Kelly Marie Lipinski, 41, of Willmar, pleaded guilty Friday to tiffanys felony theft charges for making almost $5,800 in false ink cartridge returns at a local office supply store.

Under a plea agreement reached in Kandiyohi County District Court, another felony theft charge will be dismissed. She will be sentenced April 26.

The charges were filed in September after Office Max loss prevention personnel contacted Willmar Police and reported there were an unusually high number of returns of cash refunds at the local store and recorded as made by Lipinski.

The majority of the sales were for ink cartridges, which typically were tiffany pendants re-inventoried because they are usually opened when returned. Office Max officials had tracked down a customer who had purportedly made a return, logged by Lipinski.

The person denied making the return.

The officials had already interviewed Lipinski, who admitted to making the false returns, then taking cash refunds at the end of her shift.

She reported the theft was of $3,682.04 on 44 returns this year, and about $4,800 last year. She had provided a written admission to store officials.

Lipinski was interviewed by police and explained she had looked up the tiffany earrings receipts in the store's computer, picked cash transactions, entered a refund and then took the cash at the end of her shift.

The total theft was for $5,776.67 from July 2008 to August 2009.

Credit: West Central Tribune, Willmar, Minn.

Anton Gunn's e-mail promises I won't have a hard time picking him out in the tiffany cufflinks in Richland County, South Carolina.

He's right.

Easily the biggest guy in the room, the former offensive lineman looms over an older man in an American Legion baseball cap with whom he's chatting about local business. We're just northeast of Columbia, South Carolina's capital, in the heart of Gunn's state House district.

Gunn is used to standing out. An African American representative in a majority- white district, a Democrat in a Republican-dominated state, and a 36-year-old surrounded by career politicians, he makes a fitting messenger for Obama's campaign-trail message about the need for a new kind of politics that moves beyond traditional divisions.

The 2008 election may be long over, but Obama's campaign themes are still being put to tiffanys test in states like South Carolina. When Gunn became Obama's state political director during the all-important South Carolina primary, he had already made one run at public office and lost. After Obama won the primary, Gunn ran for state representative again. This time, he won. He has also maintained his Obama-campaign ties: Gunn is the state director for Organizing for America, the grass-roots group keeping a semblance of Obama's campaign presence alive nationwide.

Gunn clearly loves the campaign trail but also seems to enjoy the Legislature. He's as at home talking about everything from the digital divide and broadband access- "the dial tone of the future," he calls it- to tax credits for employers who provide health care to physical-education requirements in school to corruptionsponsoring a bill to fight "dudes getting money on the back end from their brother-in-law's government contract."

He has gotten involved in messy issues with special relevance to South Carolina- he joined the education superintendent in pushing for public "school choice," against some in his own party as well as Republicans who want to privatize the whole system. He also signed on to a letter to Obama from young elected officials calling for a climate deal in Copenhagen and a serious investment in sustainable-energy technology.

Gunn is up for re-election this year, and state Democratic Party activists are already floating his name for higher office. But for Gunn, South Carolina isn't a stepping stone to a national political career- it's home, one he's chosen and wants to fight for, despite the fact that Republicans are unlikely to take his hands and dance off into a bipartisan future.

Though Democrats have turned more attention to the South in recent years, the region's tiffany pendants alignment that solidified in the 1990s, in which conservative Democrats were replaced by conservative Republicans, is not likely to change soon. Ed Kilgore, editor of The Democratic Strategist and a South Carolina native, notes that many in the party still treat the region as a long shot. "We're just crazy if we don't look at the excitement the Obama nominating contest created in South Carolina," Kilgore says. It's not just Obama. Democrat Jim Rex became South Carolina's superintendent of education in 2006 by a slim margin and is now fighting for the governor's mansion. And while shouting "You lie!" at a Democratic president would have once been a near guarantee of political success in the state, pollsters have called Republican Rep. Joe Wilson's re-election fight, against a well-financed Democrat, former marine Rob Miller, one to watch.

But even where electoral victories are rare, organizing can thrive and win the occasional victory for the disenfranchised of the state. Gunn's journey from organizing outside electoral politics to working from within the political system in what most consider hostile territory for Democrats provides a glimpse into what Obama's army of organizers learned on the campaign trail- and marks one path toward a future in which true progressive politics is possible- even in South Carolina.

GUNN MOVED TO SOUTH CAROLINA for college in 1990 and has since made it his job to understand his adopted state. He played Division I football for the University of South Carolina, in Columbia. After graduating with his bachelor's in history in 1994, he went into the nonprofit world, working on children's issues and economic development. He got his real education, however, with South Carolina Fair Share, where he was hired to help low-income South Carolinians organize for affordable health care. He credits Lenora Bush Reese, who first hired him as an organizer despite his lack of experience, with shaping him as a person as well as an advocate. Many years later, he told The State newspaper, "She broadened my world view."

Fair Share fights to empower South Carolina's low-income citizens, tracks legislative activity, and provides support for other nonprofits in the state. It is officially nonpartisan, but working on issues of poverty, racial bias in mortgage lending, and healthcare reform means butting heads with the state's entrenched conservative leadership, which is adamantly opposed to public spending. Chris Kromm, director of the Institute for Southern Studies, notes that it is one of the only grass-roots organizations in the state. Erica Carter, who met Gunn in 1996 at South Carolina Fair Share, says he was "like a pit bull" with his energy and dedication to the cause. His job back then, she says, was to motivate people, to get them to fight for their own issues, and also to find out their biggest health-care concerns.

She adds, "Because of his height and his size, when he goes toe to toe with people, it's tiffany earrings to see." But like many community organizers- and like Obama in Chicago in the 1990s- Gunn saw electoral politics as an obstacle and politicians as simply people to put pressure on. When she first met him, Carter says, "It was 4I don't care what that politician has to say.'"

In 2000, when Gunn was in graduate school pursuing a master of social work, his brother Cherone was one of 17 seamen killed in the U.S.S. Cole bombing. At the memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery, Gunn spoke on behalf of the family: "I'm very proud," he said. "He made his family proud. He made his country proud." Later, he told a Washington Post reporter, "Remember, they died for the country. They died defending a country we love."

His brother's death made him deepen his commitment to community service, and Gunn says he was finally pushed to run for office by his frustration with "old-school bad politicians," who made life so hard for him as an organizer. "Who are these clowns that refuse to do what people ask them to do, and why are they there, and what can we do to get rid of them?" he asked himself.

