Ny Safidinao

WASHINGTON, June 28 — Striking down an antitrust rule nearly a century old, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that it was not automatically unlawful for manufacturers and distributors to agree on minimum retail prices. The decision will give producers significantly more, though not unlimited, power to dictate retail prices and to restrict the flexibility of discounters. Five justices, agreeing with the nation’s major manufacturers, said the new rule could in some instances lead to more competition and better service. But four dissenting justices agreed with 37 states and some consumer groups that abandoning the old rule could result in significantly higher prices and less competition for consumer and other goods. The court struck down the 96-year-old rule that resale price maintenance agreements were an automatic, or per se, violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. In its place, the court instructed judges considering such agreements for possible antitrust violations to apply a case-b...

WASHINGTON, June 28 — With competing blocs of justices claiming the mantle of Brown v. Board of Education, a bitterly divided Supreme Court declared today that public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race. Voting 5 to 4, the court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., invalidated programs in Seattle and metropolitan Louisville, Ky., that sought to maintain school-by-school diversity by limiting transfers on the basis of race or using race as a “tiebreaker” for admission to particular schools. Both programs had been upheld by lower federal courts and were similar to plans in place in hundreds of school districts around the country. Chief Justice Roberts said such programs were “directed only to racial balance, pure and simple,” a goal he said was forbidden by the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating...

The Environmental Protection Agency has long been criticized for the testing procedure it uses to gauge fuel economy — which determines the mileage numbers that car shoppers seen on window stickers. The current EPA method, introduced in the 1970s, is based on outdated assumptions: that motorists drive slower than they really do, that they never use air-conditioning, never go up a hill, never start their cars in the cold, never get stuck in traffic jams, etc. Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards have pretty much stayed flat for more than a decade. Efforts to require cars and trucks to be more fuel efficient have repeatedly been stymied in Congress. Source: NHTSA In 1985, the EPA tried to account for some of the shortcomings in its lab-based tests by adjusting its fuel-economy numbers downward by 10 percent for city driving, and 22 percent for highway mileage. The revised figures were slightly more realistic, but critics argued that they still failed to account for real-world driv...

NPR.org, June 18, 2007 · CAFE standards — short for Corporate Average Fuel Economy — dictate the number of miles per gallon that an automaker should get for the range of vehicles it sells. Originating during the energy crisis of the 1970s, the standards represented the federal government's attempt at reducing fuel consumption by boosting the fuel economy of cars and light trucks. The standards ushered in an early surge in fuel economy for new cars and trucks. But CAFE requirements haven't changed much in more than a decade — and neither has the gas mileage of the vehicles that Americans drive. Below, a primer on these gas-sipping rules of the road: What are current CAFE standards? The current standard for passenger automobiles is 27.5 mpg. The standard for light-trucks — a classification that also includes SUVs under 8,500 pounds — rose to 22.2 mpg for model-year 2007 and will get bumped up to 22.5 for 2008 models. Why don't light trucks and SUVs have to meet the same fuel-...

Morning Edition, June 19, 2007 · U.S. automakers say the types of vehicles that will get more miles per gallon of gas have features that consumers tend to shun, including four-cylinder engines and stick shifts. The Senate is set to debate new energy legislation, and a major issue is how much to raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks in order to fight climate change. A new bill's sponsors are proposing a requirement that the auto industry make vehicles that get an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. ECONOMY by Elizabeth Shogren

BERKELEY, Calif. - Human-rights activists are using high-resolution satellite cameras to keep watch over imperiled villages in the Darfur region of Sudan and posting the images online to enlist help preventing violence. The new Amnesty International Web site, http://www.eyesondarfur.org , was launched Wednesday in conjunction with a conference at the University of California, Berkeley. "We're hoping that by shining a light that we will deter the abuse from ever happening," said Ariela Blatter, director of the Crisis Prevention and Response Center for Amnesty International USA. Satellite images have been used before to document destruction in Darfur and elsewhere. But the latest project offers clearer, more up-to-date images, allowing experts to better track developments, Blatter said. The quality of the pictures is "very, very good," said Lars Bromley of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an international nonprofit group that publishes the ...

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Democratic presidential candidates clashed on Sunday on Iraq and over the security of the country since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, trailing both New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in national polls, criticized their cautious approach in forcing President Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq. While some members of Congress spoke out “loudly and clearly” last month against legislation to pay for the war through September but without a withdrawal timetable, “others did not,” Edwards said. “They went quietly to the floor of the Senate, cast the right vote. But there is a difference between leadership and legislating,” Edwards told his rivals during the second Democratic debate. Both Clinton and Obama voted against the bill — which passed — but without making a strong case against the legislation. “I think it’s obvious who I’m talking about,” Edwards said. Clinton disagreed with Edwards, both ...