When it comes to news, people just weren't all the fired up about "Perky" Katie.
The search is on for Katie Couric’s successor.
The new CBS News chairman, Jeff Fager, is looking at candidates both within and outside the network, insiders say.
A Massachusetts employment organization has canceled its annual job fair because not enough companies have come forward to offer jobs.Richard Shafer, chairman of the Taunton Employment Task Force, says 20 to 25 employers are needed for the fair scheduled for April 6, but just 10 tables had been reserved. One table was reserved by a nonprofit that offers human services to job seekers, and three by temporary employment agencies.
Shafer tells the Taunton Daily Gazette the lack of employers means the task force won't have enough money to properly advertise the fair.
The task force has been organizing the job fair nearly every year since 1984.
Shafer says the cancellation reflects the current economy -- even though things are getting better, companies are still cautious about hiring full-time workers.
The chairman and CEO of Peoria-based Caterpillar Inc. is raising the specter of moving the heavy equipment maker out of Illinois.More.......In a letter sent March 21 to Gov. Pat Quinn, Caterpillar chief executive officer Doug Oberhelman said officials in at least four other states have approached the company about relocating since Illinois raised its income tax in January.
"I want to stay here. But as the leader of this business, I have to do what's right for Caterpillar when making decisions about where to invest," Oberhelman wrote in the letter obtained Friday by the Lee Enterprises Springfield bureau. "The direction that this state is headed in is not favorable to business and I'd like to work with you to change that."
Oberhelman said he's being actively courted to move.
"I have been called, 'cornered' in meetings and 'wined and dined' -- the heat is on," Oberhelman wrote. "Before, I never really considered living anywhere else and certainly never considered the possibility of Caterpillar relocating. But I have to admit, the policymakers in Springfield seem to make it harder by the day."
Cat spokesman Jim Dugan said the letter was designed to show Quinn that Oberhelman wants to be involved in finding solutions that benefit the company, which employs 23,000 people in Illinois.
Cincinnati police began searching Tuesday for the 25-year-old woman who escaped from a local hospital days after being accused of participating in the theft of a minivan in Northern Kentucky with a 4-year-old child inside.The young woman has racked up numerous criminal charges in Kenton County since she turned 18, including violating parole, unpaid child support and a number of drug arrests. She is a convicted felon.
Described as a white female about 5-foot-2 and 128 pounds, Dixon has long brown hair that she was last seen wearing in a bun. She wore a beige zip-up hooded sweatshirt with "Pink" written on the front and blue jeans when she left the hospital. A last known address for Dixon is in the 700 block of Greenup St., Covington.
Oh and by the way, this mother of the year is seven months pregnant and a heroin addict. She was in Good Sam to detox.
So congratulations taxpayer's, you've got another bun in the oven you get to take care of soon.Oh and did Snooki, er Dawn vote for Obama or McCain in the last election?
2008 General Election results-DEM: 96.93% GOP: 2.65%
2006 General Election results-DEM: 95.05% GOP: 4.33%
2004 General Election results-DEM: 93.61% GOP: 5.93%
Detroit's population fell to 713,777 in 2010, its lowest level in a century, according to U.S. Census figures released today.
The loss of 237,493 residents since 2000 is a sobering statistical stamp on a decade's worth of job losses, plant closings and foreclosures in a city that was home to 1.8 million residents in 1950. Detroit's nearly 25 percent decline in population was the most by far among the top 20 cities. The population of Chicago, by contrast, dropped 6.9 percent. It's the largest 10-year drop in Detroit's history, including the years after the 1967 riots. Already, at least two council members are calling on Mayor Dave Bing to contest the results.
The number of black people living in major cities is declining as a growing number are choosing to move to the suburbs or warmer parts of the country.
2010 Census data released so far this year show that 20 of the 25 cities that have at least 250,000 people and a 20 per cent black population either lost more black people or gained fewer in the past decade than during the 1990s.
According to USA Today, the decline happened in some traditional black strongholds such as Chicago, Oakland, Atlanta, Cleveland and St Louis.
When a burly ex-convict forced his way into a posh Florida home last week, he had no idea what awaited him -- a 25-year-old beauty queen with a pink .38-caliber handgun.
Meghan Brown, a former Florida pageant queen, shot and killed 42-year-old Albert Franklin Hill during a home invasion March 12 at the 2,732-square-foot house she shares with her fiance in Tierra Verde, Fla.
Hill had a criminal record stretching back nearly three decades -- including arrests for burglary, battery, drug possession and grand theft. He reportedly served a 13-year prison term in 1987 and was released in September after serving a fourth term behind bars.
Nearly half the city workers in Costa Mesa received layoff notices last week. Street sweepers. Firefighters. Mechanics. Payroll clerks. Animal control workers. In all, about 210 of the city’s 472 employees, many of whom have worked there for decades. On Thursday, as the notices were being handed out, one maintenance worker committed suicide by jumping from the city hall roof.More......“It’s like they decided to blow up the city,” said Billy Folsom, 58, a mechanic who got a pink slip. “It’s devastating.”
The cutbacks are necessary because the escalating costs of providing pensions for police, firefighters and other unionized employees are draining the city’s revenue, city leaders say.
Within three years, city projections show, more than one of every five tax dollars will be spent on employees’ retirement benefits, which were made far more generous in the years before the stock market crashed in 2008.
“Just do the math — this is unsustainable,” said Jim Righeimer, the city’s recently elected mayor pro tem. He campaigned on the pension issue, eliciting anger and a counter-campaign from the city’s police and firefighters. “Under these kinds of burdens, we can’t do everything the city needs to do.”
