| Everyday Life for Civilians in Darfur
Beyond direct attacks on civilians, the confused nature of the recent hostilitieswith inter-tribal fighting and groups switching sideshas contributed to the displacement of civilians. Yet in July and August 2007 government officials told international agency staffers based in Darfur that Darfurs 2.2 million internally displaced persons were beginning to return home and the international community should cooperate.90 But what the government described as voluntary returns were in fact only brief excursions out of the camps on market days or during the farming season. Few displaced persons left the camps for more than a few days and even fewer returned permanently to their villages.91 One person working with displaced people in Darfur described the governments discussion of voluntary return as smoke and mirrors.92 Another noted that last year the government tried to convince the relief community that its assistance to the camps was not needed because people were ready to go home.
Oroville's Own: Ray Peel
At 88, Ray Peel wrote a book about his 50 years as a pilot dancing on the edge of crazy. The idea for a book came when Ray decided to clean out a closet where he had been storing junk for many years. While cleaning, he found his old pilot's logs, and the cleaning came to a halt. "As I scanned through the pages, I relived exciting moments of my life," Ray wrote in the introduction to his book. "I remember an old flying friend saying to me, 'Ray, you are going to find out that flying is 90 percent pleasure and 10 percent pure panic.'" The entries in Ray's logs validated his friend's statement and inspired the name of the book, "Flying is 90 Percent Pleasure and 10 Percent Pure Panic: My 50 years as a pilot dancing on crazy." The book is a collection of small stories, almost like vignettes, of some of the highlights of his flying years along with the scares.
Harman lobbied over gender pay gap
Union activists have lobbied a Government minister as part of a campaign to close the gender pay gap. Officials from Unison delivered a strong message that women deserve as much pay as men to Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman at the party's Spring conference in Birmingham. The union's head of local government Heather Wakefield, women's officer Sharon Green and other female officials pointed out that women's average pay was still "scandalously" 17% less than men's. Unison's general secretary Dave Prentis said: "Thirty years on, the Equal Pay Act is still seen by many employers as a take-it-or-leave-it bit of legislation. "But we want to see it implemented robustly across the UK. "Local authorities have dragged their feet in implementing equal pay, blaming the lack of cash.
Perchlorate pact at hand - at last
Rialto and San Bernardino are finally on the cusp of settling their portion of the perchlorate-cleanup lawsuit Rialto filed in 2004. That suit named not just San Bernardino, but the U.S. Department of Defense and some 40 companies that Rialto wants to hold responsible for the perchlorate contamination in its groundwater. The federal lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in October, but if county supervisors approve the settlement that Rialto City Council signed onto last week, the county will no longer be among the defendants. That's good. We hate to see local governments suing each other, pitting one set of taxpayers' money against another in legal fees, instead of working out a suitable accommodation. In this case, far better to spend money on cleaning up the contamination than on dueling lawyers.
Editorial: Lawmakers must stop developers''SLAPP' suits
As acronyms go, "SLAPP" suit is perfect. It stands for "strategic lawsuits against public participation," but slap -- as in a backhander across the chops -- is the operative term. That's slap as in abuse, bully and intimidate. It's legal extortion and it's got to stop. In development circles, SLAPP suits -- such as ones filed by Meijer, Inc. and the Village at Grand Traverse LLC against Acme Township officials -- are nearly perfect weapons. They are filed against planning commission members or township trustees as individuals, not in their official capacity, which means the people being sued can't depend on the township's insurance policy to defend them. Private citizens who get too mouthy are often targeted, too. If the person being sued needs a lawyer, he pays the fees.
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