So in 2006, Gunn ran for the state House of Representatives, losing by less than 300 votes out of 14,000 in a majority-white district long held by a white moderate Republican. "I just ran out of time," Gunn later told The State. "IfI had talked to 298 more people, then I would have won." South Carolina politics are notoriously top-down and loaded with quid pro quo endorsements. "Street money has been part of things for so long, people don't even question the ethics of it anymore," Kilgore says. But even though he lost, Gunn's upstart campaign surprised cynics. He took the rest of 2006 off, and in January of 2007, when much of the Democratic old guard had already been snapped up by then-presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, Gunn was one of the new crowd brought in to help elect "that skinny dude from Illinois," as Gunn jokingly calls him. He had recently stumbled across The Audacity of Hope in an airport bookstore and says he was drawn in by the message as much as the idea of an Obama presidency-and knew he had to get involved. (He was clearly inspired by Obama: Gunn's first book, self-published last year, is called TheAudacity of Leadership.) Gunn famously called Obama to say, "I may not know a whole lot about politics, but I know a lot about South Carolina." He was hired. Early on in the primary, Clinton was getting as much African American support as Obama. The post-election narrative that black voters were in the bag for the black candidate from the start- fostered in part by Bill Clinton's comments comparing Obama's campaign to Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 primary efforts in the statewas far from true. At times, Gunn and tiffany necklaces on the campaign had to push Obama to court black voters. The New York Times reported that, on the night before the primary, Gunn pushed hard to get the candidate to attend a gala for the African American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, enlisting Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett in his effort.

"We were being told at every barbershop and beauty shop we went into that this was Clinton country," says Gillian Bergeron, who was an early campaign staffer in the state. At her very first staff meeting, Gunn laid out the rules. "Under no circumstances are we going to do South Carolina politics as usual. We're not paying for a vote, we're not paying for an endorsement, and we're not going to talk about the fact that other candidates are doing that," Bergeron recalls him saying.

She continues, "Considering how much I heard from ministers or 'neighborhood leaders' saying, If you want the black vote you've got to pay for it,' I can't imagine what he was hearing as our political director."

Gunn stuck with the organizing strategies he'd mastered at Fair Share, talking to people in their homes, hangouts, and churches and registering new voters. In the end, more than eight out of 10 black voters went for Obama. Kilgore notes that the campaign managed to get black voters to turn out for Obama without heightening the severe racial polarization of the state. "[It was] an example of how you can use an organizing method that not only works and makes people feel empowered in a way that just giving them a ride to the polls doesn't," Kilgore says. The massive Obama victory in South Carolina- 55 percent to Clinton's 27 percent- was the moment that the Obama campaign proved its wider ability to win- even without the establishment.

Carter, Gunn's former community-organizing colleague from Fair Share, says that the Obama campaign shaped Gunn as much as he shaped it. "Now he's seasoned a little bit," Carter says. "He understands that politics can be tricky and you have to finesse people. You can't make enemies out of everybody."

After the primary, many of the organizers from South Carolina packed up and state-hopped around the country, getting promoted again and again within the campaign until they landed in administration jobs. Gunn could have done the same, but Bergeron says he "stayed with his original vision." He returned to his district to run for the state House again. Excitement over Obama's candidacy and the infrastructure from the campaign were fueling voter turnout, and some Obama supporters offered financial backing as well- Gunn drew nearly $80,000 in donations from around the nation. But he stuck with the strategy that had served the Obama campaign so well: Gunn went door to door, reaching out voter by voter in his sprawling district.

And this time, he won.

SPANNING PARTS OF RICHLAND and Kershaw counties, Gunn's district is nearly three times the size of other state House districts and is the fastest-growing in the state. It's mostly suburban, with some rural areas, and most of the population growth comes from people who relocate from the North or whom Gunn calls "half backs"-people who moved to Florida and then came halfway back up the East Coast. People's incomes as well as their education levels are higher here than in most of the state, though still below the national average. Forty percent of the voters in 2008 were African American; the first time Gunn ran, 68 percent of the voters were white.

To stay in touch with the people in his district, Gunn has been holding town-hall meetings- "not ginned-up town hall meetings" but regular opportunities to converse with voters. Many of the constituents he faced at the three town halls he held in August and the three in December were not supporters, to put it mildly. But, Gunn says, "I get encouraged by people who didn't vote for me who say, 'Keep speaking the truth. Don't tell us what we want to hear, tell us what we need to hear.'"

Still, he faces challenges. Gunn notes that people still come to town meetings unsure of what their state representative actually does. "I get a lot of calls that say, 'Dismantle the IRS, government is bad, don't vote for cap-and-trade'- first of all, I'm not in Congress so I don't get to vote for those things," Gunn says. Yet he's frequently the target of critiques of the president. "'Obamacare is socialism, Obama's a communist.' I've gotten called all of those things. It's painful to hear that resentment," he says. Whether or not he agrees with the Glenn Beck fans in his district, Gunn knows he has to try to understand them. More important, he has to try to get them to understand him.

Progressives might be angry with Obama's professed commitment to bipartisanship at a time when Democrats enjoy a large majority in Congress, but to get anything done in South Carolina, possibly the most conservative and Republican state in the country, Gunn has to work with the other side and try to win over Republican voters. "There were people who had my yard sign right next to John McCain's yard sign," he notes.

Gunn says he's focused on doing what he can while he's in office- which is why he's co-sponsored 204 pieces of legislation -and colleagues from across the aisle vouch for his willingness to try to bridge the party gap. "He works to find common ground, which is something we need more of in politics," says state Rep. Nathan Ballentine, who sits next to Gunn in the House. Ballentine is a Republican, but he and Gunn have cosponsored a couple of bills- including a proposal to amend the state constitution's ballot-initiative process- a cross-party collaborative effort he says is rare in the South Carolina Legislature. In the latest budget fight, Gunn managed to get passed an amendment focused on government transparency, a difficult feat even for Republicans.

Kromm says of Gunn, "Because of his background with Fair Share, he brings an insider/outsider perspective to politics. He definitely wants to be and is an emerging political leader, but he has one foot outside realizing that we need a movement behind it, we need organizing behind it. He's going to maintain that critical distance." As Gunn likes to say, "People don't vote rationally; they vote emotionally." But his very success might belie that observation. To get elected, he had to convince at least some people to put aside emotional reactions and actually listen to him, to talk about issues like sewer problems on one side of his district and traffic on the other. To stay in office, he'll have to keep talking about the issues he can actually do something about.

Those in his party seem pretty satisfied with Gunn's approach. As Terry Bergeron, a Democratic Party activist and mother of Gillian, said when she introduced Gunn at a rally this summer on Hilton Head Island: "Remember the name Anton Gunn. You'll be voting for him when he runs for statewide office."

