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News you can use
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Last month, after the fire and explosion in West, Texas, and shortly after one of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's business recruiting trips to California, to lure companies to relocate in “business friendly” Texas, a cartoon appeared in the Sacramento Bee, showing the governor making one of his pitches for businesses to come to Texas where there are “Low Taxes” and “Low Regulations” and where “Business is booming in Texas!” The next panel of the cartoon shows the blast at West Fertilizer, exclaiming a large “BOOM!” in red letters and...
The IRS tempest in a teapot should not be about how the IRS investigates political organizations that file for 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Rather, it should be about why we have thousands, or, for that matter, any, tax-exempt political non-profits in the first place. This tax-exempt status, especially the 501(c)4 organizations, rather than the usual 501(c)3 nonprofits, is rightly subjected to more than the usual IRS scrutiny because these are the organizations most likely to misuse their status. They are not required to make...
The Havre-Hill County Library has been a focus of social life in the city and county for the more than 30 years that Bonnie Williamson was the library director. She made the library the weekly center for dozens of public service and assistance programs and year-round free arts, humanities and current events programs. Children's programs brought dozens of young people into the library every week to enjoy the interactive story-telling, music, dance, poetry, and writing events. It was a vibrant and dynamic place. Under...
On April 24th, at 9 a.m., in a crowded suburb of the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, the eight-story Rana Plaza building, completed in 2010, collapsed, killing more than 800 workers trapped in the rubble, with more still missing. In 2007, the local mayor had illegally issued a building permit for a five-story building. The owner, Muhammed Sohel Rana, a wealthy member of the ruling national Awami Party, had added another three stories, without adequate foundation, and without any permit. According to the building's architects,...
Bernstein The Bureau of Indian Affairs was created in 1824 by the War Department of the U.S. government. Its main function was to control Native American opposition to white American expansion into Indian lands. The bureau became a part of the Interior Department in 1849, and the concept of containing the Indians within a system of reservations became official government policy. Today, the bureau costs U.S. taxpayers about $3 billion dollars a year. Its primary purpose seems to be to attempt to legitimize the 200-year-old...
Norman Bernstein Last month, after the fire and explosion in West, Texas, and shortly after one of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's business recruiting trips to California, to lure companies to relocate in "business friendly" Texas, a cartoon appeared in the Sacramento Bee, showing the governor making one of his pitches for businesses to come to Texas where there are "Low Taxes" and "Low Regulations" and where "Business is booming in Texas!" The next panel of the cartoon shows the blast at West Fertilizer, exclaiming a large "BOOM!"...
The Indian Health Service, underbudgeted and understaffed, operates almost 500 health care centers across the country. Most of them are in areas of significant public health challenges, mainly on Indian reservations, where poverty, disease and substance abuse are rampant. Norman Bernstein According to the agency's director, the Indian Health Service's Catastrophic Health Emergency Fund, which is used for trauma care and major surgeries, as well as other catastrophic events, will run out of money before the end of the year,...
The IRS tempest in a teapot should not be about how the IRS investigates political organizations that file for 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Rather, it should be about why we have thousands, or, for that matter, any, tax-exempt political non-profits in the first place. This tax-exempt status, especially the 501(c)4 organizations, rather than the usual 501(c)3 nonprofits, is rightly subjected to more than the usual IRS scrutiny because these are the organizations most likely to misuse their status. They are not required to make...
We are now a few weeks into the Major League Baseball season, with the same, predictable steroid-laden lack of baseball, which is supposed to be a team sport, but has become a race for individual statistics, above all else. With so much money at stake, the game, itself, takes a back seat to the marketing of new records and new "superstars," and new products, designed to take more money out of your pockets and put it into the pockets of the billionaire owners and the millionaire players. The club owners were finally forced,...
Hydraulic fracturing, commonly called fracking, has been used since the 1940s. The purpose is to fracture the shale, allowing the natural gas, or oil, to flow more freely up to the wellhead. The original vertical fracking was much less damaging than is today's method of horizontal fracking, where the well is first drilled vertically, then the drill bit is turned to drill horizontally into the rock formation. A solution of from 3 to 8 million gallons of water per well, 5,000 to 7,000 gallons of chemicals, and silica (sand) in...
Hydraulic fracturing, commonly called fracking, has been used since the 1940s. The purpose is to fracture the shale, allowing the natural gas, or oil, to flow more freely up to the wellhead. The original vertical fracking was much less damaging than is today's method of horizontal fracking, where the well is first drilled vertically, then the drill bit is turned to drill horizontally into the rock formation. Norman Bernstein A solution of from 3 to 8 million gallons of water per well, 5,000 to 7,000 gallons of chemicals, and...
Norman Bernstein The Havre-Hill County Library has been a focus of social life in the city and county for the more than 30 years that Bonnie Williamson was the library director. She made the library the weekly center for dozens of public service and assistance programs and year-round free arts, humanities and current events programs. Children's programs brought dozens of young people into the library every week to enjoy the interactive story-telling, music, dance, poetry, and writing events. It was a vibrant and dynamic...
Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher's partner in foreign affairs, and her mirror image in domestic affairs, was president of the United States from 1981 to 1989, during which time the U.S. national debt tripled, from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion. His administration reduced taxes on the wealthiest Americans by 60 percent, ordered vast increases in military spending, attacked labor unions across the board, caused a reduction in hourly wages, a rise in unemployment as unskilled jobs disappeared, and forced more and more wives...
On April 24, at 9 a.m., in a crowded suburb of the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, the eight-story Rana Plaza building, completed in 2010, collapsed, killing more than 800 workers trapped in the rubble, with more still missing. In 2007, the local mayor had illegally issued a building permit for a five-story building. The owner, Muhammed Sohel Rana, a wealthy member of the ruling national Awami Party, had added another three stories, without adequate foundation, and without any permit. According to the building's architects,...
A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for. — Robert Browning, 1855 About 2,400 years ago, Plato wrote, "Music and dance are more potent instruments than any other for education because the rhythm and harmony find their way in the inward places of the soul." Painting, sculpting, writing, dancing, music, acting, all of the arts, help us to express our thoughts and feelings. They provide us with tools for coping with — and changing — the social landscape. The arts are a connection between history and today...
John Maresca, Union Oil of California's (UNOCAL) vice president for international relations, testified before the House Committee on International Relations on Feb. 12, 1998, that Afghanistan and the Central Asian region, historically a rich mineral resource region since the days of Marco Polo and the great Silk Road, contains significant oil and gas and other mineral reserves and that the most efficient way of meeting the expanding petroleum needs of Asia and Western Europe is the construction of a pipeline across...
A Catholic friend recently told me, "What we are faced with is a circumstance where it is sometimes an embarrassment to be a Catholic," not for reasons of religion, but for reasons of church government. He went on to say that hopefully, with the selection of a new Pope, there will soon be more affirmative action in addressing the ongoing suffering caused by the coverup, over several decades, of the facts associated with priests who were and are sexual predators. Norman Bernstein Only then, he said, can we make sure that the...
Moving on from last week's column on the Indian Health Service and Israel, the question becomes, why does the United States support the relatively sophisticated reservation in the Middle East known as Israel, as opposed to the relatively crude reservations we created, for our own purposes, for the Indian in America? To quote the late Sen. Jesse Helms, Israel is "America's aircraft carrier in the Middle East." Since its founding in 1948, the state of Israel has been economically and militarily dependent on the United States...
