National

With Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the Walter Reed hospital scandal — maybe you thought that the incompetence of the White House had bottomed out.

The most recent round of exorbitant gasoline price hikes is hurting working Americans directly in the pocketbook and indirectly by feeding inflation. It is high time to seek alternatives.

In this historic center of African American cultural life, Harlem, the main issue today is the lack of affordable housing. Right now in Harlem, the prices of all forms of housing — from public projects to affordable rental and coop apartments for middle-income families under the city-state-federal Mitchell-Lama program, to condos — are going sky high.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee May 15 that he, as well as then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other senior Justice Department officials, threatened to resign en masse in 2004 to protest the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program which they viewed as illegal and unconstitutional.

On May 8, Federal Judge Kathleen Carbone cancelled the trial of Luis Posada Carriles on immigration fraud, set for May 11 in El Paso, Texas. She ruled that the government’s handling of the case had major flaws.
As a result, Posada, a self-admitted terrorist who some call “the bin Laden of the Americas,” is again walking free.

By next fall President Bush “may find himself standing alone” on his Iraq war policy. That was the warning from Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, commenting on Bush’s White House meeting with 11 Republican House members, May 10, in which they bluntly warned him that time is running out on the U.S. military role in Iraq.

The tug of war over the due process rights of the 385 prisoners still detained by the Bush administration at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, goes on, in and out of Congress.

El noviembre pasado, los votantes en el estado de Dakota del Sur derrotaron una prohibición sobre el aborto por un margen de 12 puntos.

Oregon Gov. Tom Kulongoski lived on $21 worth of food for a week — the average weekly food stamp budget for his state’s residents — during Hunger Awareness Week, April 20-27. Oregon Food Bank spokesperson Jean Kemp-Ware said the governor’s initiative dramatized the plight of 425,000 Oregonians who rely on food stamps to stave off hunger each month.

CHICAGO — Dedra Farmer was so good at her job as a Wal-Mart department manager in Oklahoma that her bosses assigned her to train new Tire and Lube Express Division managers, all of whom were men. After she got done training them, the men went to work for $2,000 more a year than she got paid.