THERE'S A SENSE AMONG SOME state Democrats that this could be the year when they begin to make some gains. After all, South Carolina Republicans have made all sorts of negative headlines lately. Some, like Rep. Joe Wilson and Sen. Jim DeMint (known for his obstruction of Obama's nominees and his visit to the coup government in Honduras), are still popular with their conservative base. Others, like embattled Gov. Mark Sanford, have embarrassed their party to the point of impeachment. Sanford is protected only by the fact that his would-be replacement, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, has embarrassments of his own, ranging from multiple traffic offenses to a vicious rant against people who receive public assistance.

A plurality of voters say the state is headed in the wrong direction, and Republicans seem to have lost sight of the compromise that had allowed them to govern the state for most of the last two decades. In the 1990s, South Carolina Republicans managed to temper fire-breathing conservatives who wanted to keep the Confederate flag on the state's Capitol with more moderate, business-oriented figures, like the late Gov. Carroll Campbell Jr., who want the low-wage, anti-union state to remain controversy-free and attractive to employers. "As long as the Republicans continue to mismanage- which they will- there are always going to be opportunities in the South," Kilgore says. In Gunn's view, issues such as poverty (15.1 percent of South Carolinians lived below the poverty line in 2007) and the economic crisis have lessened people's appetite for hyperpartisan bickering. "They're sick and tired of being laughed at by the entire nation," he says. "They're sick and tired of being ranked at the top of everything bad and at the bottom of everything good." The number of Democrats in the state is on the rise, partly due to transplants from more progressive areas of the country. Though the state doesn't track voter registration by party, a 2008 survey found 34 percent identified as Democratic and 33.5 percent identified as Republican.

Nora Kravec, a volunteer with Organizing for America, notes that the group has picked up new volunteers who weren't part of the campaign, and OFA has maintained staff in Charleston, where she lives, as well as in Columbia. "We've gotten a few people who've said, 'Boy, I wish I'd done this before,'" she says. Volunteers collect declarations of support for the health-care bill, hold rallies, and attend church events like they did on the campaign trail. Kilgore points out that just having a Democratic infrastructure in place in the state is a huge step forward. "The last successful Democratic year, in 1998, when we won the governorship and Senator Fritz Hollings managed to hang on for another term, the campaign was totally financed by the video-poker industry," he says.

The divides in the state are still vicious- Ballentine expresses disappointment that most votes in the Legislature break down along party lines, and Gunn says that some Republicans will agree with him behind closed doors but won't vote that way when it comes to the floor. Andre Bauer's comments comparing poor people to "stray tiffany accessories" and Wilson's shout heard round the country may be extreme examples, but Gunn points out that they come out of a particular political climate.

"If you'd have told me someone was going to scream at the president and call him a liar, he'd have been the last person on my list. Joe is an aw-shucks kind of guy," Gunn says. "When you want to breed negativity, it can infect anybody, and it can take people to a level they didn't think was possible."

Kravec calls Sheri Few, Gunn's 2010 opponent, a "tea bagger," and Gunn notes that Few uses the tea party-style anti-Obama rhetoric against him. Her support of tax credits for parents sending their children to private schools makes her a polarizing candidate in a district that actually has some of the state's best schools, and she's run several times and lost, but Gunn notes that she has always been well funded.

Still, people seem to want to hear what Gunn is saying-Kravec says that his involvement in an event guarantees a crowd, and she thinks he could win higher office. If he has political aspirations beyond South Carolina, Gunn doesn't talk about them. "This is my home. I want to do everything in my power to make this state great. I'm invested. I have a 4-yearold girl who's going to grow up in this state," he says.

He continues, "We still do have our pockets of those folks who want to hold on to the old vestiges of South Carolina from yesteryear, and they have their influence. That's why the Confederate flag still flies, but I don't really care. ... What's more important is figuring out how we get to the nitty-gritty on issues like education, which is the great equalizer. There are people who try to hold us back, but as the days go by, there's a lot less of them and a lot more of me."

Gunn doesn't want to fight the culture wars- he talks public-school choice and small-business tax credits, not abortion rights and marriage equality. He downplays traditionally explosive racial issues and calls the Confederate-flag issue a distraction. But as Kilgore says, it's almost impossible to ignore race in South Carolina.

"It's never going to go away," Gunn says. "The vast majority of progress has been made over the last 40 years, which is only a tenth of the time that it has been a problem." Still, he points out that race is only one piece of the messy puzzle that makes up his opposition. "You also have some people who I think are not focused on race; they're rightly focused on the debt of our country, the economy, and the only person they can see who should be doing something about that is the leader of the free world."

Kilgore thinks that the Obama campaign and people like Gunn, who both influenced and were influenced by the election, laid a path for organizing in the South that goes beyond racial polarization. Kromm notes, "You have the makings of something different, but it has to be nourished, it has to be strengthened, it has to be invested in." As the OFA state director, Gunn is tasked with maintaining some of that investment. While other state legislators also have day jobs- Ballentine works at Wells Fargo- Gunn's day job is keeping South Carolinians involved in progressive politics. From new-media tools (he's a frequent Twitterer) to door-to-door canvassing and visiting churches and union events, Gunn and OFA are focused on the issues- health care, education, and jobs, jobs, jobs- not the implications for the national Democratic Party. We've seen Democrats lose elections this year when they've lost touch with the people, and Gunn isn't likely to forget that. It's not hyperbole when he says, "We literally changed the course of American political history by what we did here in South Carolina during the primary."

Daddy Issues
Of the many biographical details that shaped Barack Obama as a political figure, perhaps none is more prominent than the absence of his father during his upbringing. The president's public effort to understand Barack Obama Sr. began with the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, shortly after he finished his term as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. In the book, Obama describes how difficult it was to grow up without a relationship to his Kenyan father, the man who gave him a name and a heritage but was not around to help him navigate America's complicated racial divide. In The Audacity of Hope, written after he became a senator, Obama describes his own struggles as a political father who is often physically separated from his family.

At the height of the Democratic primary in 2008, Obama gave a Father's Day address at a predominantly black Chicago church. Single-parent homes are more common in the black community, and his speech encouraged young men to grow up and to take responsibility for their children. "We need to show our kids that you're not strong by putting other people downyou're strong by lifting them up," he said. "That's our responsibility as fathers." After the speech, the Rev. Jesse Jackson excoriated Obama for "talking down to black people."

Obama's rhetoric on fatherhood can sound a lot like the personal-responsibility talking points of many conservative black leaders. For white Americans, it can reinforce the notion that some problems are endemic to the black community- and that if black fathers would live up to their responsibilities, the problems of black children would just go away.

But for many, Obama's speeches acknowledge a real problem: More than half of African American children are born to single mothers. Obama tells the black community they have the power to change this, a message that resonates because Obama's personal history gives him some authority to address the issue. Juan Williams, a National Public Radio news analyst, said in December that there's at least anecdotal evidence that Obama's life story is an inspiration for young black men. At a conference of three major black fraternities, Williams heard men say things like, "If Barack Obama, who came from a broken household, can do it, we can do it too."

