Magnet

A Bucks County magnet maker already under investigation by federal authorities for possible money laundering and organized-crime connections was sued by shareholders in a class-action lawsuit yesterday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The lawsuit against YBM Magnex International Inc. alleged that the company's business as a maker and distributor of industrial magnets and bicycles was, in fact, "an elaborate scheme to defraud investors. " "It is now clear," the investors charged, "that YBM's only successful business is the laundering of criminal proceeds, evidently derived from illegal activities in the former Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations.

Question: I would like to reformat discs that came with programs I no longer need and use them to store data. However, when I try to use the Format command to prepare the discs for further use, I get a message that tells me that the disc cannot be unformatted and is unusable. Is there some way these can be used, or must they be thrown away? - Francis Fowler Wayne, Pa. Answer: Remember those warnings about not putting diskettes too close to the telephone? There is a reason for that: What an eraser is to paper, a magnet is to a computer disc.

Notice how the refrigerators you see in magazines are hidden behind paneling, as if they have something to be ashamed of. Or they have glass doors through which you see a large, perfect bunch of grapes and a head of lettuce. Never do you see the half-filled mustard jars, ketchup bottles, and yogurt containers full of fuzzy leftovers I have in my fridge. Or the refrigerators are blank slates - pristine, immaculate, untouched. Nothing like real people's refrigerators, which function as combination message center/bulletin board/scrapbook/photo album/art gallery.

Students, staff and alumni of Girard College are upset about a newly disclosed tentative plan to relocate one of Philadelphia's magnet schools to their campus, bringing an influx of day students to the private boarding school. Tomorrow, the Board of Directors of City Trusts is scheduled to discuss a memorandum of understanding with the Philadelphia School District to relocate George Washington Carver High School for Engineering and Science in a building on Girard's 43-acre campus in North Philadelphia.

Two days after a walkout at a Chester Upland magnet school to protest overcrowded classes, repeated scheduling changes, and teachers who the students said were not qualified, parents, administrators, students, and school board members vowed to work together to solve the struggling district's problems. The district laid off close to 40 percent of its teachers and dozens of support staff this year because of reductions in state and federal funding. At a school board meeting Thursday night, students and parents said that since the walkout, three new teachers had been hired or recalled from layoff and other problems were being discussed.

Girard Academic Music Program, the elite magnet school in South Philadelphia, draws students from all over the city. Getting accepted to extremely competitive GAMP, the acronym by which it is better known, is no easy task. Of the 1,000 students who applied to the 5th-through-12th grade school last year, 250 were invited to audition for 66 slots. Attending the school at 21st and Ritner Streets is simple, however, thanks to busing for grades 5 through 8. That will change next fall.

WHO SAID PRINT IS DEAD? Philly music mag Magnet , which went web-only in December 2008, just returned to print with an issue featuring Wilco on the cover. Editor Eric T. Miller , who founded the magazine in 1993, has partnered with Alex Mulcahy and Red Flag Media, which also publishes Decibel . Magnet is now a monthly, not a quarterly. The new issue also features Baltimore's Spank Rock , who got their start in Philly; Das Racist ; and Mac McCaughan of Superchunk and co-owner of Merge Records, home of Arcade Fire . Joyner's a rainmaker Syndicated morning-radio host Tom Joyner , heard here on 100.3 WRNB, will be at the Pennyslvania Convention Center this afternoon, giving out $45,000 in cash.

He's everywhere here, his smiling visage plastered onto billboards, set into statues, even sculpted into greenery in advance of the 2010 World Expo. No, not martial-arts star Jackie Chan, an Expo ambassador. It's Haibao, the fair's sky-blue mascot. It's impossible to travel even a few blocks without seeing him, his arm extended in a friendly thumbs-up. Haibao's designers meant for him to resemble the Chinese character for "people," the curl of his hair intended to represent the waves of the ocean.

As Caitlin Campbell was growing up at the Jersey Shore, the little worlds within the world around her - the flocks of egrets, the pods of migrating dolphins, the scores of tiny minnows she could scoop up in her hands - captured her attention longer than any video game or television program. So in the eighth grade when she learned about a program called MATES, a first-of-its-kind Ocean County high school where she could delve so deeply into marine and environmental sciences that some courses could be credited toward college, she was onboard.

The vote is in - Wallingford-Swarthmore School District will have a magnet kindergarten-through-second-grade center beginning in the 1989-90 school year. The school board voted on the new center as a solution to overcrowding in district elementary schools during its business meeting Monday. School board President James Proud said he was glad a decision had been reached. "Now that the vote has been taken, we need to move on and make a success of our decision," said Proud. The 5-4 vote for the new center ended a conflict that had divided the district since the fall.

