“It has been a privilege to work with Telesat on this high performance satellite that will provide advanced television services in Canada,” said John Celli, President of Space Systems/Loral. “I’d like to congratulate the teams from ILS, Telesat, and SS/L who worked hard to make this launch a success.”

Nimiq 6 is a state-of-the-art spacecraft that is fully contracted to Telesat’s customer, Bell TV. It will provide a broad range of Direct-to-Home (DTH) services to Bell TV’s subscriber base including high-definition and other specialty video offerings across Canada.?It has 32 Ku-band transponders and will be positioned at 91.1 degrees West longitude.

“We are very pleased with Space Systems/Loral’s strong execution on the Nimiq 6 satellite,” said Dan Goldberg, President and Chief Executive Officer of Telesat. “Once in service, Nimiq 6 will provide Bell TV with improved performance to better serve its customer base across Canada.”?

Nimiq 6 is based on the highly reliable Space Systems/Loral 1300 platform which provides the flexibility to support a broad range of applications and technology advances. The spacecraft is designed to deliver service for 15 years or more. With this launch, there are 68 SS/L-built satellites currently on orbit.

Another satellite for Telesat, Anik G1, is under construction at SS/L’s?Palo Alto, California manufacturing facility.?It is scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of this year.

About Telesat
Telesat is a leading global fixed satellite services operator providing reliable and secure satellite-delivered communications solutions worldwide to broadcast, telecom, corporate and government customers. Headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, with offices and facilities around the world, the company’s state-of-the-art fleet consists of 13 satellites and the Canadian Ka-band payload on ViaSat-1, plus one satellite under construction. Telesat also manages the operations of additional satellites for third parties. Privately held, Telesat’s principal shareholders are Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board and Loral Space & Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: LORL).

About Space Systems/Loral
Space Systems/Loral, a subsidiary of Loral Space & Communications (NASDAQ: LORL), has a long history of delivering reliable satellites and spacecraft systems for commercial and government customers around the world. As the world’s leading provider of commercial satellites, the company works closely with satellite operators to provide spacecraft for a broad range of services including television and radio distribution, digital audio radio, broadband Internet, and mobile communications. Billions of people around the world depend on SS/L satellites every day. For more information, visit www.ssloral.com.

About Loral Space & Communications
Loral Space & Communications is a satellite communications company. Through its Space Systems/Loral subsidiary, the company is a world-class leader in the design and manufacture of satellites and satellite systems for commercial and government applications including direct-to-home television, broadband communications, wireless telephony, weather monitoring, and air traffic management. Loral also owns 64 percent of Telesat, one of the world’s largest providers of satellite services. For more information, visit Loral’s Web site at www.loral.com.?LORL-G

This document contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words “believes,” “expects,” “plans,” “may,” “will,” “would,” “could,” “should,” “anticipates,” “estimates,” “project,” “intend” or “outlook” or other variations of these words or other similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements and information. In addition, Loral Space & Communications Inc., Space Systems/Loral, Inc. or their representatives have made or may make forward-looking statements, orally or in writing, which may be included in, but are not limited to, various filings made from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and press releases or oral statements made with the approval of an authorized executive officer of the company. Actual results may differ materially from anticipated results as a result of certain risks and uncertainties which are described as “Risk Factors” and in the “Commitments and Contingencies” note to the financial statements in Loral’s 2011 annual report on Form 10-K filed February 29, 2012. The reader is specifically referred to this document, as well as the company’s other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to (1) risks associated with financial factors, including swings in the global financial markets, financial covenants in SS/L’s credit agreement, increases in interest rates and access to capital; (2) risks associated with satellite manufacturing, including competition, cyclicality of SS/L’s end-user markets, contractual risks, creditworthiness of customers, performance of suppliers and management of our factory and personnel; (3) regulatory risks, such as the effect of U.S. export control and economic sanction laws; and (4) other risks, including litigation. The foregoing list of important factors is not exclusive. Furthermore, Loral and SS/L operate in an industry sector where securities values may be volatile and may be influenced by economic and other factors beyond the control of Loral and SS/L.