Obama is careful to never say they can do it without helphe regularly addresses how government can meet families halfway. The proposals he outlined in his 2008 speech on fatherhood- better family-leave policies for workers, more job-training opportunities for fathers- are designed to help parents, especially low-income ones. But exactly how absentee fathers factor into the cycle of poverty - and whether encouraging their involvement should be an explicit goal of programs designed to help low-income communities- is the subject of considerable debate. Research shows that the children of single parents are five times as likely to be poor, are more likely to become teenage parents themselves, have worse educational outcomes, and are more likely to end up in prison. Widely discussed studies have now shown that the way parents interact with their children before they reach kindergarten greatly affects how children do once they're there. The question, given all these facts, is whether simply encouraging absent fathers to get involved with their children is enough.

Last year, Obama addressed a group of community leaders, fathers, and children from schools near D.C. in a speech meant to kick off a national conversation on fatherhood. He noted that his accomplishments were due to the efforts of his mother and grandparents but added, "Despite all their extraordinary love and attention that doesn't mean I didn't feel my father's absence. That's something that leaves a hole in a child's heart that a government can't fill."

Indeed, Obama has never suggested it should, but he has acknowledged the government can encourage fathers to get more involved. This marks a slight departure from his predecessor. For George W. Bush and his fellow conservatives, involved fathers were important because nuclear families were important. Advocates for anti-poverty programs grew frustrated with Bush because both his rhetoric and his policies emphasized personal and familial responsibility, as if all poor families lacked were moral values. He allocated federal money to programs that promoted marriage, but the bill authorizing the funds did not use language that restricted their use for low-income families exclusively; they were open to anyone.

Now, under Obama, fatherhood programs and marriage initiatives are poised to get more funding. His 2011 budget allocates money under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also known as welfare-to-work, for a new initiative intended to help parents with barriers to self-sufficiency. A parallel Obama effort, the "conversation on fatherhood," run by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships, targets Americans of all income levels but doesn't administer grant money.

By reorienting the intent of the fatherhood programs, Obama reinforces the idea that poorer families might benefit from them. In his budget, Obama also increases funding for other programs designed to help poor families, a step many liberals would applaud. But his funding for fatherhood and family programs concedes that his goal isn't just making poverty less devastating by providing steady child care, better health-care coverage, and more work-training options for lowincome men and women. It emphatically states that the broad effort of reducing poverty is furthered by putting fathers back in low-income homes and helping couples stay married.

If his ultimate goal is indeed poverty reduction, not reinforcing "traditional" values, should Obama attempt to tackle poverty itself and trust that higher incomes will lead to more involved parenting? Or does he attack the symptom of low-income absentee fathers directly and hope their involvement will break the cycle of poverty? He seems to be trying to do both.

THE ROLE OF FATHERS IS A relatively new addition to the conversation about children and poverty. Since the Great Depression, government efforts to help the poor have mostly targeted poor mothers with young children. The Great Society legislation in the 1960s expanded those efforts to the poor in general, but much of the funding remained focused on mothers. As Rickie Solinger argues in her 1999 essay published in Whose Welfare?, single mothers were seen as psychically troubled and in need of help from the state.

By the 1980s and 1990s, however, unlimited welfare was seen as problematic. The Clinton administration made a push to get women off the rolls. One of the ways to do that was to increase the help women received from noncustodial fathers, primarily through enforcing child-support payments. But when agencies tried to track down fathers and get them to pay, they found that many men were unemployed or underemployed and unable to meet their obligations. Community groups that had already been working to help men get job training and steady employment now had the federal government's attention through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which was created by the 1996 welfare-reform bill.

While TANF made maintaining two-parent families a goal, its primary focus was economic support for low-income parents and their children. That focus changed in 2001, when Bush started the National Healthy Marriage Initiative, devoting $90 million to marriage-promotion programs. The funding was administered by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. And the programs- which were essentially marriage-counseling sessions- were based on the idea that declining marriage rates and ascending divorce rates were the source of society's problems and that promoting marriage would be the cure.

There is, as yet, no hard evidence that the programs work at reducing poverty. Groups that help coordinate these programs, like the National Fatherhood Initiative, cite many personal stories of couples who say the programs were helpful. It's easy to see how a forum in which husbands and wives can talk about their frustrations and problems as a couple make them feel better. It's harder to see how that may translate into food on the table and college tuition for their children.

But there are stories of people who say they benefit. Dawit Solomon, a 29-year-old who was raised by a single mother, finished a class last year that he says has changed his relationship with his 10-year-old son. Solomon's girlfriend got pregnant in his senior year of high school, and they did not marry. For most of his relationship with her and their son, Daquan, Solomon felt his main purpose was to pay child support. "I didn't feel like I didn't have responsibilities," he said. "I didn't know what it's like to be a dad."

After he fell behind on his child support, Solomon was ordered by the court to attend fatherhood classes with a group in Alexandria, Virginia. He could have stopped going after three classes but chose to finish the 12-week course and has emerged as its evangelist. "I was always angry at the system, felt like it was always unfair to the father," he said. That anger reached back into his relationship with his absent father, extended to his relationship with his son's mother, and refracted, he now feels, to affect the relationship he had with his son. He often saw Daquan on weekends but would plop him in front of a video game while he went about his business. The class taught him to let go of his anger and to spend time with his son.

Solomon's class used curriculum from the National Fatherhood Initiative, a group founded in 1994 that has helped shape the nationwide efforts to address fatherless families. A former president of the group, Wade Horn, was tapped by Bush to shape many of the ACF's healthy-marriage policies. Before joining the ACF, Horn wrote, "States should begin by eliminating systemic preferences that give advantages to single-parent families over two-parent, married families. But making welfare neutral when it comes to marriage is grossly insufficient." That children of single parents needed more help was irrelevant.

When Congress reauthorized TANF in 2006, it shifted away from promoting two-parent households as a means to help reduce poverty rates to promoting marriage as a goal in and of itself, setting aside $150 million for programs designed to encourage healthy marriages. (The grants were authorized for five years.) A 2006 statement from the ACF decries "divorce, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbearing" before it even mentions low-income children. When children are mentioned, it's to note that the ACF already has contact with them through several poverty-reduction programs. The language that established the new fatherhood and marriage-promotion programs did not limit them to low-income families. They could be used by any father or couple.

And that's the problem, some community groups say. These programs weren't focused on addressing poverty, and they supplanted more practical efforts such as job training and job placement, which had to compete for funding. Groups that work directly with mothers and fathers of low-income children are split on whether the programs were helpful at all, according to a report from the Center for Family Policy and Practice. Many groups think the programs are beside the point: Lowincome men have basic problems staying stably employed, housed, and fed. Even groups that felt the marriage programs were useful and helped their clients did not think they were important outside the context of job-training, skills-training, and other economic-support programs.

