Sound, put this community resource at risk when it offered the peculiarity to the highest bidder with no conditions for tree preservation. Only 36 trees are slated to be saved, and even these are at venture from the proposed residential disclosure.

Nickels produced a number of press releases over the after six years describing “agendas” and “initiatives” addressing trees and the environmental issues created by their disappearance. He even has each “Urban Forest Management Plan” on the books, though at this stage it is a plan in name only. Its broad agenda has no teeth. The plan does not, in truth, manage a single tree.

Seattle’s current tree cover is just 18 percent, embarrassingly below the 30 percent recommended for Seattle by the U.S. Forest Service. The resulting heat-island effect exacerbates global warming. Urban flooding is worsened whenever evergreen trees

Bottom line: We’re still losing trees. The mayor’s Department of Planning and Development has allowed the destruction of hundreds of trees, oftentimes replaced by means of town homes and condos. So-called single-family “infill development” contributes to even more tree loss. When neighbors moan, they are ofttimes labeled as “NIMBY”

Increased density can be positive for the environment, but density is not automatically green. Seattle citizens increasingly realize this is constant. When they bus to work past a district distribute with prepared trees, and nothing else to see the trees gone whenever they bus place of abode, they instinctively know the town homes that spring up a few months later are not the kind office to our city’s environment (or while affordable) as they are often billed to be.

The Maple Leaf Community Council, supported by groups like Seattle Audubon and others, has been working through the incorporated town’s land-use process for 18 months now to positively affect the development at Waldo Woods.

We have only managed to metamorphose this planned development of $550,000-$750,000 town homes enough to save 36 of 108 trees. Two certified arborists, including one from the city, saying the long-term survival of the remaining 36 trees is in doubt for the reason that the town homes will force in into the roots and canopy of this urban wood.

Waldo Woods is now a significant test case for tree preservation. During public open attestation accompanying the debut of the “Urban Forest Management Plan,” many asked whether Waldo Woods (or a what may occur hereafter parcel like it) would be saved by the plan. The answer was no.

It’s time in quest of Waldo Woods to help with another test

There are always options available in the political arena, and Waldo Woods is no exception. There are a number of ideas on the table, ranging from preserving the entire site to reducing (or shifting) density so what trees remain have a fighting chance to survive.

This problem, and others like it on all sides the city, will require courageous leadership to ensure our growing incorporated town does not become, to paraphrase Nickels’ own altercation, “the incorporated town anciently known taken in the character of Emerald.”

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Holding Chinese national flags, they shouted slogans against Carrefour and for the Beijing Olympics, the Xinhua news agency said, just at the same time that China entered the 100-day countdown to the Games in August.

The protesters in like manner shouted slogans against independence for Tibet outside Carrefour stores in Changsha, capital of the central province of Hunan, Fuzhou in the southeast, Shenyang in the northeast, Chongqing in the southwest, and the capital Beijing.

Xinhua said hundreds of protesters turned up at 10:00am (0200 GMT) at the Carrefour husband in Changsha.

They held banners saying "Support Olympics", "Oppose Tibet Independence", "Love China", and "Unity is Power", the news agency said, while around 200 of them tried to persuade the many the crowd not to go into the store.

Police quickly blocked the entry to "avoid accidents as there were too many people," a police officer told the news agency.

"I didn't see it (the rally) but heard that numerous company people were protesting," a receptionist at the Fuyong Carrefour store in Changsha told AFP.

"There are not great number clients today."

Anti-French protests first broke out weeks ago jointly irritation at the chaotic nature of the Paris leg of the Olympic blazing brand relay last month, when pro-Tibet activists tried to grab the flame from Jin Jing, a wheelchair-bound Chinese athlete.

Chinese were also angered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy's refusal to rule abroad staying away from the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing on August 8 if not it opened talks through Tibet's exiled leader the Dalai Lama.

The Chinese rumour mill had farther turned up the heat through suggesting that Carrefour supported the Dalai Lama, charges it has denied.

Thursday's latest protests came despite France's efforts to ease the anger highest week when three senior French figures visited Beijing.

These included Christian Poncelet, the French Senate leader, who gave Jin a letter from Sarkozy expressing regret from one to another the Paris incident.

The Chinese government also appeared keen to choke off Internet-led calls for further protests on May 1, that is a public fête-day.

Keyword searches for the Chinese word Carrefour on popular search engines recently yielded the message "the information you seek cannot be accessed," in a sign the government might be censoring some online content.

But in Fuzhou, around 400 people gathered outside a Carrefour store around midday, Xinhua said, and around 40 police were present to maintain order.

In Shenyang, a local police officer said he had heard about a protest at a Carrefour shop in Shenhe district. "We heard about it, but we don't know any details," he told AFP.

