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I am sympathetic to immigrants, since half my great grandparents were immigrants. I have also seen some families whose efforts serve to build up our country, and believe that we are better off because they immigrated. I know some immigrants from Europe and Asia, as well as some from North and Central America who have no intention of ever becoming citizens and I resent that. I also believe that there are people who are still trying to buy a green card under the last "amnesty," through lawyers who seem unscrupulous to me. It is wrong to set up a system...

In 1943, the Allied forces wanted to understand Hitler's psychological makeup in order to predict, to the extent possible, his behavior as the Allies continued their prosecution of the war and his response to Germany's defeat. The Allies were also seeking to understand the German national psyche to gain an understanding of how to convert them into a "peace-loving nation." This report was written for the OSS by Dr. Henry A. Murray, pre-war Director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and head of the OSS. Dr. Murray obviously was forced by circumstances to psychoanalyze his subject from a distance. He gathered...

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Ethiopia ordered the expulsion of three Americans who were helping prepare the Horn of Africa country for elections in May, alleging Thursday that they entered the country illegally. But the expulsions ordered Wednesday — the Americans are still in Ethiopia and have until Friday to leave — followed a critical U.S. report about human rights in the country. The May 15 elections in this country of 25.6 million would be only the third democratic ballot in its history. All the elections have been won by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front. As a rebel movement, the...

Hard-pressed employers could get a big break on workers' compensation premiums later this year if insurers follow a rate recommendation issued by a key agency Wednesday. The Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau in San Francisco, an industry-backed private organization that provides statistical analysis, recommended that insurance companies drop their premiums by about 10% beginning in July. The bureau is expected to make the recommendation official Friday. If, as is likely, such a cut is reflected in rates submitted by insurance companies to regulators, employers would see the first double-digit decline resulting from a two-year campaign to overhaul the state's system...

Union leaders have been among the most vocal opponentsof privatizing Social Security. Their opposition is some-thing of a mystery, because union workers would be amongthose who would gain the most if Social Security were trans-formed to a system of individually owned, privately investedaccounts. Because a privatized Social Security system wouldprovide a higher rate of return, union workers would receivefar greater benefits than they would under the currentSocial Security system. In contrast, traditional SocialSecurity fixes, such as raising payroll taxes, would severe-ly harm union workers.

Three former employees of the state Franchise Tax Board have been arrested and charged with embezzling more than $380,000 by cutting fraudulent tax refund checks to 43 accomplices who gave the state workers a share of the money, according to court documents and authorities. Beora Hart Jr., 46, of Sacramento, and Robin Maria Vaughn, 43, of Sacramento, are scheduled to appear in Sacramento Superior Court today on felony charges tied to allegedly using the state's computers since August 1999 to embezzle the funds, officials said. Court documents indicate Hart allegedly issued fraudulent refunds adding up to $372,000. Anetta Louise Leslie,...

27 immigrants arrested at PTI 3-9-05 By Taft Wireback Staff Writer News & Record GREENSBORO -- Federal agents arrested 27 people Tuesday on immigration charges at Piedmont Triad International Airport, where they worked as airplane mechanics and repair workers at TIMCO, an aviation maintenance company. The arrests of immigrants from eight countries were part of Operation Tarmac, a nationwide effort to keep undocumented workers out of the supposedly secure parts of airports where a terrorist strike could be carried out. Authorities said there is no reason to believe at this time that any of those arrested at PTI were involved...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A Schwarzenegger administration video packaged as a television news story has labor leaders and one lawmaker outraged.The video promotes regulations that give workers the choice of taking a meal break or going home early. "It's a blatant attempt to manipulate the media," Assemblyman Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood, said yesterday. "If a television station is lazy enough just to take this video (and run it), it completely manipulates and skews the story."He suggested the video violated a ban on spending tax money to produce propaganda and said he would ask the attorney general's office to investigate.But an administration...

Over the years, however, and especially on Mr. Sweeney's watch, they became much less interested in the creation of private-sector jobs. Instead, they became part of the ideological left and its regulatory and high-tax agenda. So instead of favoring oil drilling in Alaska, which would create thousands of new middle-class jobs, Mr. Sweeney's shop leaned toward the rich liberals of the Sierra Club. And while many union members are cultural conservatives, the AFL-CIO has spent its scarce political capital fighting conservative judges. No wonder millions of workers look at union organizers and shrug.