"I don't even want to judge whether or not an individual mother or father or person wants that kind of service or needs it or can benefit from it," says the center's co-director, Jacquelyn Boggess. "We all can benefit from that. But to actually take away the services that respond to economic insecurity and then put in the one about being a better spouse or parent. ... I can't see that as beneficial."

In the meantime, Erick King, who, along with his twin brother, created the fatherhood class in Alexandria, said the group is trying to get federal funding, but the signals from the federal government are ambiguous. The program has so far relied on private donations totaling about $100,000. King, 31, was inspired by his own troubled history with his father and his work as a juvenile probation officer. Through his work with juveniles in the court system, King has come to believe one of the primary reasons young people get in trouble is a lack of parenting at home. "It's the root of the problem," he says. "There's no substitute for the father being in their life. If that's the root cause, let's address it at the root cause."

King says the men come to the class with a range of experiences, but the absence of their own fathers is a commonality. Twenty-seven men graduated last year, the first year of the program's existence, and about 80 percent were referred through the court system because of child support or family court cases. The men ranged in age from their teens to their 60s and mostly represented the bottom of the income ladder, making no more than about $40,000 a year. The group uses a curriculum supplied by the National Fatherhood Initiative but also tries to respond to the needs of the men they meet, including jobplacement programs. This year, meeting with job-assistance groups will be a requirement to pass. But graduating just means showing up and participating in most of King's classes, which involve sessions in which men talk about their relationships to their father, take their children on community outings, and hear lectures from domestic-violence experts. There is no nationally recognized fatherhood curriculum. And while King follows the men post-graduation by communicating with their caseworkers, it's too early to tell what kinds of outcomes programs like his will produce.

OBAMA'S 2011 BUDGET REMOVES the $150 million marriage-promotion funding that started under Bush and creates a new program called the Fatherhood, Marriage and Families Innovation Fund backed by $500 million. The budget also extends TANF for a year, to the end of 2011, and increases the amount of funding for TANF and the agency that administers it, the Administration for Children and Families. It will probably take a generation to determine whether these programs really help reduce poverty, because such an assessment depends on children's outcomes in adulthood. The budget, though, does allow for some of the money to be used to evaluate fatherhood programs. The Department of Health and Human Services says the new fatherhood program will be a more comprehensive effort. The details, however, are still unclear.

Obama's other new effort, the conversation on fatherhood, will be run outside the ACF, through the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Even the office, a renamed expansion of one Bush founded, seems to have a different mission than that of its predecessor. Bush argued that faith-based groups, which have a long history of helping the needy in America, were unable to compete for federal grants with government agencies on a level playing field. Critics believed that funding faith-based groups robbed government programs of much-needed dollars and helped Bush funnel money to friends or programs that shared his moral views. Obama has said that, rather than helping faith-based groups to get more federal money, his office will listen to community groups about what needs they see on the ground and use that information to inform federal policy.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama talks about how his own struggle to be a father without a model on which to base his relationship with his daughters is the same struggle faced by a new generation of fathers. He lays out a path for encouraging fathers' participation that strikes a note in the center: "Policies that strengthen marriage for those who choose it and that discourage unintended births outside of marriage are sensible goals to pursue." But he criticizes the conservative view that we should be attempting to return to a "bygone era" by making divorce difficult, strictly defining gender roles, and shaming those who practice sex outside of marriage and have children outside of wedlock. Instead, Obama encourages supporting community programs that provide complete sexeducation and marriage-education workshops. "Expanding access to such services to low-income couples, perhaps in concert with job training and placement, medical coverage, and other services already available, should be something everybody can agree on," he writes. A member of Obama's faithbased council drew fire in May for saying the office should look beyond hetero-normative views of fatherhood, another sign the office is more about helping families, whatever their shape, and not about regulating values.

Not everyone agrees fatherhood programs should be part of the antipoverty agenda, but at least Obama's approach acknowledges that men have problems separate from their ability to be marriage partners. For example, a 2006 TANF reauthorization bill Obama co-sponsored that never passed would have supplied money for job training for ex-offenders, men who often leave prison with child-support debt and have a harder time getting new jobs. That component was spun out to be part of the stimulus bill and funded with $15 million, and Obama's focus on jobs and unemployment in areas other than TANF is intended to help low-income families along with everyone else.

Roland Warren, the current president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, says Obama's focus on jobs might be the biggest change, but he hasn't lost sight of the importance of the relationships parents have. "I think, from a practical standpoint, funding for marriage is part of the mix," Warren says. "I haven't heard any discussion about not funding the marriage stuff."

The 2006 bill concedes the problems children have in singleparent homes, but it also acknowledges the role poverty might play in the creation of those homes, citing high rates of unemployment, low wages, and domestic violence as primary reasons marriages break up and fathers aren't involved in their children's Uves. To that end, Obama's Department of Health and Human Services budget, the umbrella under which the ACF is funded, also provides money for researching the best earlychildhood programs and the best ways to help low-income families become self-sufficient. It also provides community block grants to encourage better grocery stores to move into low-income areas and other programs that, if implemented, could make the job of being a low-income parent easier. It's classic Obama; it addresses a view that is, on its face, unobjectionable: It's a good thing for fathers to take responsibility for their children, develop nurturing relationships with them, and promote their positive growth. Then it acts on that view in a way that supports the practical goals of liberalism- helping parents find jobs, expanding early-childhood programs, and rejuvenating the low-income rental market so they can provide the basics for their children.

In the first year of the Obama administration, when the TANF funding for marriage initiatives was still on autopilot, groups that work with fathers hoped Obama would push for his 2006 bill, which they found more sensible. Now those groups are figuring out how to react to Obama's proposais in his 2011 budget. The bill he co-sponsored in 2006 is still sitting in Congress, now sponsored by Sens. Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, Tim Johnson, and Roland Burris, and went to the Senate Finance Committee before Father's Day. It has remained there and is now unlikely to move since TANF has another year before it needs to be addressed. Some of the changes it would have made are now moot, as long as Obama's budget passes. With other big legislative priorities sucking up oxygen, like health care and jobs, it's not certain how much attention it will get.

Still, because the details on the new program have yet to be hammered out, and all advocates have to go on is a paragraph in the budget and a brief statement from the Department of Health and Human Services, some look back at the way Obama has talked about fatherhood and poverty. Rhetoric on responsible fatherhood that has the potential to inspire is all well and good as long as there is money to help with the very real needs of the poorest families.

Meanwhile, Obama still leverages his personal story to try to inspire young men despite the hardships they've faced. At his 2009 Father's Day talk, Obama addressed the male students in the authence, acknowledging they might worry that they don't know how to be fathers if their own fathers were absent.

