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 The current EPA method, introduced in the 1970s, is based on outdated assumptions: that motorists drive slower than they really do, that they never use air-conditioning, never go up a hill, never start their cars in the cold,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 ...

WASHINGTON - President Bush signed a bill Friday to pay for military operations in Iraq after a bitter struggle with Democrats in Congress who sought unsuccessfully to tie the money to U.S. troop withdrawals. Bush signed the bill into law at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, where he is spending part of the Memorial Day weekend. In announcing the signing, White House spokesman Tony Fratto noted that it came 109 days after Bush sent his emergency spending request to Congress. Bush had rejected an earlier bill because it contained a timetable for withdrawing troops. However, The New York Times reported Friday night that the Bush administration is working on ideas for cutting U.S. forces in Iraq by as much as half, to roughly 100,000, by mid-2008. Reframig the mission The mission Bush set for the U.S. military in January when he ordered it to regain control of Baghdad and Anbar province would also be greatly scaled back and would focus on training Iraqi troops and fighting ...

WASHINGTON - America’s lowest-paid workers won a $2.10 raise Thursday, with Congress approving the first increase in the federal minimum wage in almost a decade. President Bush was expected to sign the bill quickly, and workers who now make $5.15 an hour will see their paychecks go up by 70 cents per hour before the end of the summer. Another 70 cents will be added next year, and by summer 2009, all minimum-wage jobs will pay no less than $7.25 an hour. For years, the idea of increasing the minimum wage has been stalled by partisan bickering between Republicans and Democrats. Wrapped into Iraq funding bill That almost became the fate of this year’s proposal. Democratic leaders attached the provision to the $120 billion Iraq war spending bill, which was vetoed by the GOP-controlled White House on May 1 because Democrats insisted on a pullout date for American troops. But with the House passing a rewritten bill 280-142 and the Senate 80-14, the end is likely near for the longest stretch ...

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Under pressure from their rivals, the leading Republican presidential contenders defended their conservative credentials on abortion, gun control and tax cuts in a feisty debate Tuesday night. “Republicans should be uniting” to defeat the Democrats, implored former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, rather than stressing their differences with one another. Giuliani, a supporter of abortion rights, wasn’t the only contender to field pointed questions. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney conceded he had signed legislation banning assault weapons but added he is a supporter of the rights of gun owners under the Second Amendment. Arizona Sen. John McCain of Arizona said he would make sure that President Bush’s tax cuts are made permanent, even though he said he had voted against because they were not accompanied by spending cuts. “If we don’t make them permanent then every business farm and family will have to adjust their budgets to what is in effect a tax increase,” he said...

Gonzales v. Carhart Gonzales v. Carhart

April 30, 2007 issue - The Supreme Court's decision to uphold a federal ban on "partial birth" abortion last week set off skirmishes on three battlefields: in politics, doctor's offices and the high court itself. With Samuel Alito now in Sandra Day O'Connor's old seat, conservatives finally had five votes to restrict abortion. Justice Anthony Kennedy—often derided by conservatives as a closet liberal—wrote the vigorous majority opinion upholding the law. Kennedy has expressed nuanced views on abortion in the past, upholding Roe but disagreeing with a ruling that struck down a Nebraska "partial birth" ban. In last week's opinion he didn't reject the landmark abortion-rights decision, but his language pleased pro-lifers. "Kennedy is very much speaking in the code language of the anti-abortion activists," says David Garrow, a legal historian at the University of Cambridge. The justice used "kill" or "killing" 11 tim...

WASHINGTON - An increase in the minimum wage is again being delayed because it's attached to the Iraq war spending bill that President Bush plans to veto. It's been ten years since the last federal minimum-wage increase, and boosting it from five-15 to seven-25 per hour over the next two years was a key element of the Democrats' midterm election platform. Republicans say Democrats could have had a minimum-wage bill passed and signed by now if they hadn't added it to the Iraq war bill. But a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute says, "That's just a temporary detour." Alan Viard says Democrats will find a way to quickly move the minimum-wage legislation back to the White House. Currently, a person working 40 hours per week at the current minimum wage makes about ten-thousand-700 dollars a year. An increase to seven-25 would boost that to just over fifteen-thousand a year. Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not...

Antananarivo - The island of Madagascar off the African coast will adopt English as its third official language alongside French and Malagasy following a referendum to change the country's constitution, reports said Monday. Four days after the public referendum, the Interior Ministry published the preliminary official results on Sunday. Some 43.75 per cent of the around 7.35 million Malagasy eligible to vote cast their votes at 17,546 polling stations. Some 75,3 per cent voted for the changes pushed by President Marc Ravalomanana, who was re-elected in December 2006. According to the president's Madagascar Action Plan, which is intended to "speed up progress in the country," the main aim of the new constitution is the decentralization of the administration and the transfer of responsibilities to local offices. The currently existing six provinces are due to be abolished and replaced by the country's 22 regions. Copyright © 2007 Respective Author Posted : Mon, 09 A...

