This is the VOA Special English Technology Report

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.
What do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison have in common? They all made billions of dollars in technology. And they all left college. Now, a wealthy businessman is paying other technologically talented young people to follow that same path.
Peter Thiel is paying them to drop out or at least to "stop out" of higher education temporarily to work on their interests. He and his Thiel Foundation just announced the first group of what they call 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows.
PETER THIEL: "We selected people on the basis of a combination of having demonstrated intense passion about science and technology and then having the drive to try to carry it forward in the years ahead."
There are twenty-four people to be exact, because a couple of projects involve more than one person.
One of the youngest is Laura Deming. At twelve she began researching ways to extend human life. Now, at seventeen, she has already graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Eighteen-year-old John Marbach just finished high school. He hopes to use Web tools to bring classrooms into the digital age. He plans to attend one semester of college before he begins his fellowship.
Each of the fellows will receive one hundred thousand dollars over two years to continue their research. They will also receive help from experts.
Peter Thiel has a lot of experience with technology start-up businesses. He helped create the electronic payment system PayPal. He was also one of the first investors in Facebook.
He himself is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School in California. But Mr. Thiel says college has changed.
PETER THIEL: "It's gotten a lot more expensive than when I attended school a quarter of a century ago. And so, if you look at how much college costs have gone up, you now have people graduating with a quarter million dollars worth of debt and they end up having to spend years or decades paying the debt off."
The Obama administration is pushing college. It says over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require more than a high school education. But Peter Thiel says many young people choose college for the wrong reasons.
PETER THIEL: "What I ended up doing, and what I think is still true of most of my peers and is true of most people today -- was simply to default into it. Talented, high school, what do you do? You go to college. Good in college, what do you do? You go to law school. Where education and higher education becomes almost this way for not thinking and avoiding thinking about what you're going to do with your life."
Mr. Thiel says the young people he is investing in are clear about what they want to do. At the very least, he says, they will gain experience to take back to school if that is what they decide to do.
More than four hundred people from twenty countries applied to the program. Later this year the Thiel Foundation plans to begin taking applications for the next group of fellows under the age of twenty.
And that's the VOA Special English Technology Report, written by June Simms. Tell us what you think at or on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. I'm Steve Ember.
This is IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.
This week, Serbia arrested one of Europe's most wanted men. Former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic spent sixteen years in hiding. He is accused of genocide and other crimes during the war fought after Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia announced charges against Mr. Mladic in nineteen ninety-five. He is charged with the killing of eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys that year at Srebrenica, a town on the border of Serbia. Srebrenica was supposed to have been protected as a United Nations "safe area."
Mr. Mladic is also accused of ordering or carrying out war crimes during the three years in which Sarajevo was surrounded and attacked.
His son, Darko Mladic, says his father is not in good health. He also says his father believes he is not guilty of the charges. But on Friday, a court in Belgrade ruled that Ratko Mladic is healthy enough to be tried in the Netherlands. His lawyer said he would appeal the ruling.
Russia, an ally of Serbia, has called for a fair trial.
The capture of Mr. Mladic was a condition for Serbia to become a candidate to join the European Union. Another condition has been the capture of former Croatian Serb political leader Goran Hadzic, who has yet to be arrested.
The wartime political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, was captured in two thousand eight. He also faced charges in The Hague, but his trial was suspended. Former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic also went before the tribunal, but he died during his trial.
Serbia has been under intense international pressure to arrest Ratko Mladic. President Boris Tadic announced that he was arrested Thursday morning. The former general was at a farmhouse in a village about one hundred kilometers from Belgrade.
The arrest happened during a visit by Catherine Ashton, the foreign policy chief for the European Union. But President Tadic dismissed the suggestion that the government could have acted sooner.
BORIS TADIC: "We are not making calculations when and how to deliver. We are doing that because we truly believe this is in accordance with our law."
The Serbian president said there will be an investigation into how Mr. Mladic avoided arrest for so long.
Kada Hotic from the Mothers of Srebrenica Association accused Serbia of knowingly hiding a man she calls a "monster." Still, she and other family members of victims welcomed the arrest, while some Bosnian Serbs expressed anger.
JAMES KER-LINDSAY: "Many Serbs, yes, do regard Ratko Mladic as some sort of hero."
James Ker-Lindsay is an expert on southeast Europe at the London School of Economics.
JAMES KER-LINDSAY: "They look to the events that took place in Bosnia and rather than seeing him as a military leader of an act of aggression rather view him as being the defender of the Bosnian Serb people. So in that sense, there is a certain degree of latent support for him."
But Mr. Ker-Lindsay says Serbs are conflicted because they understand that their country's future has to be a part of Europe.
JAMES KER-LINDSAY: "It's not about forgetting what took place in Bosnia or, indeed, the entire Western Balkans in the nineteen nineties. But it's about recognizing that Serbia's got to atone for this, pay its price and move on. And people understand that Mladic is absolutely central to that process."
And that's IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.
This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.
The "Arab Spring" in the Middle East and North Africa has raised hopes and dreams. But can it raise money to invest in a better future?
How to respond to the Arab uprisings was a major question for world leaders this week at the Group of Eight meeting in France. Earlier in the week, the head of the World Bank said international support can speed progress -- "but only if coupled with real reform."
World Bank President Robert Zoellick offered loans to Egypt and Tunisia. Tunisians and Egyptians led democracy protests that overthrew their presidents early this year.
President Obama discussed American development plans in his Middle East policy speech last week at the State Department.
BARACK OBAMA: "The goal must be a model in which protectionism gives way to openness, the reins of commerce pass from the few to the many and the economy generates jobs for the young. America's support for democracy will therefore be based on ensuring financial stability, promoting reform and integrating competitive markets with each other and the global economy. And we are going to start with Tunisia and Egypt."
The World Bank will offer Egypt four and a half billion dollars in loans over the next two years. The money would be part of a plan with the International Monetary Fund to help control Egypt's budget deficit.
The goal is to improve the country's credit rating in order to ease the concerns of investors and reduce borrowing costs. About two billion dollars in loans would be linked to progress in government reforms.
The World Bank also promised at least one billion dollars for Tunisia.
Twenty years ago, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development was created to help former communist countries after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, that bank could invest up to three and a half billion dollars in the Middle East and North Africa.
About four hundred million people live in those two areas. A majority are under the age of thirty. The anger of the many educated but unemployed young people has been a driving force in the Arab Spring movement.
Oil is the main export for many of the countries. Yet a recent World Bank study showed that oil has not done much to raise wages. Income growth continues to fall behind East Asia and South America.
Over the years, private investment has been limited largely to the oil industry. But there are some efforts to change that. In March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised two billion dollars through a government agency known as OPIC.
OPIC is the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. It works with Americans businesses to invest in projects in developing countries.
And that's the VOA Special English Economics Report, written by Mario Ritter. I'm Steve Ember.。