AUGUSTA, Ga. - Sumeth Budhraja is a 40-year-old golf nut from Bangkok, a 3-handicap with a nice short game. In October, he won a local tournament at Siam Country Club in Pattaya, a beach resort about 70 miles south of the capital city. He shot 78 in the first flight. Barclays, the international finance monolith, sponsored the tournament. First prize: a trip to the Masters. Budhraja is a Sikh, bearded and pleasant, so proud of his heritage that he not only wore a blue turban on Thursday but also a T-shirt that explained the reasons why he wore it. (Final reason: It makes him look good.)

THERE WAS something about Catherine Leatherbury that drew people to her. Friends and neighbors would drop by her house in Overbrook just to be with her and soak up the warmth of her loving personality. Catherine devoted much of her life to caring for others, especially children, for whom she had a special place in her heart. Catherine LeVere-Leatherbury, a retired beautician, an active churchwoman who traveled to Europe and Africa on missionary excursions, an artist, a loving mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, died Dec. 3. She was 89 and was living in Dauphin, Pa., but had lived most of her life in Philadelphia.

The mood was tense, but the music was beautiful. Officials at GAMP - Girard Academic Music Program, the city's elite public magnet school for gifted musicians - have been notified that they will lose the yellow school buses that transport middle school students from points around Philadelphia to the school at 22d and Ritner Streets. So on Thursday night, dozens gathered in the GAMP auditorium for a concert and rally to voice their displeasure to the Philadelphia School District.

They look harmless enough at first glance, but the tiny magnets sold as toys are causing an increasing number of serious medical complications in children who swallow them, a pediatrics group says. In a survey of its members, a pediatrics specialty group said that out of one sample of 123 cases, 8 out of 10 required medical treatment, and nearly 30 percent required surgery. Saying that the magnets had no social purpose other than entertainment, the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition called for a ban on sales of the items, sometimes marketed as Buckyballs.

Girard Academic Music Program, the elite magnet school in South Philadelphia, draws students from all over the city. Getting accepted to extremely competitive GAMP, the acronym by which it is better known, is no easy task. Of the 1,000 students who applied to the 5th-through-12th grade school last year, 250 were invited to audition for 66 slots. Attending the school at 21st and Ritner Streets is simple, however, thanks to busing for grades 5 through 8. That will change next fall.

  The Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, which was searched by federal agents Thursday, pays tens of millions of dollars a year to a network of nonprofit and for-profit companies run by former executives of the state's largest online public school. The relationships between the Beaver County-based school and those businesses were a concern to former Gov. Ed Rendell's administration, which late in its tenure asked PA Cyber for better accounting of its payments to spin-off entities.

Pop Maroon 5 Overexposed (A&M/Octone ) It's hard to stay on top with music styles mutating so fast. Maroon 5 has apparently accomplished this via some sort of Faustian pact, trading in the soul that made its 2007 CD It Won't Be Soon Before Long such a joy for the machine-tooled dance-pop of last year's comeback single, "Moves Like Jagger. " Overexposed has a couple of similar electro-rousers, "One More Night" and "Payphone," that are catchier than a computer virus.

Before principal Christine Borelli-Connor arrived at James H. Webster Elementary School in Philadelphia's Kensington section in 2006, expectations for its students were not high. Borelli-Connor, 35, said that few of the school's fifth graders were being admitted to the city's magnet middle schools and that scores on standardized tests were low. The outlook for the school's 940 students has changed significantly since then. "We received, this week alone, 37 acceptance letters from magnet schools," she said.

A new U.S. Census study shows that Asians are the fastest growing racial group, with a 46 percent jump from 2000 to 2010. And, it shows New Jersey remains a top magnet for those of Asian descent. The Census study released today looked at the population identifying itself as Asian, either alone or in combination with one or more other races. The percent of those identifying themselves as being partially of Asian descent grew by 45.6 percent. Those who say they are solely of Asian descent grew by 43.3 percent.

BRUGES, Belgium - Many claim this picturesque canal-threaded city is the chocolate capital of a country obsessed with bonbons. And the thrill of wandering its ancient cobblestoned streets is to discover, bite by sweet bite, the many true artisans along with the larger companies. Famous names such as Godiva, Neuhaus, Galler, Guylian, and Leonidas are prominently situated along main shopping thoroughfares like Steenstraat. But with an astounding array of 52 chocolate shops scattered across the medieval center of the tourist-rich historic district, there are plenty of unique addresses to sample.