"Some of you might even use that as an excuse and say, well, if my dad wasn't around, why should I be," he said. "Let's be clear: Just because your own father wasn't there for you, that's not an excuse for you to be absent also. It's all the more reason for you to be present. There's no rule that says that you have to repeat your father's mistakes. Just the opposite: You have an obligation to break the cycle, and to learn from those mistakes, and to rise up where your own fathers fell short, and to do better than they did with your own children. That's what I've tried to do in my life."

Almost every year we travel to India to visit our grandparents who live on a farm in a village near Hunsur, in the south. Quite a few of the villagers in this region grow tobacco, as it is a cash crop. But as we learned during our regular visits, tobacco carries a heavy environmental burden. In order to process tobacco, the leaves of the plant must be cured in heated barns. This requires burning large amounts of firewood, which generates significant air pollution. Even worse, the tobacco-curing kilns' demand for firewood is causing deforestation. Because the farmers have no wood on their own plots of land, they typically purchase firewood from agents who do illegal logging in the local wildlife sanctuary, the Rajiv Gandhi National Park (Nagarahole), which is tiffanys to the Asian elephant and tiger.

Whenever we go to India, we see the effects of deforestation on the borders of the park, and die resulting humananimal conflicts. We began to realize that if the local farmers continued to grow and cure tobacco, then eventually the whole forest and its incredible biodiversity would disappear. We wanted to find a way to help, and thought that a solution might lay in identifying another crop that could earn farmers an income while being more environmentally sound,

Jatropha curcas seemed like the answer. Jatropha is a perennial shrub that sprouts inedible but oil-rich seeds that can be turned into biofuel. We already had been experimenting with jatropha on our grandfather's farm. But we had to prove to the local farmers that the crop could be economically viable substitute for tobacco.

In 2008 , we planted 1,000 seedlings as a pilot crop. We held a demonstration of processing the tiffany pendants into biofuel and distributed it to local farmers to test it on their irrigation pumps. The results were clear: The biofuel burned much cleaner than the thesel that farmers were accustomed to using. If the farmers could sell the biofuel, they would have another cash crop.

Our efforts took off. Before we knew it, we had raised close to S 15,000 to expand the work, attained official nonprofit status as Project Jatropha, and involved local Lidian youth. Scores of farmers were hopping on board, and soon we had planted 13,000 jatropha seedlings, As Project Jatropha gained momentum, we began to visit India more frequently; often going there two to three times a year. We spent a lot of time with the farming families, working with them in the heavy rains and scorching sun. We played with the local kids, drank from the local wells, fell sick, and luckily got better.

As we spent more and more time at the project site we started to realize that we weren't just giving to the farmers - we were gaining valuable lessons ourselves. We thought that the solution to tobacco's problems was so straightforward. But we were starting to see our easy assumptions go up in smoke.

We had researched tobacco, and we diought we knew everything: that it was the root of the problem, that it had to be eliminated since all it did was harm society; and that it was easily replaceable. But our opinions and reality differed. During a visit in the summer of 2009, we began to realize the plant's complex position within the rural culture. Tobacco farmers need a license to construct a processing barn and sell processed tobacco. Not everyone gets this license, and recently the number of licenses has been restricted. So those who have licenses are considered well-off In fact, economic status and tobacco are so deeply entwined in rural south India that the first thing a boy's parents will ask if they are trying to arrange a marriage for their son is whether his intended's parents have a tobacco license. Possession of a tobacco license, we found out, ensures that the girl's parents can pay for the wedding and possibly give her a dowry. Having a tobacco license ensures a girl's parents that they will be able tiffany earrings find a suitable groom for their daughter.

Prior to learning about tobacco's place in the local culture, we had never looked upon the crop with respect. Now that we understand its role in the culture, we ask ourselves: If we replace tobacco with jatropha, how will this affect communities? Is the complete removal of tobacco a smart course? Can an environmental solution be truly sustainable if it tears apart the social fabric?

We don't know. But we're sure that the answers, just like our jatropha seedlings, will take time to fully mature.

Characteristics of young rural Chinese suicides

Suicide rates in China are among the highest in the world. A study published in 2002 reported tiffany necklaces in China as the fifth leading cause of death, with an estimated mean annual rate of 23 per 100 000 and a total of 287 000 suicide deaths per year (3.6% of all deaths) (Phillips et al. 2002 a ). The demographic pattern of suicide in China, with rural rates two- to threefold greater than urban rates, and rates among women higher than among men, is different from that reported in Western countries, where rates in urban and rural areas are roughly equivalent and rates of suicide in men are two- to fourfold higher than in women (Durkheim, 1897/1951; Wang et al. 2008). The age pattern of Chinese suicide is generally a bimodal one, with peaks in young adulthood and among the elderly (Ji et al. 2001; Phillips et al. 2002 a ; Zhang et al. 2002). Among young adults 15-34 years of age, suicide is the leading cause of death, accounting for 19% of all deaths in this age group (Phillips et al. 2002 a ).

In general, the male/female ratios of suicides are lower in Asian societies than in the West: Hong Kong (1.1), Singapore (1.3), Japan (1.8), Taiwan (1.5), India (1.4), Philippines (1.5), South Korea (2.2) (Canetto & Sakinofsky, 1998; WHO, 1999; Taiwan Government, 2003). The inverse ratio in China may be a reflection of Asian culture and additional factors specific to its communist ideology, reinforced in Chinese society since 1949 when the communists gained control of the country.

To investigate the mechanism behind rural Chinese suicides, and to identify potentially innovative, culture-specific prevention measures for rural China, we conducted a case-control psychological autopsy (PA) study with a focus on cultural and other risk factors for this subpopulation. We hypothesized that Confucianism, which is considered to be the cultural foundation of most Asian societies including China, partially explains the suicide risk for young women. We posited that the deep-rooted Confucian patriarchy and its sexist orientation that tiffany accessories women, coupled with the communist egalitarianism advocated in China, creates frustration or strain in the daily life of some young rural women.

Method

Study population and design

Persons aged 15-34 years and living in rural areas of China were the focus of our study. We examined young rural women and men who had died by suicide in comparison with community-living controls from the same specific populations. Pilot studies had demonstrated the feasibility of studying suicide by the PA method in Chinese social and cultural environments (Zhang & Norvilitis, 2002), and that the Western developed instruments are reliable and valid with the Chinese samples (Zhang et al. 2003). We used established PA methods and a case-control design to investigate the environmental and other characteristics of young rural suicides and controls.