Wout Kusters, director of a manufacturing plant in the Dutch lowlands, knows something the U.S. Congress needs to know. So does Gervais Pruvost, a laborer in a small cement plant in northern France . So does just about every German homeowner. When you're trying to slow down global warming, beware of unintended consequences. As U.S. lawmakers work on the details of their greenhouse-gas legislation, they are looking carefully at Europe's experience. Five Senate proposals all use the same basic approach, known as "cap and trade," that Europe has used for the past two years. But what the snappy name "cap and trade" means is that the market will put a price on something that's always been free: the right of a factory to emit carbon gases. That could affect the cost of everything from window panes to airline tickets to electricity. Europe has already hit a few bumps with its program. There's the Dutch silicon carbide maker that calls itself the greenest su...

DAVENPORT, Iowa - Democrat Barack Obama ( news , bio , voting record ) raked in $25 million for his presidential bid in the first three months of 2007, placing him on a par with front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton and dashing her image as the party's inevitable nominee. The donations came from an eye-popping 100,000 donors, the campaign said in a statement Wednesday. The figure was the latest evidence that Obama, a political newcomer who has served just two years in the Senate, has emerged as the most powerful new force in presidential politics this year. It also reinforced his status as a significant threat to Clinton, who'd hoped her own $26 million first quarter fundraising total would begin to squeeze her rivals out of contention. The campaign reported that the figure included at least $23.5 million that he can spend on the highly competitive primary race. The Clinton campaign has yet to disclose how much they can use for the primary verses money that is designated for the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has raised a record $26 million since announcing her presidential candidacy in what is shaping up as the most expensive race in history, her campaign said on Sunday as it sought to steal a jump on rivals. Clinton, who entered the race in January, also transferred $10 million left over from her Senate re-election run. That made for a total $36 million in receipts for the three months to March 31, her staff said. That would be a record for the first-quarter of a non-election year. The deadline to report quarterly campaign-finance figures to the Federal Election Commission is April 15, and candidates are jockeying to cast their fund-raising clout in the best light as an early test of their campaign's success. Clinton's campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, said the preliminary figure far exceeded a goal $15 million in the January-March period. "We are overwhelmed by the tremendous enthusiasm and historic...

Congress and the White House marched closer to a showdown in court Wednesday after lawmakers rejected President Bush’s offer to let top aides be interviewed about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys only in secret and not under oath. A House Judiciary subcommittee responded to Bush’s offer by voting Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for Karl Rove, the president’s top political aide, and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, along with their deputies; and for Kyle Sampson, who resigned last week as chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The vote gives Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, a powerful weapon in lawmakers’ fight to force the administration to explain why the eight U.S. attorneys were forced out of their jobs late last year. It allows him to issue the subpoenas to try to haul the aides up to Capitol Hill to testify under oath at any time. The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, is scheduled to vote Thursday on its own sub...

In February, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) announced that Ford Motor has made changes to its $18,000 Fusion sedan , and better safety ratings--for front and side protection especially--have resulted.Ford is, of course, delighted about this, and the company's media Web site is now trumpeting "advanced safety" as one of the Fusion's biggest selling points. The IIHS sees improvement in the model, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) gives the Fusion four- and five-star safety ratings across the board. (NHTSA works with a scale of one to five stars.) But safety isn't the only reason the Fusion has made our list of 15 smart cars for teenagers. It is also inexpensive and has good gas mileage (23/31 city/highway, under optimal configurations). It has "very good" accident-avoidance capabilities (Consumer Reports says the most important factors in determining accident-avoidance capability are braking and emergency ha...

High school test scores unimpressive, yet grades, transcripts improving WASHINGTON - Large percentages of high school seniors are posting weak scores on national math and reading tests even though more of them are taking challenging courses and getting higher grades in school, say two new government reports released Thursday. “The reality is that the results don’t square,” said Darvin Winick, chair of the independent National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the national tests. Nearly 40 percent of high school seniors scored below the basic level on the math test. More than a quarter of seniors failed to reach the basic level on the reading test. Most educators think students ought to be able to work at the basic level. The reading scores show no change since 2002, the last time the tests were given. “We should be getting better. There’s nothing good about a flat score,” Winick said. The government said it could not compare the math results to old scores because the latest te...