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When the weather turns hot and the kids are out of school some days you are left unsure how to entertain them. One tried and true method around our house is Treasures in the Sand. It is a version of a game I played as a child.? It is very simple to play, you take a small child-sized pool, fill it up with sand and then put any sort of small treasures in it.

My kids love the archeologist version of it the best.? I bury pieces of pottery and other such toy items (sometimes dinosaurs) and then they hunt for them. They spend time cataloging each item,discussing it, and sorts of things. Since we live in Georgia and it gets pretty hot, they say it?s like being in Egypt.? Use your imagination and just go wild with it, although a word of caution; I put a screen and tarp over the sand to keep any creepy crawly things out and it allows us to use the sand all summer long.? When all of nieces and nephews are here we throw pennies in and they race to see who can find the most.

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The device went off a few minutes before 8 a.m. in the Adriatic port town of Brindisi in the country’s south just as students milled outside, chatting and getting ready for class at the mainly all-girls Morvillo-Falcone vocational institute.

The school ? which prepares students for jobs in fashion and social services ? is named in honor of prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, a judge who died with her husband in a 1992 highway bombing in Sicily by the Cosa Nostra.

Mesagne Mayor Franco Scoditti identified the victim as Melissa Bassi, 16, from the town. Brindisi civil protection agency official Fabiano Amati said she died of her wounds after being taken to hospital.

One of the shaken students who witnessed the attack told reporters that one injured girl, her hair charred, screamed the name “Melissa, Melissa” when she realized her friend was gravely injured.

Amati said at least seven other students were hospitalized, but some news reports put the figure at 10. Perrino health director Graziella Di Bella said most of them suffered burns and shrapnel-like wounds, and several had undergone surgery.

“The explosion sent out fragments and flames … pieces of iron,” Di Bella told Sky TG24 TV in an interview. She said a team of four psychologists were working with the students.

“One of the (injured) girls asked me: ‘What do we have to do with this?” Di Bella said, adding the students were feeling a sense of “disorientation, terror” as well as anger.

Dr. Paola Ciannamea, a Perrino Hospital physician who helped treat the injured, told reporters that one of them was a teenage girl who was in a grave but stable condition after surgery.

Anti-Mafia prosecutor Cataldo Motta, based in the nearby port of Lecce, told reporters that there had been no claims of responsibility. He added that the bombing didn’t appear to be the work of organized crime, since fuel and not dynamite, the Mafia’s traditional choice of explosive, was used. Motta said the “international terrorism” angle was unlikely, but stressed that investigators had not ruled out any hypothesis.

Italy has been marking the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Sicilian highway that killed the prosecutor and his wife, but it was unclear if there was an organized crime link to Saturday’s explosion.

Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri, in charge of domestic security, said she was “struck” by the fact that the school was named after the slain hero and his wife, but she cautioned that investigators at that point “have no elements” to blame the school attack on organized crime.

“It’s not the usual (method) for the Mafia,” she told Sky in a phone interview. The Sicilian-based Cosa Nostra usually targets specific figures, such as judges, prosecutors, turncoats or rival mobsters in attacks, and not civilian targets such as schools.

The school bombing is an attack of “unprecedented cruelty,” the minister said.

“The big problem now is to get intelligence” on the attack, said Cancellieri. She added that she had spoken by phone with Italian Premier Mario Monti, who is in the United States for the G-8 summit.

Monti’s office said that the premier ordered flags flown at half-mast for the next three days. He pledged that the government would work to crack down on crime and to “favor the maximum cohesion of all political and social forces to prevent the return in our country of subversive attacks,” a statement said.

National police chief Antonio Manganelli told Sky TG24 in a phone interview that Italy’s “best investigators” had been dispatched to Brindisi to determine who was behind the attacks. National anti-Mafia prosecutor Piero Grasso arrived and surveyed the blast scene without making comments to reporters.

Manganelli said there were “shadows” of doubt clouding the hypothesis that the school blast was caused by organized crime because the Sicilian-based Mafia usually targets precise individuals. Still, he said, neither the hypotheses of organized crime nor that of subversives have been ruled out.