GOPUSA Poll What is your opinion about Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo exploring a potential run for president in 2008? I would support him, and I think he could win the nomination. I would support him, but I don't think he could win the nomination. I would not support his presidential candidacy. Who is Tom Tancredo? I'm not sure yet. View Results

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Groups representing attorneys and injured workers filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging state regulations they said would result in big cuts in benefits for employees who suffer disabling injuries on the job. "The ratings fail to replace workers' pre-injury earnings," said Mark Hayes, president of Voters Injured at Work, a new group that hopes to organize thousands of injured workers into a political force. "If these drastic reductions take effect, more Californians will lose their cars, their homes and their good credit ... (and) end up on welfare." Susan Gard, a spokeswoman for the state Division of Workers...

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez said Wednesday that he signed an order to immediately expropriate the assets of Venepal, a bankrupt paper company that halted operations last month. Chavez met with former Venepal employees to sign the expropriation order. The workers vowed to rebuild the company with the help of the government and manufacture books and notebooks the government could use in public schools and other education-related social projects. Chavez, a self-described "revolutionary" and critic of unbridled capitalism, said Venepal's expropriation is a step in Venezuela's new economic self-development model. "We're at war against poverty and against misery in Venezuela," he...

California business owners saw the average annual premium for workers' compensation insurance drop between 13.9 percent and 16.6 percent in the last six months, according to records from the state Department of Insurance. These would be the first double-digit percentage rate cuts since deregulation in 1995, savings that arose out of legislative overhauls the last two sessions. "Rates are coming down. Right now, it appears medical cost inflation has been impacted by the reforms. Medical costs were one of the primary drivers pushing rates up," said Jack Hannan, a spokesman for the Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California, an...

California employers paid 38 percent more for workers' compensation insurance this year than those in the second most expensive state, Alaska, a new study shows. The nationwide survey said the gap between California and the rest of the country widened further in the past two years. In 2002, the state's employers, while still facing the highest rates in the nation, paid 16 percent more than the No. 2 state of Florida. On average, employers in January 2004 paid an average of $6.08 per $100 of payroll for premiums - $1.69 more than Alaska companies, according to a biennial survey of...

PARIS, Dec 9 (AFP) - French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin on Thursday announced a major relaxation of the controversial 35-hour working week, the key socialist reform that has come under attack for helping create the country's stubbornly high unemployment.     At a televised news conference in Paris, Raffarin unveiled a government action plan dubbed "Contract France 2005", whose main provision is to make it easier for staff and companies to get round the last left-wing administration's compulsory cut in working hours.     Introduced in 1998 by then prime minister Lionel Jospin, the law is blamed by the ruling Union for a Popular...

A judge who can't handle "deadlines, attorneys' and parties' harassment and conflicts (with) angry, hostile litigants" probably ought to find another line of work. But a state workers' compensation judge – actually, an arbiter of money and medical benefits in workers' comp cases – has filed a workers' comp claim for, according to The Sacramento Bee, "injuries to the heart and psyche." And hers is hardly the most glaring case of judges working the workers' comp system to their personal advantage. More's the pity that it's lawful. In fact, the cost of workers' comp as a percentage of payroll at...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

British aid workers are expelled from Sudan By David Blair, Africa Correspondent (Filed: 30/11/2004) The Sudanese government ordered senior members of Oxfam and Save the Children to leave the country yesterday, accusing them of backing rebels in the war-torn region of Darfur. The action against the two British-based aid agencies, which are helping hundreds of thousands of refugees, followed a report by Save the Children of a government air raid on one of its feeding centres, and critical press statements issued by Oxfam. Save the Children is a large distributor of food in Darfur Sudan pledged three weeks ago to...

Turkish workers a mistake, claims Schmidt By Hannah Cleaver in Berlin (Filed: 25/11/2004) Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, has inflamed the country's debate on immigration by saying that multiculturalism can only work under authoritarian regimes, and that bringing millions of Turkish guest workers to Germany was a mistake. "The concept of multiculturalism is difficult to make fit with a democratic society," he told the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper. He added that it had been a mistake that during "the early 1960s we brought guest workers from foreign cultures into the country". Mr Schmidt, 85, who was the Social Democratic chancellor...

A death threat threw workers' compensation Judge Ruby Theophile into such an emotional tailspin that she filed her very own workers' comp claim. Even one of her doctors remarked on the irony. The situation "seems unusual if not unique," psychiatrist Warren Jones wrote in his evaluation of the Pasadena judge. It was not unique - nor even unusual. California's 150 workers' compensation judges are six times more likely to file on-the-job injury cases than their judicial counterparts in state government, a Bee investigation has found. These gatekeepers of cash and medical benefits for injured workers have claimed injuries from rearranging...