The music and video game seller reported on Thursday that it earned $2.8 million, or 9 cents per share, for the period ended April 28. That compares with a loss of $2.5 million, or 8 cents per share, a year earlier.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Trans World Entertainment Corp. returned to a profit in its fiscal first quarter as expenses declined. Its stock soared to a new high after the earnings were released.

Selling, general and administrative expenses fell to $37.3 million from $48.3 million. Other expenses dropped as well.

Trans World Entertainment, based in Albany, N.Y., operates stores under the f.y.e. for your entertainment and Suncoast names.

Revenue at stores open at least a year climbed 1 percent. This metric is a key gauge of a retailer’s health because it excludes results from stores recently opened or closed.

The company’s shares jumped 45 cents, or 17.9 percent, to $2.96 in afternoon trading. Earlier in the session, the stock hit a 52-week high of $3.11.

Purchase information: Buy it here.

I always talk about how much I love oversized sunglasses and groovy chicks I see on the street can’t stop talking about them, either. Hollywood certainly isn’t stopping on this look, nor is the runway… I just can’t get enough! And at just $10, these glasses are a steal of the week!

The Isabel Toledo for Payless collection is just starting to become available on Payless.com, and all the shoe and handbag styles will be available in Payless stores in September.  This chic, sporty flat by designer Isabel Toledo features a high-shine crinkled metallic upper, coordinating pleated cap toe, stretchy drawstring Ghillie laces and a flexible outsole. Manmade materials, sized 6-11.

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By Sasha Charnin Morrison for UsMagazine.com. To read more of the Recessionista blog, click here.

The basic design of the Ghillie shoe has a soft sole with sides that go partway up the foot, joined with sturdy laces which may wrap around the ankle and up the leg so the shoe is secure. Great with short skirts, jumpers or khakis.

Orange made a splash on the runways for Spring, but it remained to be seen whether anyone would brave the shade in the real world. Remained, that is, until last night. Drew Barrymore at Emmy Rossum both wore head-to-toe orange stepping out on opposite coasts: Barrymore, in floor-length Jil Sander, in Hollywood at Cover Girl’s 50th anniversary party, and Rossum, in J. Mendel, in New York on Live With Jimmy Fallon. (Chloë Sevigny, ever the early adopter, wore orange last Friday—but we’re honor-bound to report that it was as a Knicks color at a Knicks game.) Will there be more sunshine-bright looks to come? Time will tell. But if you’re looking for an entry point to the trend with a slightly smaller commitment, there’s always the runway-to-reality beauty trend of the moment, a bright orange lip, or Spring’s rash of brilliant accessories, hitting stores now: from left, Prada’s furs to Michael Kors’ ladylike handbag to Tila March’s two-tone tote.

However, a number of artists have complained that they see very little money from streaming services.

The singer-songwriter said he was "amazed" by the achievement.

However, the OCC said in 2009 it was "bound to" include streaming and subscription services at some point.

"Streaming services and online in general have always been an important way for me to get music out to my fans," he added.

It says it is holding discussions with YouTube about creating a stand-alone chart for streaming video over the coming months.

It will launch the new chart on its website next Monday, 14 May, at 13:00 BST.

Continue reading the main story Most-streamed artists in 2012 1 Ed Sheeran 2 Lana Del Rey 3 David Guetta 4 Rihanna (pictured) 5 Coldplay 6 Gotye 7 Jessie J 8 Emeli Sande 9 Florence and the Machine 10 Drake

"It's set up to be a little bit more fair for the labels than it is for the artists, I think," said Patrick Carney from rock group Black Keys last year.

End Quote Rory Cellan-Jones BBC Technology Correspondent Read Rory's blog

Continue reading the main story “Start Quote

"A new official streaming chart that recognises another way of enjoying music can only be a good thing."

A stand-alone download chart was first launched in 2004. Within a year, downloads were incorporated into the main singles chart and, by 2006, Gnarls Barkley had scored the first ever number one single based on download sales alone.

However, it noted that YouTube dwarfed other services in the market, accounting for about 55% of all music streamed online.

The arrival of a streaming chart means that a new way of getting access to music has come of age”

According to figures released by the OCC, the most-streamed track in the UK this year is former number one Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know.

The top 100 rundown will be compiled by the Official Charts Company (OCC) using statistics from audio streaming sites such as Spotify, We7 and Deezer.

There is no word on whether the streaming services will later be included in the mainstream top 40, as they are in America.

In 2011, digital sales accounted for 98.4% of all singles sold in the UK, and 23.5% of albums.

Some 26% of consumers streamed music online or watched it on YouTube, compared to 17% who listened to downloads, it reported last year.

