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<p>The NYPD is so strapped for applicants that it is lowering standards to admit recruits with DWI arrests, The Post has learned.</p> <p>Background checks on 100 of the 2,800 new recruits who'll enter the Police Academy on Monday reveal that nine were busted for driving while intoxicated, police sources said.</p>

JUST ABOUT EVERYONE gets a turn at discrimination-induced outrage in Ornery America. Last week it’s “people of size” — otherwise known as fat people — who take up too much space on airplanes. Southwest Airlines planned to start charging double for people whose girth consumes more than one seat. Fat people are furious; civil liberties lawyers are drooling; skinny people are skipping lunch. This is one of those cases where everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong all at the same time. Fat people are right that the airline’s policy is discriminatory; civil liberties defenders are probably right that making fat people...

June 28— By Timothy Heritage QALANDIYA CHECKPOINT, West Bank (Reuters) - The Israeli soldier shakes his head as he studies a journalist's credentials at this army checkpoint blocking the main road between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah."No passage for journalists," he says, handing back the press card from inside his sentry box next to the huge concrete blocks and barbed wire that block the road.An officer puts a call through to the local commander, but the reply is negative. "Try again tomorrow," he says.Covering the 21-month-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been difficult and sometimes dangerous. Both sides...

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Just a simple thought here. . .I understand that A. Gore railed against the current adminstration in a recent speech at a fund raiser. AG sited the frauds and deceipt in some big businesses as proof that GWB, and his administration, is not doing their job well at all. Hmmmm...seems to me that most, if not all, of the heads of these "failed" corporations came to power during the Clinton years; that the policies and procedures they've been following were begun and perfected during the Clinton years. It is now...during this administration, that the problems, theft, fraud, and deceipt are...

Budget thriller takes new twists By Richard Locker and Paula Wade locker@gomemphis.com wade@gomemphis.com June 28, 2002 NASHVILLE - A Senate committee Thursday blocked an attempt to move the outline of a plan coupling sales and business tax hikes with limited spending cuts to the Senate floor for a vote. The attempt by income tax opponents to bypass the Senate Finance Committee's usual review of the so-called CATS plan failed in the committee on a 5-6 vote. Its sponsor, Sen. Doug Jackson (D-Dickson), blasted the panel but pledged to try again. In the House of Representatives, Speaker Jimmy Naifeh said he...

TEL AVIV, Israel, June 28 (UPI) -- Iran was developing a nuclear capability as well as missiles that could reach Europe and eventually the United States, the head of Israel’s intelligence agency reportedly told NATO’s council. Israel also has “clear indications” that Iraq resumed efforts to produce fissile materials, Mossad leader Ephraim Halevy said while addressing a closed session of the council Wednesday in Brussels. The Israeli Yediot Aharonot newspaper published the full text of the speech Friday. Halevy reportedly said several countries that have been traditional foes of Israel were developing advanced weapons systems, including Iran which in recent...

SAN FRANCISCO--A day after he shocked the nation by declaring the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, a U.S. federal appeals court judge declared the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional as well. Circuit Judge Alfred T. Goodwin, who wrote the 2-1 opinion that said the phrase "under God" violates the separation of church and state, referred to hihger power references such as "Creator" in the documents. Goodwin's action Thursday has no immediate impact on the Federal or State Governments, since the ruling already was on hold by court rules for 45 days to allow for any challenges. Vikram Amar,...

About NOW's Family Court Report By Roger F. Gay June 26, 2002 The California chapter of the National Organization for Women released a new report alleging that the California family court system is biased against women. It is difficult to know how to follow that statement. Most readers have probably already reacted to it. You are laughing, pulling your hair out by the roots, or throwing your hands in the air and shaking your heads. It's something like a school of sharks complaining about the ocean because they might have to swim a mile to satisfy their feeding frenzy....

