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NEW YORK - There were piles of catfish and hushpuppies in Central Park Saturday as hundreds of Mississippians celebrated their home state and encouraged Northeasterners to aid its recovery from Hurricane Katrina by paying the state a visit. The 27th annual picnic in the park, established by a group of homesick Mississippians, added significance in light of the hurricane. Those invited to attend the watermelon seed-spitting contest and enjoy the food and live band included scores of Yankees who volunteered to help coastal communities rebuild after the storm. "We have benefited so much from the literally tens of thousands of...

MOSS POINT, Miss. - A private jet is waiting for Richard Scruggs, but first the millionaire lawyer wants to squeeze in a quick lunch. Smiles and nods greet him as he walks into Lu-Cher Doe's Diner, a soul food restaurant down the street from his law office. Everyone in the diner instantly recognizes the trim, gray-haired man in the expensive suit. Scruggs feels right at home, even though he sticks out in the crowd of T-shirt-wearing patrons seated at vinyl-covered tables. "How are you, pretty lady?" he asks the cashier, turning on his Mississippi drawl. "How are you doing, Mr....

U.S. Department of Labor Awards $4.9 Million in Grants To Improve English Language Skills in the Workplace Grants Will Train Workers in California, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York and Texas WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Labor today announced five grants totaling more than $4.9 million to improve English language skills in the workplace. The grants will train approximately 4,400 individuals in California, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York and Texas. “To succeed in the workplace, workers must know how to communicate in English,” said Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao. “These $4.9 million in English skills training grants will help thousands of...

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BEIRUT (AFP) - The leader of the Lebanese fundamentalist Shiite movement Hezbollah claimed that if Muslims had executed British novelist Salman Rushdie others would not dare to insult Islam. Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa or religious edict in 1989 demanding Rushdie's execution over his best-selling novel the "Satanic Verses," deemed blasphemous and insulting to the Prophet Mohammed. "If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so," Hezbollah chief Hassan...

OSHA News Release: [09/13/2005] Contact Name: Pamela Groover or Al Belsky Phone Number: (202) 693-4676 or x1999 Release Number: 05-1724-NAT OSHA Teams Deployed To Aid Hurricane Katrina Recovery Workers Agency Focused on Safety in Cleanup and Recovery Operations WASHINGTON — As part of the U.S. Department of Labor's response to Hurricane Katrina, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has deployed safety and health professionals to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to provide technical assistance to recovery workers in their ongoing cleanup efforts along the Gulf Coast of the United States. “The Department of Labor has already dispatched teams of OSHA...

Earlier this year near Paducah, Texas, cinematographer Sean Casey got the scary part of his wish. “The holy grail of all footage is to get a tornado coming right at you—filming with a wide-angle lens, and having the tornado hit you, impact the camera—and that shot really hasn’t been gotten yet,” says the seven-year storm-chasing veteran. “If we can get that on IMAX, it would be a really nice, nice shot.” Because of heavy rain, his bulky IMAX camera didn’t get the shot. Casey was hit by a tornado twice that day, events he recalls with a calm, articulate tone...

ON THE U.S.-CANADA BORDER - Nearly four years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and after billions in security investment on both sides of this frontier stretching from Atlantic to Pacific, authorities and average folks are still jittery. Here's why: - At the edge of a sprawling raspberry field where Washington state meets British Columbia, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shakes his head at tire tracks that snake between rows of berries and over the international boundary, which here is a gravel ditch so puny a person could leap it. "They're long gone," says agent Candido Villalobos, who raced to...

Authorities say an undercover sting at the Tuxachanie Hiking Trail has scared away men suspected of gathering there for sex. That doesn't mean they won't turn up in another area of the DeSoto National Forest. But if they do, federal law enforcement agencies are on the lookout, said Ron Smith, acting district ranger for the U.S. Forest Service. And so are Harrison County deputies who will continue to check the area. Smith, in a meeting Thursday with Sheriff George H. Payne Jr., credited deputies with a sting in early June that resulted in six men's arrests on charges of indecent...

