contributions

By John Braddock
Provisional results from Saturday’s New Zealand elections have put neither of the two major parties, Labour or National, in a position to form a government. The incumbent Labour Party leads by a narrow margin of 23,000 votes with 218,000 special votes still to be counted. As it stands, the result gives Labour 40.7 percent of the vote (50 seats) and National 39.6 percent (49 seats). Both would need to stitch together a shaky coalition with more than one of the minor parties (…)

By Peter Schwarz
The result of the election for the German parliament (Bundestag) on Sunday can be interpreted in only one way: policies based on welfare cuts and the re-division of social wealth to benefit the rich have met with bitter resistance from the German population and been vigorously rejected.
Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had arranged the early election in order to create a stable parliamentary majority for the implementation of his thoroughly unpopular program of (…)

By William Fisher After three days of hearings on the confirmation of Judge John G. Roberts to be the seventeenth Chief Justice of the United States, what the public has learned is that the nominee appears to be as much Talmudic scholar as jurist. In the relatively few questions he did not duck altogether by saying they related to issues likely to come before the Court, or by claiming the views he wrote were those of the administrations he has worked for in the past, Roberts responded (…)

by Daniel Patrick Welch
The Hurricane Katrina disaster is bringing out an instinct to help from schools, churches and groups all over the world. However, students at The Greenhouse School are taking a unique approach to helping victims of Katrina—and one that is familiar at the same time. “We wanted to do something, like a lot of people, but we wanted it to be special and in line with how we work,” said Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde, the school’s assistant director.
She and her colleague, (…)

By Jason Leopold
A funeral services company which recently learned that one of its subsidiaries is negotiating a lucrative contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to remove dead bodies in areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, paid $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit several years ago alleging the company desecrated thousands of corpses, and dumped bodies into mass graves.
Moreover, the company paid $200,000 to settle a whistleblower lawsuit that sought to expose (…)

by Ralph Nader If only corporations could laugh. If only corporations could laugh during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Judge John Roberts’ nomination for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, they would head for the nearest champagne closet in their executive suites.
What a triumph for the most dominant powers in and around our nation. Judge Roberts got away without having important questions asked regarding the interface between corporations, the Constitution, the election (…)

By Scott Galindez
I spent three weeks in Crawford, Texas. The heat was unbearable; bugs were everywhere, including fire ants crawling into my keyboard. But I wouldn’t have traded Camp Casey for any other story that I have ever covered.
I remember the frigid cold of January in Washington DC, when millions around the world said no to the war in Iraq. We covered the Democratic and Republican conventions, I went to Iowa and New Hampshire to cover the primaries. These were all stories that I (…)

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
ROBERT S. MILLER is a turnaround artist with a Dickensian twist. He unlocks hidden value in floundering Rust Belt companies by jettisoning their pension plans. His approach, copied by executives at airlines and other troubled companies, can make the people who rely on him very rich. But it may be creating a multibillion-dollar mess for taxpayers later.
As chief executive of Bethlehem Steel in 2002, Mr. Miller shut down the pension plan, leaving a federal program (…)

by Joseph Stiglitz Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is professor of economics at Columbia University and was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Clinton and chief economist and senior vice- president at the World Bank. His most recent book is The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World’s Most Prosperous Decade.
The world has been horrified at America’s response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. Four years after the (…)

ASK MR. CREATION SCIENTIST
By Peter Fredson, Ph.M, LLDDD, SCr, NM, Esq.
In the public interest, we started a write-in to creation scientists to help explain things that the ordinary layman may find mystifying. You may direct your query to Mr. Creation Scientist
Some of his answers may seem prosaic, but that is the nature of scientific endeavor. Here are some of the questions and the logical answers of Mr. Creation Scientist. Enjoy!
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Dear Mr. Creation (…)