| Wait May Foil Immigrants' Right To Vote
The fees to apply for American citizenship rose to $675 from $400 starting July 30, 2007. In July 2007, applications jumped by more than 600% from the previous year. In that one month, 460,294 people applied to become citizens, according to numbers obtained from the federal government and released yesterday by the Migration Policy Institute, a pro-immigration think tank whose chairman is the Bishop of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio. "It's a really dramatic increase," a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, Doris Meissner, who was commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration, said. "It's the volume that is unusual." Some critics and immigration advocates have suggested the United States Customs and Immigration agency was unprepared for the large number of people who applied before the increase in fees went into effect.
Who Needs Nuclear?
For developers, a no' in a reasonable time frame can be better than a yes' over three or four years." The SNP government has promised to boost the proportion of Scotland's electricity demand met by renewable sources to 31% by 2011 and 50% by 2020. Around 20% of Scotland's electricity is currently generated by renewables. But the huge backlog of wind farm applications is jeopardising progress, with dozens of major projects waiting up to five years for approval. Altogether there are 74 schemes for which planning applications have been submitted, 64 for which applications are being prepared, and 15 that are under appeal. According to the latest data from the renewables industry, projects which have been rejected by a public local inquiry and then go to the Scottish government take an average of 45 months to win approval.
Asda recalls 300,000 microwaves
Asda has asked customers to return 300,000 of its own brand microwaves over fire risk concerns. The supermarket said three customers had reported problems with the XB2316 model, which retailed for 22.75. The product was not manufactured with batch numbers, so Asda has decided to recall the entire range. Customers have been urged to stop using the appliance, and take it back to any Asda store for a full and immediate refund. Fault They do not need to return the box or produce a receipt. Recall notices will be put up in stores on Friday and press advertisements will run on Saturday. Asda said its initial investigation had uncovered a fault with the "Durabrand" microwave's timer mechanism. No customers have been hurt. "Even though this is only three microwaves, we take this sort of thing very seriously indeed, and that why we have taken the decision to recall all these microwaves," said spokesman Ed Watson.
UMAPAGAN AMPIKAIPAKAN: Why the guy with an Afro is a winner
THERE is this Kennedy campaign advertisement from 1960. It's got this catchy jingle that I just can't seem to shake off. You know what it's like, when a song suddenly slips into your senses, playing in an infinite loop, over and over again. It plays for so long that you believe it to be more than just happenstance. There must be a reason for this trespassing tune. And so you begin to draw all kinds of connections and conclusions. This is what has happened to me.
Now if newsprint were music, I'd sing for you, but you're just going to have to use your imagination, as it goes a little something like this:
"Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Ken-ned-dy for me! Do you want a man for president who's seasoned through and through, but not so doggone seasoned that he won't try something new? A man who's old enough to know.
Flip Shelton: Don't sweat the scorpions
NI Hao. I'm back from the Kingdom of Bicycles and had a cracker of a holiday. It seems my pre-travel worries were unwarranted. (Dear reader: if you missed my last column I was caught in a Chinese conundrum and feared retribution from the god of travel, Hermes.) According to English pop songstress Katie Melua, there are "nine million bicycles in Beijing" and, given that the city is as flat as Ballarat, the topography is certainly conducive to cycling. To give you some perspective -- just over one million bikes were sold in the whole of Australia last year, while in Beijing nine million bikes exist in an area roughly twice the size of Melbourne. That's about 536 bikes a square kilometre! In bravery akin to a matador facing a rampaging bull, cyclists gather at intersections before building up enough strength in numbers to venture across.
A bereaved nurse who injected a friend's baby girl with an overdose of ...
Off-duty nurse Veronica Duncan administered the jab to the four-month-old child after she lost her own baby daughter. Sentencing her at the High Court in Edinburgh today, temporary judge Roger Craik QC placed her on three years' probation with several conditions, saying he acknowledged she had been suffering from an "abnormal grief". .
Tamara Bradford Pleads Guilty
The Rapid City woman accused of hitting four young boys while driving drunk last September pleaded guilty today to two counts of vehicular battery. She caused cuts, bruises and broken bones when she drove into a group of boys on their bicycles. Today the family of those victims were relieved when she walked into the Pennington county courthouse and pleaded guilty. "We're kind of excited because now we don't have to go to a jury trial," says Keri Ihle, mother of one of the victims. The plea is part of an agreement. The victim's families were willing to drop two charges of vehicular battery, one for driving with a revoked license and a D-U-I third charge. Police say she had a blood alcohol limit of .27 the day of the accident... three times the legal limit. "I still can't believe it happened and that she got this far into the system before something was done," says Ihle.
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