Did you know that your very own union bosses are working against you? Did you know that nearly every union official is out to make him or herself wealthier and more powerful -- at your expense? And did you know that this is easy to prove, if you can just assemble the puzzle pieces?Please consider:
Mine workers -- According to a study by the United Mine Workers of America, a new EPA rule cracking down on "airborne toxins" could cost 250,000 workers their jobs.
Steel workers -- The United Steelworkers wrote last August that the EPA's new environmental regulations would cost "tens of thousands" of union members their jobs.
Farm workers -- Legendary unions like the United Farm Workers are threatened by oppressive EPA regulations ranging from oversight of spilled milk to dust kicked up by farm equipment. By making farming more expensive with onerous regulations, fewer dollars can be spent on workers' salaries and benefits. Layoffs of union members will be the inevitable result.
Labor -- For at least a dozen years, certain powerful union bosses have advocated open borders policies. In 2000, the AFL-CIO's bosses have "called for blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants."
Don't forget how those jobs in the gulf are largely good paying union jobs. What about the potential for good union jobs in ANWAR?
Roger Keats, a former Illinois state senator and Cook County Board president, is packing up and leaving the Land of Lincoln for good. The 62-year-old Keats was a good government reformer who helped clean up the rampant corruption in the Chicago-area courts uncovered by Operations Greylord and Gambat.
But now he’s throwing in the towel, and he and his wife are heading for Texas. “I am tired of subsidizing crooks," Keats told the Wilmette Beacon.
In “Good Bye and Good Luck,” a letter to all the friends and political supporters he’s leaving behind after 60 years, Keats says he is leaving what he calls “the most corrupt big city…and most corrupt state in America” with “a heavy heart.”
“But enough is enough!” he writes. “The leaders of Illinois refuse to see we can’t continue going in the direction we are and expect people who have options to stay here.”
Indeed, Illinois has already lost a quarter of its population and will lose another seat in the next Congress.
And that’s not the only sign of serious, and possibly irreversible, decline.
In a conference call with reporters, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill just disclosed that she failed to pay $287,000 in property taxes related to her co-ownership of a private aircraft. This scandal comes quickly on the heels of recent revelations that McCaskill improperly billed taxpayers for use of the same private aircraft, for which McCaskill reimbursed the Treasury $88,000:
For generations here in the deepest South, there had been a great taboo: publicly crossing the color line for love. Less than 45 years ago, marriage between blacks and whites was illegal, and it has been frowned upon for much of the time since.So when a great job beckoned about an hour’s drive north of the Gulf Coast, Jeffrey Norwood, a black college basketball coach, had reservations. He was in a serious relationship with a woman who was white and Asian.
“You’re thinking about a life in South Mississippi?” his father said in a skeptical voice, recalling days when a black man could face mortal danger just being seen with a woman of another race, regardless of intentions. “Are you sure?”
But on visits to Hattiesburg, the younger Mr. Norwood said he liked what he saw: growing diversity. So he moved, married, and, with his wife, had a baby girl who was counted on the last census as black, white and Asian. Taylor Rae Norwood, 3, is one of thousands of mixed-race children who have made this state home to one of the country’s most rapidly expanding multiracial populations, up 70 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to new data from the Census Bureau.
In the first comprehensive accounting of multiracial Americans since statistics were first collected about them in 2000, reporting from the 2010 census, made public in recent days, shows that the nation’s mixed-race population is growing far more quickly than many demographers had estimated, particularly in the South and parts of the Midwest. That conclusion is based on the bureau’s analysis of 42 states; the data from the remaining eight states will be released this week.
In North Carolina, the mixed-race population doubled. In Georgia, it expanded by more than 80 percent, and by nearly as much in Kentucky and Tennessee. In Indiana, Iowa and South Dakota, the multiracial population increased by about 70 percent.
“Anything over 50 percent is impressive,” said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The fact that even states like Mississippi were able to see a large explosion of residents identifying as both black and white tells us something that people would not have predicted 10 or 20 years ago.”
Well yes it does Mr. Frey. It tells us that the only people obsessed with race are the liberals at the Brookings Institution.
San Francisco prides itself on helping the homeless, and it even created a special committee for grievances from those kicked out of shelters.But this month, it began a new experiment that treats the homeless more harshly than the city's other policies. After lengthy training, police began enforcing an ordinance that bans sitting or lying on sidewalks during daytime hours.
The measure, which was approved by 54 percent of city voters in November, has drawn criticism from homeless groups and the down-and-out themselves.
The new approach comes at a time when the city is working to bolster tourism and local businesses in a tough economy.
Many residents have welcomed the ordinance, which was spearheaded by a neighborhood group from 1960s counterculture haven Haight-Ashbury.
Now out here in "Redville" we have no homeless. How is it that we seem not to have such a population. I'm guessing that if our community announced such things as sponsoring a methadone clinic, opened some community homeless shelters, opened a food bank, provided clean needles to users, and allowed people to shit and piss in public parks we would develop a nice homeless population within days.
So who's more compassionate?It's been 15 years since I last visited San Francisco, and the thing that will always stand out to me were the throngs of people living in Golden Gate park while a bunch of old Italians were playing Bocci, the bum who opened a garbage can and started eating a half eaten burrito, watching a couple cops arrest some dude who was shitting himself on the corner of Haight and Asbury and the smell of urine everywhere.