LUCKNOW, India, Jun 28, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- India's prime minister ruled out the possibility of war with Pakistan, but expressed doubts Friday that the Pakistani leader would permanently stop incursions by Islamic militants. "There is no possibility of war with Pakistan," Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told reporters in Lucknow, the capital of northern Uttar Pradesh state. Although 1 million soldiers are still deployed on the border between the two nuclear-armed countries, Vajpayee said tensions have eased. He said India was ready to discuss the five-decade-old dispute between the two neighbors over control of Kashmir, but...

Today is FReeper Friday and we would like to honor and salute the Founder of Free Republic. The FReeper USO Canteen receives many emails from our troops and also from FReepers that are themselves Veterans that have continued to lurk at FR and the FReeper USO Canteen. They speak of their gratitude to have the finest place online to meet with others , read their thoughts and be supported by people that truly care about their service to our country. And we agree! I would like you to meet Jim Robinson, Founder of Free Republic, a Navy Veteran and...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - "Politically Incorrect" was politically annihilated, host Bill Maher said Thursday after taping the final episode of his ABC talk show. Although the program had suffered declining ratings in recent years, Maher said it would still be on the air if he had not made a remark a week after the Sept. 11 attacks that characterized previous U.S. military actions as "cowardly." "I cleaned out my office a week later," Maher said in an interview. "We were always in hot water for one thing or another. That was just the straw that broke the camel's back." ABC,...

Scheduled for three hours, however, the House convenes at 9:00, so it will probably run just two hours. Jim Lehrer, Executive Editor & Anchor Gwen Ifill, Senior Correspondent Ray Suarez, Senior Correspondent Margaret Warner, Senior Correspondent Kwame Holman, Congressional Correspondent Morning Journal C-SPAN's TV Schedule

GEORGE W. BUSH sat down privately with the nation’s top business executives late last week and gave them an earful about corporate ethics in what is being called America’s second Gilded Age. It is a subject the President feels deeply about but so far has not addressed fully in public. So, his unscripted comments to the businessmen were not released. Will President Bush ever speak to the public definitively on what he considers corporate conduct that poisons the stock market and threatens the economy? “Stay tuned,” responded one aide who shares his concern. A Presidential address is planned after the...

<p>During the late 1990s, Robert Shiller, an economics professor at Yale University and an expert on market volatility, studied the dynamics of an economic bubble as the tech-fueled boom took the financial markets to unprecedented heights. Now Shiller is seeing some of those same dynamics at work, but heading in the opposite direction.</p>

SAN FRANCISCO — Online magazine publisher Salon Media Group Inc. faces the prospect of going out of business if it can't raise more money this summer, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As of March 31, San Francisco-based Salon said it was down to its last $1.5 million in cash — enough to keep its business running for three or four months, according to the company's annual report to shareholders. Salon's precarious position prompted the company's auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to conclude there is ``substantial doubt'' about its prospects for survival. The auditor's warning threatens to make it...

<p>June 28, 2002 -- IN a nutshell, here's what got the two country singers in trouble: They planned to perform songs on national TV on the Fourth of July that articulated their anger over the 9/11 terrorist attacks.</p> <p>For this, the two stars - Toby Keith and Charlie Daniels - had the welcome mat pulled right out from under them by ABC and PBS.</p>

The Zimbabwe government has slammed white farmers who defied orders to cease operations by midnight on Monday, saying they were "unrepentent racists and fascists" bent on attracting attention at the ongoing G8 summit in Canada, the state-run Herald newspaper reported on Thursday. "The CFU (Commercial Farmers Union) action is a racist and fascist approach of wanting to continue white dominance in this country," Lands Minister Joseph Made told the paper in an interview. "They are playing to the gallery while we are trying to create a harmonious community of farmers," Made said in the interview published on Thursday. Many of...

<p>ENRON, WorldCom and Martha Stewart just proved that America's financial and accounting systems work. Despite the monstrous cheating and mad-dog greed, the good news about all the scandals we are suffering is that the bad guys - and gals - got caught.</p>

<p>MONTREAL - The heads of the world's wealthiest nations yesterday pledged a ''new beginning'' for inhabitants of the earth's poorest continent, signing a historic agreement to increase development aid by billions of dollars in return for a commitment from African leaders to eliminate corruption, despotism, and human rights abuses.</p>