Gates Foundation

Gov. Parris N. Glendening said yesterday he intends to increase education spending by $130 million next year -- including money to cut class sizes -- but stopped short of committing to the state school board's ambitious plan for ending social promotion and overcoming a teacher shortage.In a rare public meeting with the state school board, Glendening and schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick also disclosed that they have begun discussions with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for additional support of Maryland's education reform.

Enoch Pratt Free Library has been awarded a $240,000 grant by the Gates Library Foundation to set up a computer training center at the Broadway branch.The computer lab, expected to open in a year, will teach residents how to become comfortable with computers and use the Internet as a research tool. "We envision it as a free service," said Patricia Wallace, chief of Pratt's information access division.The lab also will become a center for training librarians at the Pratt and other library systems across the state.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library has won a $240,000 grant from computer software tycoon Bill Gates to teach people in poor and working-class neighborhoods how to access and exploit the Internet for their gain.The Pratt will add about $250,000 to the grant from the Gates Library Foundation to establish a computer training center in the basement of the library's branch at Broadway and Orleans Street. Smaller classrooms will be set up at the central library and at the Northwood, Hollins Street and Pennsylvania Avenue branches.

China has called an urgent meeting that could affect your life, and it's not about the global economic crisis - or global warming. Instead, it's about a quiet global health threat that is more disturbing than you probably assume: the silent spread of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) around the world. Many global health leaders are in Beijing this week trying to draw attention to the danger, including Bill Gates, whose foundation has given billions of dollars to fight diseases; Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization; and senior representatives from more than two dozen nations, including the United States.

Kudos to The Sun for supporting Dr. Andrés Alonso's efforts to fund repairs to the city schools' aging buildings ("A promising vision," Jan. 29). This would improve education, reverse the prime source of Baltimore's population decline (parents of school-age children leaving Baltimore for better-equipped county schools) and thus increase city revenues. Here are some ways to prevent potential waste: Seek city and state-level funding. Then, divide the remainder of the $2.9 billion Dr. Alonso says will ultimately be required into eight or more groups of potential donors, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Major League Baseball or NFL teams and players.

He uses words like "chill" and "dude" just like any other junior at the Johns Hopkins University, but Vivek Baluja did something yesterday that no other Hopkins' student -- or anyone else for that matter -- has done before: welcome Microsoft to a city recreation center to show off a shining new computer room.William H. Gates, father of Microsoft mogul Bill Gates and head of the Gates Foundation, came to Baltimore to meet Baluja months after the student struck up a correspondence with father and son via e-mail.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library has won a $240,000 grant from computer software tycoon Bill Gates to teach people in poor and working-class neighborhoods how to access and exploit the Internet for their own gain.The Pratt will add about $250,000 to the grant from the Gates Library Foundation to establish a computer training center in the basement of the library's branch at Broadway and Orleans Street. Smaller classrooms will be set up at branches in Northwood, Hollins Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and the central library.

When some University of Maryland, College Park students return to class for the spring semester, they could be attending lectures, taking quizzes and completing group projects without leaving their dorm rooms. The university is participating in a pilot program that combines massive open online courses with traditional classroom instruction. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently awarded $1.4 million to nonprofit research group Ithaka S+R to study how the state's university system could incorporate the increasingly popular online courses "There are two things we're seeking: new strategies that will improve learning outcomes and lower costs," said University System of Maryland Chancellor William E. Kirwan.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced yesterday a $287 million donation to fund AIDS vaccine research and establish an international network focused on vaccine development. The main goal of the 16 individual grants is to shift the development process from independent efforts in separate laboratories to large-scale collaborative efforts stretching across many labs and countries. "Traditional ways of making vaccines, which have worked well against other diseases, have largely failed for HIV," said Dr. Giuseppe Pantaleo of the University Hospital Center of Vaudois in Lausanne, Switzerland, one of the grantees.

ABC's 'This Week' Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent from Vermont. 9 a.m.:WMDT (Channel 47), 10 a.m.: WJLA (Channel 7), 10:30 a.m.: WMAR (Channel 2) CBS' 'Face the Nation' Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.; former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas; Dede Scozzafava, former Republican candidate for New York's 23rd Congressional district; Ed Gillespie, former Bush White House counselor. 10:30 a.m.:WUSA (Channel 9) and WJZ (Channel 13)