In the UK, it is worth £35m, according to the BPI, accounting for about 4.5% of total music industry revenues.

Figures represent the year to 28 April

BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor added the chart would "provide fresh insight into the consumption patterns of music buyers".

The popularity of music streamed on-demand is to be measured in a new weekly chart.

Carney went on to explain that his band had decided to withhold their critically-acclaimed album El Camino from Spotify.

The Official Charts Company estimates that 2.6bn audio streams were delivered in the UK last year.

However, Ed Sheeran is the most popular artist - with three of his songs, Drunk, Lego House and The A Team, all featuring in the top 20 most-streamed tracks.

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Source: Official Charts Company

One could draw a comparison to the emergence of digital downloads in the early 2000s.

Nielsen Soundscan, which compiles the US Billboard Charts, has previously reported that streaming services are now more popular than paid-for downloads.

However, video streaming services, including YouTube, will not contribute to the new chart for the time being.

‘Important’

The OCC's latest initiative comes a few weeks after it launched a chart reflecting album sales in independent records stores across the UK.

"It still isn't at a point where you're able to replace royalties from record sales with the royalties from streams," he told VH1.

There are people who will not look the other way when buying what they like, so the good news is that the J. Brand Houlihan is back from a major re-order and is available now for $231.

But the greatest news is that Victoria’s Secret has replicated this staple in sizes from 0-16, two lengths for girls who need less or more, and they offer the style not only in classic olive but also in three other colors (black, beige, brown). All this, and they retail for only $59.50! (Find the Skinny Cargo Ankle-Zip style here.)

It’s no secret that Victoria’s Secret has always delivered or mirrored high fashion for less. But sometimes people completely forget that you can get amazing fashion online in addition to stocking up on your lacy undergarments. After I cruise the thongs and knickers, I head over to fashion and find amazing pieces that look exactly like the ones celebs crave (Julianne Moore adores them) - but you and I can afford. Our news director, Lara Cohen, was surfing the site last night and sent me a link to these cargos that look, well, very close to the original J. Brand Houlihan design.

The utilitarian look is hot for fall, so buying these will be a great purchase to take you through the Fall/Winter season and on. Layer with an animal print soft chiffon top and a fitted leather jacket. Add a heel…and you’re good to go!

CLICK FOR A SLIDESHOW of a few of our favorites.

Photo: WPA Pool/Getty Images (Beckham); Jorge Herrera / WireImage (Cameron)

"The continued use of this pejorative term has no place in the US Code," Mr Conrad said on the Senate floor.

The word enters the American medical lexicon in the 19th Century with the development of modern psychiatry, says medical historian Gerald Grob, an emeritus professor at Rutgers University.

"Any move to present those conditions in a more neutral and scientifically informed way should be welcomed."

Researchers and scholars note that the removal of the word "lunatic" illustrates plainly how quickly language evolves - and warn journalists, legislators and medical professionals not to get too attached to the new vocabulary.

In the US, a 2010 act of Congress replaced "mental retardation" with "intellectual disabilities" in several places in the US Code.

The word may have entered English through Norman French, which received it from late Latin.

Thanne loked up a lunatik, a leene thyng withalle

"The written laws of the US, let alone the ones at the state level, are official pronouncements," says Bob Carolla, a spokesman for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

'Drunkards' and 'idiots'

Advocates say the moves are not merely politically correct word-policing, but legitimate attempts to ease the debilitating stigma attached to mental illness and developmental disability.

The words "insane" and "insane person" and "lunatic" shall include every idiot, lunatic, insane person, and person non compos mentis;

The US law that would be amended by the new bill was passed in 1947. In the Senate, Kent Conrad said federal law should reflect the 21st Century understanding of mental illness, a notion shared by scholars.

Last month, Senators Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican, and Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, proposed the 21st Century Language Act, a 257-word bill that would strip the word out.

Tennessee last year passed a law replacing "handicapped" with "having a disability" and "idiot, lunatic, person of unsound mind" with "person adjudicated incompetent". In 2009, the state of Maine inserted "person with alcoholism" in the place of "common drunkard" and "person who is legally incompetent" for "lunatic".

The bill is the latest in a series of efforts in the US and Britain to strike terms for mental illness and developmental disability that are deemed antiquated and offensive from the law and from public discourse.

In English, it first appears in the South English Legendary, a verse compendium of saints' lives composed in the 13th Century near Gloucester. Roughly a century later, it shows up in The Vision of Piers Plowman, the late-14th Century allegorical poem by William Langland.

Continue reading the main story 'Lunatic' in Piers Plowman, by Langland, 14th Century England

Not only is the word "lunatic" older than the current understanding of mental illness - it is far older than the English language itself.