Sampling

We selected three provinces in China for the study. Liaoning is an industrial province located in northeast tiffany, Hunan an agricultural province in central-south China, and Shandong is a province with economic prosperity in both industry and agriculture located on the east coast of China mid-way between Liaoning and Hunan. Sixteen rural counties were selected randomly from the three provinces (six from Liaoning, five from Hunan, and five from Shandong). In each of the 16 counties, suicides aged 15-34 years were sampled consecutively from October 2005 to June 2008. Similar numbers of community-living controls were recruited in the same counties for the same time periods.

Recognizing the need for clearly defined criteria for suicide as a manner of death (Younger et al. 1990), we excluded cases of accidental or natural death in which suicidal intent was questioned. As China does not have a medical examiner system and all deaths are required to be sent to a health agency for a death certificate, hospitals are the primary place for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to locate cases for the study. Each hospital uses a standard protocol to determine the cause of death. In remote rural areas far away from a hospital, village doctors are responsible for furnishing death certificates and are required to report the death to the Xiang (township) health agency. The county CDC oversees all the hospitals and clinics in the county. For our study, all suicidal deaths were required to be reported to each county CDC by telephone or fax on a daily basis, and the information gathered at the county CDC was then forwarded on a monthly basis to the provincial CDC. For those suicidal deaths that were not recognized by any health agency, our mortality registry system allowed the village treasurers, who collect fees for each burial or cremation and are aware of all the deaths in the village, to notify the Xiang health agency or the county CDC. Whenever necessary, an investigation with the village board and villagers was conducted by the research team to try to ensure that no suicide cases were missed, or reported erroneously. These procedures were implemented to minimize false classifications.

The epidemiological assumption is that controls are representative of the general population in terms of probability of exposure (suicide risk) and that controls have the same possibility of being selected or exposed as the cases (Timmreck, 2002). To optimize the scientific validity of our study, we did not use accidental deaths for the control group because they might be biased in certain ways (e.g. higher likelihood of substance misuse or impulsive risk-taking behavior). Instead, the controls were from the same counties and from among the living general population within the same age group of the suicides. The fact that proxy informants for controls were not affected by bereavement must, however, be taken into consideration in interpreting the results. There was no significant difference in age distribution of the controls and the 2005 Chinese national census database, supporting the representativeness of the controls in our study.

The community-living control group was a random sample stratified by age range and county. In each province, we used the 2005 census database of the counties in our research. For each suicide, we used the database of the county where the deceased lived to randomly select a living control in the same age range (i.e. 15-34 years). With regard to gender, the random selection of controls aged 15-34 years from each county database yielded approximately equal numbers of males and females, which approximated to the gender distribution of suicide cases in the study. The control sample did not exclude individuals who had been diagnosed with mental disorders or previous suicide attempts. Thus, the prevalence of mental disorders and suicidal attempts could be assessed in the rural general population aged 15-34, and more importantly, the effects (direct, moderating and intervening) of mental disorders on completed suicide could also be studied.

Information sources

For each suicide and each control, we interviewed two informants, with very few exceptions (for two subjects only one informant was available for each). However, we recognized that the type rather than the number of informants used in PA studies is an important and complex consideration (Kraemer et al. 2003). We tiffany rings the informants based on the context or environment (how people observe the target; for example, home versus non-home setting). In this way, each informant was carefully selected to optimize the information available on each case so that home, work, family and non-family aspects were included in the data.

Based on the above considerations, we used the following four guidelines for the inclusion of informants: (1) suicide informants were recommended by the village head and the village doctor and then selected by the research team based on familiarity with the subject's life and circumstances, availability for and willingness to consent to in-person interviews, whereas control group informants were recommended by the controls themselves and then selected by the research team with similar principles. (2) Although target persons could be as young as 15 years of age, informants had to be aged [= or >, slanted]18 years. Characteristics of the informants for both suicides and controls were noted in a standardized fashion (i.e. most recent contact, number of contacts in the past month, frequency of contacts in the past year, number of years informant has known the target, relationships, and the informant's impression of their familiarity with target persons). (3) For both suicides and controls, the first informant was always a parent, spouse or another important family member, and the second informant was always a friend, co-worker or neighbor. (4) Wherever possible, we avoided recruiting husbands and in-laws of those female suicides associated with family disputes. Interviewing these people could result in very biased reports, if marital infidelity and family oppression were possible causes of suicide. Similarly, in selecting the male suicide informants and the control informants we tried to avoid this type of biased informant when family disputes were noted beforehand.

Interviewing procedures

Informants were first approached by the local health agency or the village administration by a personal visit. Upon their agreement by written informed consent, the interview was scheduled between 2 and 6 months after suicide incident. Interviews with informants regarding living controls were scheduled as soon as the control targets and their informants were identified. Each informant was interviewed separately by one trained interviewer, in a private place in a hospital/clinic or the informant's home. The average time for each interview was 2.5 h.

As the cases were deceased and controls were living, blinding of raters to case status was not possible. Inter-rater reliability was established and maintained by limiting the principal data-gathering role to the 24 trained clinical interviewers and by comparison of duplicate ratings of the interviewers on a regular basis. The same interviewers participated in data collection for both case and control samples, promoting inter-rater reliability across the study.

Measures

The case-control status was the dependent variable. Predicting variables under this study included age, education, family annual income, marital and dating status, religion, pesticide availability, traditional gender values, modern gender values, gender value strain, impulsivity, and mental disorder.

We divided subjects into younger (<25 years) and older ([= or >, slanted]25 years) age groups. Duration of education ranged from 0 to 16 years for the cases and from 2 to 18 years for the controls. The cases and controls were categorized into low (<7 years) and high ([= or >, slanted]7 years) education level as the first 6 years of formal education in China is elementary. The family annual income was measured in Chinese Renminbi (RMB). One US dollar was equivalent to about 7.00 RMB.

To investigate the effect of marriage and marital experience on young rural Chinese suicides, we computed a variable with three categories. The group of 'never married and not dating' included those young people who had been unattached in their life, the group 'never married but dating' comprised those who had been involved in a love relationship but never married, and the group of 'ever married' covered the currently married ( n =421), separated ( n =12), divorced ( n =18) and widowed ( n =1). There were four items in the protocol to assess religion and religiosity of the cases and controls. The first asked what religion the target person believed in, and the choices were Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, other, and none. The second item asked about how many times in an average month the target person attended religious events. The third and fourth questions asked if the target person believed in God and an afterlife. The variable of religion/religiosity was the sum total of the four items, with all positive responses as 'yes' and negative responses as 'no'. Pesticide availability was assessed with a single item asking if any types of farming chemicals were stored at home.