Outside the school, textbooks and notebooks, their pages fluttering in the breeze, and a backpack littered the street near where the bomb exploded. At the sound of the blast, students inside the school ran outside to see what had happened.

Officials initially said the bomb was in a trash bin outside the school, but later the Italian news agency ANSA, reporting from Brindisi, said the device had been placed on a low wall ringing the building and near the bin. The wall was damaged and charred from the blast. Sky TG24 said the device included three containers of fuel. It was unclear if the blast was triggered by a remote control or by a timer.

Public high schools in Italy hold classes on Saturday mornings.

The bombing follows a spate of attacks against Italian officials and government or public buildings by a group of anarchists, including the shooting and wounding of an official from a nuclear engineering firm, which is part of a state-controlled company. An anti-nuclear anarchist group that previously had targeted Italy’s tax collection agency claimed responsibility for the shooting.

Authorities have said the Italian anarchists have worked in the post in close contact with Greece-based anarchists. Brindisi is a major point of departure for ferries between Italy and Greece, but there was no immediate indication from investigators of any Greek link.

The attacks and threats lodged against authorities prompted the government earlier in the week to assign bodyguards to 550 individuals, and deploy 16,000 law enforcement officers nationwide.

Minister Cancellieri indicated that after the school blast authorities’ sense of possible targets had been tested.

“Anything now could be a ‘sensitive’ target,” she said, adding that the “economic crisis doesn’t help.” Austerity measures, spending cuts and new and higher taxes, all part of Monti’s plan to save Italy from succumbing to the debt crisis roiling Greece, have angered many citizens, and social tensions have ratcheted up.

Brindisi is a lively port town in Puglia, the region in the southeastern “heel” of the Italian boot-shaped peninsula. An organized crime syndicate known as the Sacred United Crown has been traditionally active there, but crackdowns have been widely considered by authorities to have lessened the organization’s power.

The brother of the slain anti-Mafia prosecutor , Alfredo Morvillo, a prosecutor in Sicily, told reporters in Tuscany at a ceremony to honor his slain sister and brother-in-law that the “Mafia angle is, at the moment, the most credible,” ANSA quoted him as saying

“I say that because of the place and the timing,” ANSA reported, in reference to both the name of the school and the many memorial services for the 1992 attack that were being held on Saturday.

Brindisi’s mayor, Mimmo Consales, noted that an anti-Mafia procession was scheduled for the town in the evening, but added that many such memorial ceremonies were scheduled to be held on Saturday throughout Italy.

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? Fellowship
? Courage
? Self or Academic Improvement
? Effort
? Community Service
? Leadership

At the regular Board of Education meeting on May 17, district staff and the Board of Education will publicly recognize the following students for unique or exemplary achievements in their nominated category (see photos from the May 17 event in the May 24 issue of this newspaper):

Solana Pacific School

Grade 5: Victoria Li (Effort)

Grade 5: Alexandra Sherlock (Effort)

Grade 6: Malvika Jain (Fellowship)

Grade 6: Simon (Jiil) Kim (Effort)

Skyline School

Grade 4: Keyli Garibay (Effort)

Grade 4: Maria Jimenez (Fellowship)

Grade 5: Samantha Ramirez (Self or Academic Improvement)

Grade 6: Jack Hargis (Leadership)

Grade 6: Carolyn Knapp (Community Service)

Solana Vista School

Grade K: Sofia Dalhoumi (Fellowship)

Grade 1: Wallace Graziano (Courage)

Grade 2: Freddy Beltran (Effort)

Grade 3: Tigist Lambesis (Effort)

Solana Highlands School

Grade K: Ines Derrien (Effort)

Grade 1: Peyton McKenzie Garand (Courage)

Grade 2: Ryan Deere (Leadership)

Grade 3: Adam Young (Leadership)

Grade 4: Paige Linden (Self or Academic Improvement)

Carmel Creek School

Grade K: Lauren Wilson-Krescanko (Courage)

Grade 1: Alex Cabulio (Leadership)

Grade 2: Kendal Boothman (Fellowship)

Grade 3: Ivar Melin (Effort)

Grade 4: Lucy Reed (Fellowship)

