By TODD HARTMAN
Allegations that enormous stores of new equipment were thrown away in the haste to close the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and earn the contractor early cleanup bonuses have been lodged by several workers.
Global free trade talks, billed as a once in a generation chance to boost growth and ease poverty, collapsed on Monday after nearly five years of haggling and resuming them could take years.
Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut on Sunday promised a bruising fight in the U.S. Senate against confirming John Bolton to be the country’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Although President George W. Bush’s poll numbers continue to inch back upward after record lows, his dismal job approval ratings are not encouraging to Republicans and still give Democrats hope for recapturing control of Congress in the November midterm elections. But four months is an eternity in politics.
President George W. Bush’s carefully-crafted facade of Republican unity is coming apart at the seams as more and more of his former party faithful bail because of his disaster in Iraq.
A longtime friend, a career soldier, returned home from Iraq recently and said that, sadly, he is thinking of retiring. After a record of service that extends from Vietnam to Panama to Desert Storm and, finally, to the invasion of Iraq, he says the will to serve his country is gone. “This country used to stand for things that meant something,” he said. “Not now. Honor, justice, loyalty, pride: None of these words have any meaning now.”
By NICHOLAS BEADLE
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire
It is the nine-digit key to your life — and B.J. Ostergren has more than 18,000 of them.
For the past four years, the 57-year-old former insurance adjuster has lost sleep to gain boxes crammed with public records, many plucked from county clerks and recorders’ Web sites. They have one golden kernel: Social Security numbers, usually partnered with enough information to open a fraudulent line of credit — or worse.
The Army’s aggressive 4th Infantry Division made headlines by capturing Saddam Hussein but the unit’s over-the-top treatment of Iraqi civilians fueled the insurgency that plunges the country into an unstoppable civil war.