“It gives me pleasure to announce to the entire citizenry of New York that we have a proposed agreement,” Local 100 union president Roger Toussaint told a crowd at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown where round-the-clock talks have been held since Friday.
Having been a proud owner of the Palm V for 2 years, not only was I searching for an elegant looking PDA, but also one that provided adequate memory, expandability and a color screen .The Sony CLIE PEG SJ30 was perfectly suited to my needs so I picked one up last weekend.
The SJ30 uses the standard Palm OS 4.1 but adds a few flourishes to the basic theme: a high-resolution, color screen; 16MB of RAM; a Memory Stick slot; (which is especially useful if you want to carry around family photos) and extra software for viewing or editing images. The unit uses a 33MHz DragonBall VZ processor which will adequately handle most tasks with ease and the built-in lithium-ion battery delivers an acceptable amount of operating time
There are hundreds of third party software available for the Palm OS that I find very useful. In addition, the avant go service provides a prefect vehicle that allows me to stay apprised of current events even when I'm away from my PC.
This model will appeal to those who don't need all the extra bells and whistles and are simply looking for a well-designed, moderately priced, color PDA. I highly recommend it.
A combination of factors makes North Korea uniquely dangerous. It has an unpredictable and untrustworthy dictator, an economy in free fall and a two-track nuclear weapons effort that appears more advanced than Iraq's. ... Washington seems to think that it can afford the luxury of deferring the North Korean problem until it has finished disarming Iraq. It cannot. [more]The situation is a lot more complicated than it seems, indeed. Read on and judge for yourself.
The American people know that U.S. forces handily defeated the Iraqi military in 1991 and that American bombs have already begun to drop on Iraq a decade later. What has happened since then and why the need to return?
These are questions for which few Americans have the answers, yet informed citizenship depends on them, according to University of New Hampshire professor and media analyst Joshua Meyrowitz.
Meyrowitz argued that by reporting mostly what government sources say, the American media have become instruments of war propaganda, thereby crippling their audience’s ability to find the truth or to hold their leaders accountable. Journalists in bed with the government have spawned an impaired version of free speech, but Americans take freedom for granted, so they don’t pressure the media to protect it, he said.
Gov.-elect Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has vowed to rescind Maryland's death penalty moratorium as soon as he's sworn into office. If so, seven inmates currently on death row - six of whom are black - could soon be eligible for execution.
Yet a statewide poll conducted earlier this year found that at least 60 percent of African-Americans support the current moratorium on the use of the death penalty.
Consider: Maryland has one of the highest percentages of black death row inmates in the country - more than 70 percent. Although most murder victims are black, the 12 men on Maryland's death row were convicted of killing white people. Nine of them were convicted in Baltimore County.
Several prominent people have raised concerns about the fairness of the death penalty, including two sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices who have publicly expressed reservations.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told a law conference last year, "If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed."
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a speech that she had "yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on the eve of execution petitions in which the defendant was well represented at trial."
In fact, the Supreme Court has recently agreed to consider the case of a Maryland death row inmate, Kevin Wiggins, who claims he was sentenced to death because of incompetent representation.
African-Americans and other people of color deal with a broad range of economic, educational and political inequities that are embedded deeply in our culture. Racial profiling, police brutality, poor legal representation and false imprisonment persist in a system that often fails to deliver equal justice under the law. [more]
If you are talking straight lyricists - artists who can paint pictures in your mind with the use of clever wordplay, metaphors and words with double-meanings, it doesn't get any better than Nas and GZA. Both steeped in consciousness, MC battles, commercial success and New York City folklore, you would be hard-pressed to find any two MCs better than the Queens and Brooklyn-natives.(Via Black Electorate.com)
" I personally have the energy and drive and ambition to make another campaign, but I don't think that it 's the right thing for me to do.'"
"I think the current policies have to be changed," Gore said. "I think that my best way of contributing to that result may not be as a candidate this time around."Gone but not to be silenced any time soon, I'm sure.
Moments before the midnight deadline, Transport Union Workers secretary-treasurer Ed Watt said "we have made sufficient progress to stop the clock" and continue negotiations.
"I believe that there is plenty of opportunity to resolve this contract before midnight tonight. I say this because the issues we have presented are relatively simple issues, and at the point at which the MTA has decided that it wants to be helpful in addressing those issues, they will be resolved very quickly." (Complete transcript of his statement.)At a 4 p.m. Sunday press conference with Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the mayor said "nobody knows at this point if there will be" a strike, but that the public should go to sleep tonight "assuming there is a strike. And when they wake up in the morning they might be pleasantly surprise."
Q: Who is negotiating?
A: The Transport Workers Union, which represents 34,000 city subway and bus workers, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the transit system.
Q: What does the union want?
A: The union is seeking 6 percent raises for each of three years, better health benefits and changes in the way the MTA disciplines its employees. It also wants the MTA to ensure better safety procedures for employees; two subway workers were killed in two days last month.
Q: What has the MTA offered?
A: The MTA, which is facing projected deficits and has proposed fare increases, has offered no raises for the first year of the contract and possible raises the second and third year if the union agrees to productivity increases. It has offered to spend $60 million more on health coverage over the next year and relax its disciplinary procedures. During the third year of the contract, the MTA wants workers to contribute 2.3 percent more of their income to a pension fund. [more]