Short URL: http://www.delmartimes.net/?p=35165

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Today Gartner reported that Samsung has passed Nokia as the world?s largest manufacturer of mobile phones. Samsung seems to be doing everything right. Nokia held the crown as the largest mobile phone manufacturer for 14 years. Does this mean that Samsung will be the dominant company in the industry for as long? Looking to analogs from related industries, I would say no. A position of dominance invites competitors to dethrone the king. As Samsung?s goal has been to unseat Nokia, others will likely seek to dethrone Samsung. As the market changes structure and the barriers to entry fall, the position of king seems an increasingly uncomfortable place to be.

The PC Industry

The PC industry has gone through a number of changes over the past 30 years, driven by technological changes and widespread consumer adoption. The result has been that the industry has gone through phases of market disruption and concentration.

Having ushered in the modern PC with the help of Windows, IBM was the predominant manufacturer in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the mid-1990s, Compaq emerged as a market leader due to aggressive marketing and consumer adoption. Dell had been aggressively deploying its direct sales model and lowering price points to steadily gain market share, so that by 2001 it became nominally the market leader. However, no single leader emerged with Dell and a newly merged HP-Compaq within a few points of each other. By the mid-2000s HP consolidated its position in the industry with a strong business and consumer presence and gained a substantial leadership position. However it appears that we are now on the cusp of the next transition with HP losing share and Lenovo aggressively growing following its acquisition of IBM?s laptop business. In a mature industry with a horizontal model, where the operating system, hardware, and applications are separate, the leadership amongst hardware manufacturers is proving impossible to sustain.

The Gaming Console Industry

Gaming consoles command a high degree of customer lock-in through proprietary operating systems and significant content investments by customers. Nintendo is credited with being the originator of the modern gaming machines in the 1980s, and their early success was closely linked to the popularity of the Mario Brothers game. However, Sony quickly began to challenge Nintendo in the 1990s, and for much of that period we see the two companies alternating market leadership depending on game popularity and new device launches. Microsoft entered the market with their Xbox in the early 2000s and steadily built market share.

Although Nintendo did leap in dominance for some years following the launch of the Wii, the market has resolved to a dead heat between the three manufacturers. In this vertically integrated business model players cannot seem to sustain market leadership for very long.

Reflections on Mobility

Nokia?s long run at market leadership was in an era when the industry was vertically integrated. Software and hardware were fused together. Although customers were not locked in with content, brand loyalty was strong and closely linked to the hardware manufacturer. Customers still buy the manufacturer?s products, but are increasingly locked in to the software platform and its ecosystem. Consumers purchase apps and content for their smartphones that may not transfer to other platforms. As Stephen Elop, Nokia?s CEO, stated: ?we are now in a war of ecosystems.? In an environment like this, a single manufacturer will find it difficult to sustain market leadership for a long period of time.

With the exception of iOS, platforms benefit from several manufacturers building on their operating systems. Android?s success has been due to Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and Sony all building devices running the Android OS. Thus, there are two levels of competitive dynamics occurring simultaneously: competition among the platforms and competition among the manufacturers. In this type of environment, it is increasingly difficult to imagine retaining market share leadership for a sustained period of time.

But Samsung does not need the crown. Following the example of Nokia in addressing all price points with product is one clear way to retain leadership in volume share for a time, but this does not lead to a sustainably profitable business. Ultimately, maintaining the crown should be a lesser concern. Market leadership invites others to steal the business. Someone can always come in and do it cheaper to drive market share. Samsung can thrive being the second, third, fourth largest mover of handset units, as long as they are more importantly the leader in profit.

Samsung must continue to focus on innovation, product leadership, and profitability. Innovation in all areas of the business to meet customer needs naturally leads to product leadership. Product leadership reinforces your position in the battle of the ecosytems allowing you to capture greater profits.

-?Mark Mulcahey,?Senior Partner

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The NFL apparently has heard the concerns regarding the spoon-feeding of summaries, characterizations, and conclusions regarding the Saints bounty scandal to the media, in the hopes that the media will then spoon-feed without scrutiny that same information to the public.