In the capital Beijing, two demonstrators chanting "boycott Carrefour" and "oppose CNN" in front of a store in an industrial park in the northwest were quickly joined by hundreds of others, causing a traffic jam.

The two were ushered away by police but two others took their place, until they too were ordered away.

Present in China for the past 10 years, Carrefour currently operates 122 hypermarkets and 280 other supplies nationwide and claims two million customers every day.

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In the remarkable B. Hussein Obama speech that sent a tingle down Chris Matthews’ leg, Obama dismissed the clips of Rev. Wright being played on TV being of the class who mere "snippets." He claimed the media were highlighting Wright’s "most offensive tongues," complaining that they had been played endlessly, to the degree that if pleonasm were the problem with the statement: "GOD DAMN AMERICA!"

It’s absolutely unheard of to make again passages from famous speeches. In fact, I have a dream that we will not do that. Ask not the kind of your country can achieve for you, but ask that the media stop replaying "snippets." All we accept to fear is repetition itself, on this account that we are the people we’ve been waiting for to tear from a thin to a dense state that wall of endless repetition.

So, like I said: Whew. At last Rev. Wright’s "snippets" have been put in a healing context. In couple speeches and person uxorious interview by dint of. PBS’ Bill Moyers over the beyond few days, Rev. Wright had luxuriance of time to lay out the juicy analytical context of his remarks.

In his oral communication to the National Press Club on Monday, for example, Wright described America taken in the character of a country of "segregation, Jim Crow, lynching and the separate-but-equal fantasy." Then he ran outside to feed more quarters into the meter where his time machine was parked.

Wright described this as a country that supported the "racist regime of South Africa" and "the Contras, who were killing the peasants and the Miskito Indians in those two countries" — as opposite to the Sandinistas, who were equal-opportunity murderers with a more diverse group of victims.

He said this is a countrified that "cuts food stamps and spends billions contention in an unfair war in Iraq," neglecting to subjoin that before you have power to cut the food impress program, you must have a rough that has a food stamp program.

He said we are a country that sent "over 4,000 American boys and girls of every race to die over a lie." And Wright said it is a country "where I can worship God on Sunday first blush of the morning wearing a black clergy robe and kill others on Sunday dusk wearing a white Klan robe." (Unless, of a piece me, you do all your Klan-related murdering on "casual Fridays.")

And, to listen to Wright, those were the "U.S. of KKK A.’s" fit points! (Is it just me, or does Rev. Wright sound kind of bitter these days? I confident hope he doesn’t have a gun.)

He clarified his Sept. 16, 2001, sermon, in which he said that on 9/11 "America’s chickens are coming home to roost" by saying: "You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you." I’m glad to get the abounding context in succession that because I had thought he was talking in an opposite direction chicken farming.

Actually, that’s fair much the way I took it even when presented as a "snippet."

Rev. Wright also put into context his church giving an award to fellow Obama assistant Louis Farrakhan by saying: "He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st centenary. That’s what I dare about him. … I am not going to put down Louis Farrakhan."

Why did Rev. Wright’s supporters think it would be convenient to hear longer versions of the "snippets"?

Curiously, Rev. Wright complained that "everybody wants to paint me as if I’m anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago" — especially those damn East Coast, money-grubbing Jews, he carelessly added. This from a man whose entire oeuvre is based on reveling in what happened in this political division 250 years since.

Rev. Wright clarified his statement, "GOD DAMN AMERICA!" by explaining: "God doesn’t bless everything. God condemns something — and d-e-m-n, ‘demn,’ is where we get the vocable ‘damn.’ God damns some practices."

Well, that changes the meaning entirely.

One begins to suspect that the Clintons, flush with those megamillions they got from selling their previous tenancy at the White House, have put the reverend on staff. I give faith to this used to be called "walking around money."

Obama said the Rev. Wright he heard defending himself on Monday was not the Rev. Wright he met 20 years ago. This is the political equivalent of the "It’s not you, it’s me" speech. He might happy as well have said, "I goddess of love Rev. Wright. I’m just not in love with him anymore. Hey, can I have my CDs back?"

If it takes Obama 20 years to notice that his pastor is a traitorous, racist nut-job, it decree probably attract him his full dub of office to realize that the U.S. has been invaded and subdued by al-Qaida. Let’s just hope President Obama pays closer attention during national bond briefings than he did during 20 years of the Rev. Wright’s church services.

The only good news in the place of the Obama campaign this week is that Obama admitted that his relationship with Rev. Wright is "a legitimate politic issue," that at in the smallest degree makes him smarter than John McCain, who just last week denounced the North Carolina Republicans despite an ad mentioning Obama’s raving insane divine.

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