The traditional gender value scale was a measure of Confucian paternalism denigrating women in Chinese culture. It was measured on Likert categories (1=strongly disagree, 2=disagree, 3=neutral, 4=agree and 5=strongly agree). Respondents were asked to what extent the target person agreed with the following statements: (1) women should stay at home and work only at home; (2) caring for her husband; (3) bearing a son; (4) keeping marriage without divorce; (5) arranged marriage; (6) obedience to men; (7) no education for women; (8) no social life; (9) women at home and men outside; (10) a woman should not exceed her husband in education; (11) a man is more important than a woman; and (12) a woman should be with only one man, live or dead. The modern gender value scale was a measure of communist gender equalitarianism promoting women's social status. It was also measured on Likert categories, and respondents were asked to what extent the target person agreed with the following statements: (1) going out to work; (2) equality for men and women; (3) marriage by self-choice; (4) a woman to receive education; (5) equal pay for equal work; (6) women uphold half the sky; (7) women can do all that men can do; and (8) men and women are equally important.

The gender value strain was computed from the above two value scales: Confucian paternalism denigrating women (referred to here as the 'traditional' scale) and communist gender equalitarianism promoting women's social status (the 'modern' scale). We used the mean score for each of the two scales. Responses for the traditional scale were divided into three levels based on the scale mean: low (0-2.5), middle (>2.5 to <3.5) and high (3.5-5), and each level consists of approximately one-third of the respondents. Responses for the modern scale skewed to the high end of the measurement. About 90% of the responses were between the means of 4 and 5, and the rest of the responses were between the means of 3 and 4. Therefore, we divided the responses into only two levels: low (0-4) and high (>4-5). The final strain variable was created by integrating the two recoded traditional and modern variables. Thus, strain was an ordinal measure with two categories. When both traditional and modern values were high, the strain was coded as high. For all other combinations, the strain was coded as low or no. The Chinese traditional and modern gender value scales and the value strain conceptualization were tested earlier among 487 young people in rural China, and the tests yielded excellent reliability scores ([alpha]=0.69 for the traditional scale; [alpha]=0.88 for the modern scale) and good validity evidence ( r =0.27) for the computed strain variable (Zhang & Song, 2006).

Impulsivity was measured by the 12-item scale developed and validated in English by Dickman (1990) and then translated into Chinese for the current project. We used only the 12 items for dysfunctional impulsivity in the scale and excluded the functional impulsivity items from the current measurement. The response for each of the 12 impulsivity items was 'yes' (1) or 'no' (0), with the highest possible score being 12 and the lowest being 0. As 49.4% of the responses had a score of [= or <, slanted]4, we arbitrarily categorized those with a score of [= or <, slanted]4 into the group of low impulsivity and the rest into the group of high impulsivity.

We used the Chinese version of the Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM-III-R (SCID; Spitzer et al. 1988; Gu & Chen, 1993) to generate diagnoses for both suicides and living controls. Diagnoses were made by the psychiatrists on each team in a consensus meeting at which all responses from each informant were presented by the interviewers. All interviewers had received formal training in using the SCID to obtain information on mental disorders. Tests on the inter-rater consistency and reliability and validity of the interviews had been conducted prior to the formal data collection, and the excellent test scores indicated that the Chinese version of the SCID is an adequate instrument for Chinese populations.

Integrating the information from different sources

There were two proxy interviews for each suicide case and each living control. The vast majority of the responses for the target person were the same or fairly similar. For different responses pertaining to the target person, data were integrated with the following three principles based on previous experiences (tiffany bracelets et al. 2003). For demographic information, we relied on the answers by the informant who had the best access to the information. For example, a family member should be able to tell the target person's age and birth date more accurately than does a friend. Second, in estimating the cultural values of the target person, we used the higher score of the two informants' responses if they were different. Finally, to determine a diagnosis with the SCID, we selected the response representing a positive symptom, because the other informant may not have had an opportunity to observe the specific characteristic or behavior. These three guidelines were applied in integrating responses of both cases and controls.

More than a dozen WVU students strutted down the runway in fashionable winter wear hoping to raise money for two organizations. The Saturday-evening event was a fundraiser for the WVU Public Relations tiffany Society of America (PRSSA and PRSSA) and the Mountaineer Boys & Girls Club, said show director Brandon Thomas. The two groups split the earnings. Funding for the Boys & Girls Club has decreased during the past few years, and Thomas said they wanted to help. "We really wanted to highlight the Boys & Girls Club," Thomas said. The show allowed everyone to take a break from their hectic schedules and enjoy fashion and help raise money for a good cause, he said. Seventeen WVU students participated as models and the PRSSA organized the tiffany rings. The models displayed clothing from Gap, Rue 21, Pacific Sun and Vanity. The show had four scenes and more than 50 people attended the showcase. One of the models, WVU senior Megan Puglisi said she watched the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show last week and got a few tips on how to work the runway. With only 20 minutes of practice at home she said she was ready to go. "I'm a natural," Puglisi joked. The fashion show shows people how important the Boys & Girls Club is to the kids, tiffany bracelets said. It also was a unique way to increase funds instead of a traditional fundraising program. "If we do something out of the box, it's going to attract a crowd," Puglisi said. WVU junior Ben Hancock agreed with Puglisi that the fashion show was a fun and different type of fundraiser. He added the event helps increase the club cash flow, but also allows the PRSSA students to practice their skills. One of Hancock's friends is involved with PRSSA and Hancock said when he heard about the event he jokingly asked why Hancock wasn't a model. The joke soon turned to reality as he became one. But, he said he had no problem and was excited for the tiffany cufflinks. "I thought it would be fun," Hancock said.

Bibby International Trade Finance (BITF), a division of Bibby Financial Services, said it provided a multi-tiffany cufflinks dollar export factoring line to the New York City-based company that owns the legendary fashion house Halston. The facility is being used to finance the expansion of Halston's global business.

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"My attraction to BITF was its willingness to work with a U.S.-based company to fund our tiffany money clips accounts at a reasonable premium. And, it was the only factoring company with the flexibility to meet our needs to provide funding in multiple currencies," said Jeff Green, Halston's Chief Financial Officer. "Given the excellent demand for both our Halston Heritage line and the debut of our fall 2010 mainline designed by Marios Schwab, BITF has given us access to funding that supports our growth in worldwide markets."

Resurgence for the Halston line has coincided with the clothes being featured in the movie Sex and the City 2 by actress Sarah Jessica Parker who was recently named president and chief creative officer of Halston Heritage, the company's just-launched secondary collection that features updated archival Halston pieces at contemporary price points. Bibby Financial Services is one of the leading global factors, specializing in fast and flexible cash flow solutions for small and medium-sized companies. With offices in 10 North American cities and 11 countries around the world, its product portfolio includes factoring, export finance, purchase order finance, and specialist solutions for the government, staffing and transportation sectors. In 2009, Bibby Financial Services was a stepping-tiffany pendants to financial health for more than 8,000 customers, funding $7+ billion in receivables worldwide.

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