Sorry, NFL, but I can?t and won?t do it.

As I?ve said a time or two, if the NFL is going to make this matter to public by accusing players of funding and receiving funds from a bounty system, I need raw evidence ? especially when there seems to be a disconnect between the raw evidence that has become available and the summaries, characterizations, and conclusions the NFL has disseminated.

That may change.? Sort of.

Judy Battista of the New York Times reports that, after the player appeals have concluded, the league may publicly release some evidence, ?with sources carefully masked.?? The league continues to be concerned that, if some sources are identified, players will be able to figure out who blew the whistle in 2011.

That?s a cop out.? Once the whistle has been blown and people start talking to the league not secretly but in response to direct questions from the league office, the importance of protecting the perceived ?snitch? evaporates.? Assuming former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams has confessed to maintaining and funding a bounty system, he surely has told the NFL which players helped him set it up.? So why not release one of his statements or interviews?? He?s not the whistleblower, and he deserves no such protection.

The same goes for Joe Vitt and Sean Payton and Mickey Loomis and any other person who gave information not because they wanted to but because they had to.

Still, the league seems to be blurring the line between whistleblower and witness in order to justify giving those in the media inclined to not take what the league feeds us at face value something that can?t be properly and fully picked apart and put back together.

In the end, none of it may matter.? At some point, the NFLPA and/or the lawyers representing the suspended players will likely land in a forum that forces the NFL to release raw data and, no matter how hard the NFL tries to keep the information confidential, it eventually will be released in open court ? after a judge explains to the NFL?s lawyers that only the person who actually blew the whistle is entitled to any type of protection.

Even then, a case can be made that the person who blew the whistle isn?t entitled to full and complete anonymity, especially if that person had evidence that no other witness could provide.

Once again, we?re not a third-world country where witnesses testify behind a curtain.? At some point, every witness/whistleblower may need to be identified, and if retaliation occurs the persons who retaliate will be held accountable.

If that ever happens, hopefully the raw evidence to prove retaliation will be made available in that case, too.

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Leslie J. Mangiamele, school director for 18 years and an adjunct professor of visual art in UALR’s art department, said the program will end Aug. 15, after its Summer Arts Camp and Summer String Camp end.

“The problem is the bottom line,” Mangiamele said. “The dean could not see a way around not cutting our salaries.” She said the school has been under threat of closure for several years, but survived an attempt to close it two years ago because of support support.

Deborah Baldwin, dean of UALR’s college of arts, humanities and social sciences, said yesterday she considers the closing of the school as temporary. She said the university will study a consultant’s report made in March on how to make the program self-sufficient and present a proposal to the provost in July 2013.

About 1,000 children and adults are enrolled in the program, which has seen growth over the years. Tuition pays for faculty (81 percent), operating costs (8 percent) and reimburses UALR for facilities’ use (11 percent). It does not pay the salaries for the director and her assistant. Baldwin said the school “has regularly been $75,000 to $85,000 in the red” ? by which she means the university is paying the salaries ? and UALR would like the program to be entirely self-supporting. Baldwin said she did not know how many university community schools are self-supporting. Mangiamele said that deficit budgets for the schools “are sort of the nature community schools.”

The school was opened in 1979, Mangiamele said, “to make these wonderful professors [at UALR] in the arts accessible to people in the community.” The faculty includes arts professionals and those with advanced degrees as well as UALR instructors teaching the once-a-week classes.

?I feel terrible about the students we have been nurturing from age 5 to their teen-age years? to become arts professionals, Mangiamele said.

Mangiamele is one of four visual art instructors. There are also 12 music instructors, a dance instructor and a language instructor. A string instructor, the language instructor, an art instructor and three piano teachers will lose their only employment, Mangiamele said.

“I’m sorry we’re in this position,” Dean Baldwin said. “We would love to be able to continue … we just have to figure out how to make this work.”

Ironically, the school was created because of cutbacks in the arts in the public schools. The Community School’s website includes this statement:

“When considering the education of the children in our community, we discover that for a variety of reasons our schools have been unable to provide consistent and varied arts instruction. Sadly, music and visual art classes are the first to be cut when money is short. To address this, the UALR Community School of the Arts, initiated in 1979, was created.”