The word, written in Latin as "lunaticus", an adjective, first appears in writing in the 4th Century Vulgate Bible, attributed to St Jerome.

End Quote Allan Horowitz Rutgers University sociologist

When it originally was put in the law, it didn’t have the same connotations that it has today. It wasn’t intentionally derogatory - it became so over time”

And kneeling before the king well speaking said:

The preferred terminology is "people-first" language that does not define individuals diagnosed with mental illness by the condition.

Many experts say they are surprised a term that in antiquity referred to madness influenced by the lunar cycle survives in such a prominent place in the US Code - its very first section.

"It sort of captures them in a snap shot as this dangerous, unpredictable, different soul," he says.

"The impulse to define people by a characteristic, and in particular a disability or an illness, is very dehumanising."

The OED says the word originally referred to a kind of insanity supposedly dependent on the phases of the moon.

Continue reading the main story “Start Quote

"Christ keep thee sir King, and thy kingdom"

"Crist kepe thee, sire Kyng, and thi kyngryche"

Passed through languages

In Matthew 17:15, a man asks Jesus to have mercy on his son who "lunaticus est". More than a millennium later, the compilers of the King James Version rendered the passage with "lunatick".

"It can show up in court proceedings, it can show up in any kind of legal citation or boilerplate. Anyone with a mental illness is never going to know when they're going to be slapped in the face by it, and it's coming in a very official context."

In the Digest, a 6th Century legal code ordered compiled by the Emperor Justinian, "lunatic" shows up in a passage discussing the value of slaves.

"'Lunatic' was a descriptive word," he says. "Today we would use 'mental illness' or the like."

Then looked up a lunatic, a lean thing withal

"'Lunatic' is an unnecessary term and… its removal will have no impact on the broader federal law."

"This thinking is definitely antiquated and it needs to disappear," says Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University in Illinois, and author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.

Mental health advocates describe the move as a small step toward healing the stigma of mental illness.

"If somebody has a diagnosis of schizophrenia, that may be a significant thing in their life but it isn't their whole being, their whole identity," says Eduardo Vega, director of the California Center for Dignity, Social Inclusion and Stigma Elimination.

Modern English:

Two US senators have proposed to excise the word "lunatic" from federal law, calling it outdated and offensive. What are the word's origins and why is it so offensive?

And only later did it develop an offensive, pejorative connotation, researchers say.

The word "lunatic" has been codified into US law so long it has outlasted its currency in the psychiatric profession.

The word stems from the Latin "luna" meaning moon, with the "atic" suffix meaning "of the kind of", according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word "lunatic" connotes danger, wildness and unpredictability, says Prof Patrick Corrigan, a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

US Code/Cornell Legal Information Institute

The US Code is the official codification of US federal laws. In it, the word "lunatic" appears in a section of basic definitions, and later in a tract dealing with bank mergers.

The 21st Century Language Act does not include replacement language.

Original Middle English:

And knelynge to the Kyng clergially he seide

Source: Project Gutenberg; Harvard University

Advocates say 'lunatic' unfairly connotes danger and unpredictability Dangerous and unpredictable

"I would be confident that 100 years from now, the terms that we now see as enlightened will be seen in the same way that we consider these old-fashioned terms," says Allan Horowitz, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University who studies mental illness.

Continue reading the main story The Law: 1 USC Sec 1

The word "lunatic" thus developed a sordid, hateful association, and it dropped out of the medical lexicon by the end of the 19th Century, Prof Grob says. It was replaced by "insane", and subsequently by "mental illness".

By Sasha Charnin Morrison for UsMagazine.com. To read more of the Recessionista blog, click here.

I love Malandrino’s clothes and have been a fan since she started. Wow, was I happy to see these super chic, Eco-friendly totes that are just so divine. The playful sketches on the J’ai Deux Amours (Love of Two Cities) bag showcase iconic symbols from New York and Paris, giving a basic tote shape some personal style. 

Available throughout the Spring/Summer season in Catherine Malandrino boutiques worldwide, the lightweight, city-chic tote is a perfect beach, travel and shopping tote for the season. It is made from 95% recycled materials and the retail price will be only $25!

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Celebs’ favorite designer, Catherine Malandrino, has designed a super cute tote bag to be sold in stores starting April 17, just in time for Earth Day.

JACKSON, Miss. - The U.S. State Department says it is making major changes to its premier student-exchange program following an investigation by The Associated Press that found widespread abuses.

The AP investigation found some participants working in strip clubs, not always willingly, while others were put in living and working conditions they compared to indentured servitude.

Officials say the new rules limit the hours and jobs participants can work and make clear the program is about fostering cultural understanding.