National

Economists are warning that a crisis is looming in the home mortgage industry that could eclipse the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies seven years ago. It has the potential of plunging the nation into a recession.

No Child Left Behind is losing support, including from Republicans. It has produced a huge shift towards standardized testing, using test scores to narrowly gauge success of teachers, principals and schools, increasing bureaucratic constraints, and, perhaps most significantly, pressures towards privatization.

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Hundreds of people from Massachusetts and Rhode Island rallied here March 17 in support of 361 undocumented workers who were arrested in a government raid earlier this month at a New Bedford garment factory.

CHICAGO — By a 45-0 vote, Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City Council approved a resolution March 13 calling on President Bush to issue a moratorium immediately on all immigration raids and deportations not related to national security or criminal activity, and especially those involving immigrant parents with U.S.-citizen children.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Behind all the furor around U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, one of eight federal prosecutors who were fired by the Bush administration, was an effort by the Republican Party to suppress massive voter registration in New Mexico during the 2004 election.

WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands protested the Iraq war in Washington and in cities and towns across the nation the weekend of March 16-19, the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

NEW BEDFORD, Massachussets – Las redadas y arrestos por agentes de inmigración y aduana (ICE por sus siglas en inglés) fue motivo de gran ira a través del estado de Massachussets la semana pasada. Los arrestos de 361 inmigrantes, mayormente mujeres, que dejó a cientos de niños traumatizados, fueron en la compañía Michael Bianco, Inc.

Forty-five dollars for a six-pack of Pepsi; $99 to wash a load of clothes. You’d have to be crazy to pay such prices. Right? Wrong. This is what Halliburton has been charging in Iraq.

“Mistakes were made,” intoned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, attempting to explain away the mass firing of eight U.S. Attorneys last year. The real reason was not their job performance but rather their failure to display sufficient loyalty to George W. Bush and his drive to clamp permanent Republican control on the White House and the nation.

As a child of eight, I came to the United States from Port of Spain, Trinidad, British West Indies. My mother and father had come to this country two years earlier, in 1922, when their economic status had been worsened as a result of the drop in the cocoa trade (on the world market) from the West Indies which had impoverished the West Indies and the entire Caribbean.