The school will continue after a fashion, Mangiamele said, thanks to an offer of studio space by Rhythm 88 on Bowman Road. She’d like to see the program get its own space. “We could use a house, a building … empty strip malls. … Give us a space and we will continue to do high quality stuff.”

UALR ended its planetarium and Urban Design programs in the past few years; neither was resurrected.

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My 60th birthday is less than a week and a half away, and if there is one thing I can say with certainty it’s that 60 is not the new 50.

My body creaks and groans. My eyes aren’t what they used to be. I don’t sleep as soundly as I did just a few years ago. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of doctors, just to make sure everything still more or less works.

I’ve also found myself with a sudden urge to get my house in order — just, you know, in case. Insurance, wills, that sort of thing. Sixty is when you stop pretending you’re going to live forever. You’re officially old. Or at least old-ish.

The only thing I haven’t dealt with on my to-do checklist is retirement planning. The reason is simple: I’m not planning to retire. More accurately, I can’t retire. My 401(k) plan, which was supposed to take care of my retirement, is in tatters.

Like millions of other aging baby boomers, I first began putting money into a tax-deferred retirement account a few years after they were legislated into existence in the late 1970s. The great bull market, which began in 1982, was just gearing up. As a young journalist, I couldn’t afford to invest a lot of money, but my account grew as the market rose, and the bull market gave me an inflated sense of my investing skills.

I became such an enthusiast of the new investing culture that I wrote my first book, in the mid-1990s, about what I called “the democratization of money.” It was only right, I argued, that the little guy have the same access to the markets as the wealthy. In the book, I didn’t make much of the decline of pensions. After all, we were in the middle of the tech bubble by then. What fun!

The bull market ended with the bursting of that bubble in 2000. My tech-laden portfolio was cut in half. A half-dozen years later, I got divorced, cutting my 401(k) in half again. A few years after that, I bought a house that needed some costly renovations. Since my retirement account was now hopelessly inadequate for actual retirement, I reasoned that I might as well get some use out of the money while I could. So I threw another chunk of my 401(k) at the renovation. That’s where I stand today.

When I related my tale recently to Teresa Ghilarducci, a behavioral economist at The New School who studies retirement and investor behavior, she let out the kind of sigh that made it clear that she had heard it all before. The sad truth, she told me, is that I’m the rule, not the exception. “People have income shock, like divorce or loss of a job or a health crisis,” and those crises tend to drain retirement accounts, she said.

But even putting income shocks aside, she said, most human beings lack the skill and emotional wherewithal to be good investors. Linking investing and retirement has turned out to be a recipe for disaster.

“People tend to be overconfident about their own abilities,” said Ghilarducci. “They tend to focus on the short term rather than thinking about long-term consequences. And they tend to think that whatever the current trend is will always be the trend. That is why people buy high and sell low.” Financial advisers — at least the good ones — are forever telling their clients to be disciplined, to create a diversified portfolio and to avoid trying to time the market. Sound as that advice is, it’s just not how most humans behave.

That data starkly backs up Ghilarducci’s contention. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, for instance, only 22 percent of workers 55 or older have more than $250,000 put away for retirement. Stunningly, 60 percent of workers in that same age bracket have less than $100,000 in a retirement account. Ghilarducci told me that the average savings for someone near retirement in America right now is $100,000. Even buttressed by Social Security, that’s not going to last very long.

What, then, will people do when they retire? I asked Ghilarducci. “Their retirement plan is faith based,” she replied. “They have faith that it will somehow work out.”

I laughed, but it’s not funny. “The 401(k),” she concluded, “is a failed experiment. It is time to rethink it.”

In truth, I’m one of the lucky ones. I do work that I love, which requires no heavy lifting and has no mandatory retirement age. If I become incapacitated, I will have assisted-living insurance. Otherwise, I can keep writing till I drop.

But, for the millions of others who have discovered, as I have, that their original enthusiasm for investing was unwarranted, their faith-based retirement plan is all they’ve got left.

Read original article at NYTimes.com >>

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