Sunday, June 26, 2005 In his 1974 song "Rednecks," Randy Newman lays a trap for the listener. Calling up the most boorish images of white Southerners ("We talk real funny down here/ We drink too much and we laugh too loud/ We're too dumb to make it in no northern town"), Newman invites the superior laughter of northern white liberals, the folks who'd bristle at pickaninny dolls but smile at Bubba jokes. And then he unsheathes his knife. His proclamation that good old boys are "too ignorant to realize" that the North has given blacks their freedom is followed by...

Labor Department Announces Availability of $5 Million To Train Workers with Limited English Proficiency WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration today announced the availability of approximately $5 million in demonstration funds to test innovative and unique training strategies to serve individuals with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) and Hispanic Americans. “The ability to communicate effectively in English is an essential element to career advancement,” said Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao. “This $5 million in funding will be used to develop and implement programs to address the language and job training needs of workers with limited...

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS, Associated Press PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - Hicks. Rednecks. Racists. People who live in this town of 7,300 have heard the epithets slung their way for decades. And many — black and white — cringe as they anticipate how the world will view their town when reputed Ku Klux Klansman and part-time preacher Edgar Ray Killen goes on trial Monday in the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers. "People make it sound like it's a hick town. It's not," said Bryon Whitley, a white 21-year-old who works in a music store on the downtown square, just across...

Immigration is crawling its way back onto the national agenda -- and not just as a footnote to keeping terrorists out. This year Congress enacted a law intended to prevent illegal immigrants from getting state driver's licenses; the volunteer "minutemen" who recently patrolled the porous Arizona border with Mexico attracted huge attention, and members of Congress from both parties are crafting proposals to deal with illegal immigration. All this is good. But unless we're brutally candid with ourselves, it won't amount to much. Being brutally candid means recognizing that the huge and largely uncontrolled flow of unskilled Latino workers into...

Fabian Basabe wears a watch, but don't ask him for the time because he has no idea. He never does.

An advertisement that ran in today’s print edition of The Daily Mississippian contained a racist message. The ad (pictured at left) was paid for by the New Century Group and promotes American Renaissance, a monthly magazine launched in 1991 that espouses incendiary views about immigration and race relations. The Daily Mississippian advertising staff will include a retraction and apology for the advertisement in Monday’s edition of the paper. Melanie Wadkins, advertising manager for the S. Gale Denley Student Media Center, said American Renaissance will be refunded the $220.50 paid for the three-column, 10 inch ad. Wadkins, who is the staff...

MEXICO CITY - Marilu has been working the streets of Mexico's capital for 45 years, and she's still at it — though at age 70 she'll settle for food instead of money. Women like her are the inspiration behind a new shelter for aging prostitutes in a dilapidated downtown mansion in Mexico City. Carmen Munoz, a sex worker in her 50s who organizes prostitutes trying to break free of their pimps, had the idea after seeing older women living in boxes on the streets of the Merced, one of Mexico City's main red-light zones. Munoz rallied support from women's groups...

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) - Three crewmen were kidnapped after pirates attacked a Japanese tugboat in the Malacca Strait, three days after a gas tanker came under a similar attack in the area, a piracy watchdog said. "The tugboat's crew have put out a distress call. The attack is going on now," Noel Choong, regional manager of the Piracy Reporting Centre of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), told AFP at 7:20 pm (1120 GMT). "The pirates are on board the boat. We are communicating the details of the attack to the Malaysian marine police so that they can dispatch a patrol...

Missile Counter-Attack Axworthy fires back at U.S. -- and Canadian -- critics of our BMD decision in An Open Letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Thu Mar 3 2005 By LLOYD AXWORTHY Dear Condi, I'm glad you've decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It's a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more. I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even...

Rolling back the tide of tyranny Mike S. Adams February 28, 2005 Last semester, the faculty senate at the University of Alabama (UA) passed an Orwellian speech code designed to restrict “any behavior that demeans or reduces an individual based on group affiliation or personal traits, or which promotes hate or discrimination.” Anyone armed with an 11th grade education can see that such a speech code is unconstitutional. Indeed, many of the UA “diversity initiatives” such as the Vagina Monologues would be banned under such a code, if the university had any intention of applying the code equally. Come to...