| Carla Marinucci: UPDATE - Gore cancels appearance at Boxer fundraiser
I just got a call from Vice President Al Gore. He told me that he needs to travel abroad tomorrow for an exciting and urgent mission that could result in a major breakthrough in the fight against global warming. Unfortunately, this means that we must postpone our Thursday, October 11th event with him until Friday, November 9th. I wanted to be sure to e-mail you tonight in case you were planning on attending. While I am really disappointed that we won't see Al Gore until next month, I am thrilled that he is continuing to provide critical leadership to address one of the most pressing issues of our time. You should know that only the most urgent global warming mission has called him out of the country. I look forward to seeing you on November 9th so we can all hear first-hand about Al Gore's latest exciting initiatives.
Tangri, son held for attempt to murder
Cherian exposed the distortions and revisionist trends in trade unions and cautioned the working class against policies of the CPM, which, he said, had abandoned class struggle. Mr Gangadhar Reddy drew the attention of the convention towards reforms in labour laws that deprived the working class of its trade union rights. He appealed to the workers to oppose such laws. According to Mr Kuldeep Singh, state secretary of the party, about 1,000 delegates attended the convention. It called for district-level demonstrations from August 7 to 14 against the anti-people policies of the government. .
Recipient E-mail
The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, also known as Becta, governs the educational systems tech adoption. Becta's decision effectively bans adoption of Office '07 and Vista on any existing machines. Government employees can buy new machines with the software, but the agency strongly recommends against it; suggesting instead to buy Linux products, such as the OpenOffice.org desktop package. The reasoning behind Becta's decision specifically cited that the new OS and office suite provides little in the way of improvement, while bringing to the table a broad array of potential problems. In the report Stephen Lucy, Becta's executive director of strategic technologies, explains, "Our advice is to be sure there is a strong business case for upgrading to these products as the costs are significant and the benefits remain unclear." The report also blasted Microsoft for refusing to support the Open Document Format (ODF), championed by International Organization for Standardization. Microsoft instead chose to adopt another open format known as Office Open XML. The report states, "Microsoft should provide native support for the ODF file format increasingly used in competitor products and those that are free to use." The move follows suit with the U.S.
Return to previous page
Ask educators and school board members for their New Year's wish lists for 2008, and you'll often get one overarching response: more money for schools. They argue that schools have been slighted by a stingy Legislature that won't meet their inflationary needs, and that voters in many districts have put schools in a crisis mode by not approving more tax funding through referendums. Dig deeper, past the obvious wishes to hire more teachers to keep class sizes down, and to meet a smorgasbord of academic and extracurricular needs, and you home in on some of the programs and services for which school officials have their fingers crossed in 2008. The Star Tribune interviewed board members and superintendents in six school districts to get a fix on what in particular they'd like to see happen in 2008.
Activists taking a toll on city
It is one of the purest forms of democracy — the right to address government; but in doing so, Glendale’s self-described community advocates are also hitting the city’s bottom line.Glendale’s expanding base of community advocates is having an undeniable effect on city resources in their quest for government accountability — be it a $1,300 tab to produce a 4,000-page public record, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a civil lawsuit — and it’s a trend that has grown over the last two years.Whether it’s citywide compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, quicker Glendale Fire response times, more parkland, quieter playing fields, or demands for greater transparency, they have moved beyond simply airing their grievances into the microphone to researched, focused presentations to bolster their positions.And those positions have begun to affect the city in an unprecedented way.City Council critic Herbert Molano’s lawsuit alleging the city failed to adequately address the environmental impacts of the Downtown Specific Plan represents one of the largest, singular activist-related costs to the city in recent years.A Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuit in August, but in October Molano filed an appeal to that decision after City Councilman Dave Weaver publicly admonished him for the $400,000 in legal fees the city had incurred defending itself.Since that time, the city attorney’s office has secured an additional allocation of up to $575,000 to pay for the appeal.But while those costs stem from the effects of a singular cause, more sustained impacts to the city’s resources have come in the form a 1968 state law — the California Public Records Act.
|
