The mortgage foreclosure crisis has caused a drop in cities’ revenues, a spike in crime, more homelessness and an increase in vacant properties, a survey of elected local officials out today shows. About two-thirds of 211 officials surveyed by the National League of Cities reported an increase in foreclosures in their cities in the past year, according to the online and e-mail questionnaire. A third of them reported a drop in revenues and an increase in abandoned and vacant properties and urban blight. SURRENDER: Mortgage lenders see more borrowers give up ‘There’s a reduction in revenues at the same time that more services are needed,’ says Cynthia McCollum, president of the National League of Cities and councilwoman in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville. ‘Because of foreclosures, people are stealing, crime is on the rise and we don’t have more money for cops on the street.’ More than a fifth of city officials responding said homelessness and the need for temporary and emergency housing increased in the past year. The ills of foreclosures are dominating the agenda of the league’s meeting with congressional lawmakers in Washington, D.C., this week to secure federal funding for local […]
WASHINGTON — House Democratic leaders unveiled legislation Tuesday to update the nation’s wiretapping program, rejecting a Senate-passed version of the bill that would give telecommunications companies legal immunity for agreeing to participate in the program after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. President Bush and House Republicans have insisted that the House pass the Senate version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill. Instead, top Democrats — including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes and Judiciary Chairman John Conyers — proposed that lawsuits against the phone companies could move forward through U.S. district courts. The government has effectively frozen all litigation by invoking the ‘state secrets’ doctrine, arguing that documents detailing the phone companies’ activities are classified. Under the proposed legislation, the companies would be able to argue their cases in court and present classified evidence to a judge during a closed proceeding without the presence of the plaintiffs. ‘We are not going to cave in to a retroactive immunity situation,’ Conyers said. He argued that ‘there’s no law school example in our memory that gives retroactive immunity for something you don’t know what you are giving it for. It […]
VATICAN CITY — Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of ‘new’ sins such as causing environmental blight. The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican’s number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils. Asked what he believed were today’s ‘new sins,’ he told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics. ‘(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control,’ he said. The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning. Girotti, in an interview headlined ‘New Forms of Social Sin,’ also listed ‘ecological’ offences as modern evils. In recent months, Pope Benedict has made several strong appeals for the protection of the environment, saying issues such as climate change had […]
Bread, eggs, milk prices up sharply American families, already pinched by soaring energy costs, are taking another big hit to household budgets as food prices increase at the fastest rate since 1990. After nearly two decades of low food inflation, prices for staples such as bread, milk, eggs, and flour are rising sharply, surging in the past year at double-digit rates, according to the Labor Department. Milk prices, for example, increased 26 percent over the year. Egg prices jumped 40 percent. Escalating food costs could present a greater problem than soaring oil prices for the national economy because the average household spends three times as much for food as for gasoline. Food accounts for about 13 percent of household spending compared with about 4 percent for gas. Rising food prices can be particularly corrosive to consumer confidence because people are so frequently exposed to the cost increases. ‘It’s the biggest risk we face economically, and it might be the thing that does us in,’ said Rich Yamarone, director of economic research at Argus Research Corp. in New York. ‘There’s nothing really worse than having a job, making money, and forking most of it over just […]
WASHINGTON — An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network. The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime. The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a ‘direct operational link’ between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report. He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn’t due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday. President Bush and his aides used Saddam’s alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had ‘bulletproof’ […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
