• At the Passion Caring Home for the Elderly, three people who voted absentee in the August primary could not name the mayor of Detroit or recall having voted when interviewed Thursday. Each was helped by Currie's election assistant in a private room. Of eight recent absentee ballots mailed to the home for the general election next month, seven of the ballot recipients have been declared legally incapacitated by Wayne County Probate Court judges and suffer from dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
• People who were mailed absentee voter applications by Currie's office and later voted by absentee ballot have voter registration addresses of two long-abandoned nursing homes, the LaSalle Nursing Home on West Grand Boulevard and the Woodward Nursing Center.
• In one case, Joseph Koziara voted by absentee ballot. His application for the ballot was addressed to his registered voting address, 3456 Martin, a building that was demolished in 2002 and remains a vacant lot, according to city records. Currie's office has addressed ballot applications to demolished and vacant buildings. In one case, 34 applications were sent to a juvenile detention center for teenagers that need to be hospitalized.
• Two people in unrelated civil cases filed against Currie have given sworn statements that they witnessed Currie's workers filling out empty absentee ballots after the polls had closed. One of the cases is pending. In the other, a judge ruled that there wasn't enough evidence to invalidate the election in question.
• In a 2003 race between Cheryl Cushingberry and Keith Williams for the Wayne County Commission, a fire broke out in the Detroit clerk's counting room for absentee ballots. When people were allowed back in, a recount was impossible because ballot boxes and results had been tampered with, according to court records. Cushingberry later challenged the results, alleging absentee votes had been manipulated.
from Foxnews:Harriet Miers (search) withdrew her nomination to be a U.S. Supreme Court justice Thursday in the face of strong criticism from President Bush's most conservative supporters who say she doesn't have the qualifications or experience necessary to serve on the nation's highest court.Now to see if her original nomination was a jellyfish decision or a brilliant Rope-A-Dope. Stay tuned, the next nominee will be telling.
Miers, who President Bush had nominated in the beginning of the month to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, notified Bush on Wednesday night about her decision and delivered a letter to him dated Thursday. In her letter, she blamed her withdrawal on Senate demands for release of internal White House documents in advance of her confirmation hearings.
A judge ordered Tuesday that Detroit City Clerk Jackie Currie halt the sending of so-called ambassadors to group homes -- unless requested -- to help people with absentee voter ballots.Hmm, can anyone else see the potential for massive voter fraud with "helpers" completing ballots for aged people in senior and nursing homes?
The ruling by Wayne County Chief Circuit Judge Mary Beth Kelly came after allegations that 30 to 40 ambassadors from the clerk's office have for years showed up unsolicited at senior centers, nursing homes and similar places to help people complete absentee ballots.
Lawyer Steven Wasinger even alleged that the ambassadors fill out ballots for senior citizens, which is illegal, and collect ballots from people who are not registered to vote.
he judge has also appointed two monitors to investigate why Currie mailed out the applications and whether her office tampered with absentee ballots during the Aug. 2 primary election.
Cmdr. Craig W. Schwartz, a well-known officer who headed investigations of homicides and other serious crimes, sued the city, department and the chief in U.S. District Court in Detroit Monday, claiming he was repeatedly passed over for promotion to deputy chief and other executive positions "and, in fact, was demoted to a non-executive position of lieutenant solely on the basis of race."Interestingly, in a related case, Judge
Edmunds quoted a sworn deposition by former Detroit Deputy Police Chief Pam Evans that Bully-Cummings, then an assistant chief, initially refused to approve a promotion because there were "too many white people in (the) bureau."
Edmunds ruling added: "In addition (Cliff) asserts that assistant chiefs (Walter) Shoulders and Bully-Cummings stated that the city of Detroit 'is all black.'"
Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency that he heads won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
ElBaradei, who was reappointed last month to a third term, has had to contend with U.S. opposition to his tenure. Much of the opposition stemmed from Washington's perception he was being too soft on Iran for not declaring it in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That stance blocked a U.S. bid to haul Tehran before the U.N. Security Council, where it could face possible sanctions, for more than two years.
"I see it as an endorsement of the professional and independent role of the IAEA and of international verification in the field of nuclear power and nonproliferation," Blix said.
For years, street banners and a state historical marker have touted Vandalia's history as a stop along the Underground Railroad.Note that the artifacts the researchers have recovered were all above ground for all this time, and yet no one had known for certain that this was a former area of settlement for escaped slaves. Amazing the new discoveries one can make for even very recent historical events. Who knows how many other lost settlements in North America alone await discovery?
It's estimated that 1,500 fugitive slaves arrived in Cass County seeking freedom. They were aided mostly by sympathetic Quakers and free blacks who risked imprisonment. It was illegal, even in free states, to help fugitive slaves.
Some left the county for Detroit or Canada. For the approximately 200 who stayed, the Quakers provided small plots of land in exchange for harvesting crops or clearing trees for farmland. Blacks lived in sharecropper-style cabins on the land, sometimes for years.
Within a few decades of the abolition of slavery, the structural remains of Ramptown no longer could be found. The location of the community, originally known as Young's Prairie, never appeared on any historical maps, and people with firsthand knowledge started dying out.
"Because this was a clandestine activity, it's been difficult to try to identify evidence of this," said Nassaney, an anthropology professor at Western Michigan . . . .Without doing any digging, the archaeologists found skeletons of farm animals, nails, horseshoes, and pieces of pottery, glass and brick. Because the sites didn't coincide with the locations of residences on maps from the mid-1800s, and using written and oral accounts of the area's history, the team concluded that Ramptown residents had occupied the sites.
Nassaney said he's glad the artifacts were found when they were because it's hard to say how much longer they might have survived above ground, exposed to the elements.
Scientists have made from scratch the Spanish flu virus that killed as many as 50 million people in 1918, the first time an infectious agent behind a historic pandemic has ever been reconstructed.I believe the statement "People around the world developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today" is far less reasuring than it sounds. How many people are alive today who survived the 1918 pandemic? Further it is highly unlikely that these survivors passed their acquired immunity on to their progeny.
Why did they do it? Researchers say it may help them better understand -- and develop defenses against -- the threat of a future worldwide epidemic from bird flu.
"The effort to understand what happened in 1918 has taken on a new urgency," said Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger of the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who led the team.
The public health risk of resurrecting the virus is minimal, U.S. health officials said. People around the world developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today.
The viral recreation, announced Wednesday, is detailed in the journal Science.
About 10 vials of virus were created, each containing about 10 million infectious virus particles, Tumpey said.
SERENITY was number two in the box-office rankings this weekend.
Second place went to Joss Whedon's Serenity, which earned a $10.1 million on about 2,200 screens.Not a bad start.
