September 16, 2010

Pa. ordeal raises new questions about states' info-gathering

By John Gramlich, Stateline Staff Writer

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has canceled a $125,000 contract with a consulting firm that sent a bulletin to the state's Office of Homeland Security in which it described opponents of natural gas drilling as "environmental extremists" and suggested they were a threat to the state.

Rendell told reporters in a news conference on Tuesday (Sept. 15) that Pennsylvania would cancel its deal with the firm, the Institute of Terrorism Response and Research, which also identified animal rights demonstrations and anti-war events as potential security threats to the state.


As the Aging Stoop to Their Labors, Prosperous Pundits Lecture Them About Sacrifice

By Richard Eskow
Created 09/15/2010 - 3:48am

The aging American workforce has been vilified a lot lately, in much the same way the poor were in previous decades. Politicians who once might have spread myths about "welfare queens" are now describing retired people as "greedy geezers." Not to be outdone, well-paid pundits are rushing to lecture people on their moral failings and urging them to rediscover the nobility of sacrifice. But sacrifice for whom, exactly, and to what end? It doesn't seem to matter - and that's the problem.

Fortunately, not everyone's joining the crusade. Today's shining example is John Leland from the New York Times, [1] who took the time to review the data on aging workers. What's more, he even went out and talked to some of them.

Here's what Mr. Leland learned. As a new analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research demonstrates, "one in three workers over age 58 does a physically demanding job ... including hammering nails, bending under sinks, lifting baggage -- (a job) can be radically different at age 69 than at age 62. " Leland also met workers like 58-year-old Jack Hartley, who "works a 12-hour shift assembling tires: pulling piles of rubber and lining over a drum, cutting the material with a hot knife, lifting the half-finished tire, which weighs 10 to 20 pounds, and throwing it onto a rack."


Graveyard DNA rewrites African American history

13:43 16 September 2010
by Shanta Barley

Two of Christopher Columbus's shipmates were the first Africans to set foot in the New World, a study has found.

Using DNA analysis of human bones excavated from a graveyard in La Isabela, Dominican Republic – the first colonial town in the Americas – the new study adds weight to the theory that Africans crossed the Atlantic at least 150 years earlier than previously thought.