WASHINGTON (NNPA)?-As some predominantly White universities scramble to revise their admissions process to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in two University of Michigan affirmative action cases, they ma want to borrow a page from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that have been taking an individual approach to applicants all along.

?I think the literature is full of many ways to look for talented students and if you look for a student body that will be conducive to the learning of everyone then you are going to look at those measures that will help you predict who can be successful,? says Barbara R. Hatton, president of Knoxville College in Tennessee.

…In an unusual twist, the new rulings prohibiting strict scoring standards may also spell the elimination of special scholarships that had been awarded to Whites in an effort to encourage them to enroll in predominantly Black colleges under court desegregation orders.

In 1995, Alabama District Court Judge Harold Murphy, in a ruling in the case of ?Knight v. Alabama,? mandated the creation of Whites-only scholarships at predominantly Black Alabama State University in Montgomery and Alabama A&M University in Normal, near Huntsville. Under the court order, the race-based scholarships were funded annually for up to 10 years, with each university being reimbursed up to $1 million a year.

Filed at 10:11 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Saturday he had confidence in CIA Director George Tenet despite his agency's failure to warn Bush against making allegations about Iraq's nuclear weapons program later found false.

"Yes I do, absolutely,'' Bush said. "I've got confidence in George Tenet. I've got confidence in the men and women who work at the CIA and I look forward to working with them as we win this war on terror.''

Whatever eventual benefit there might be in such reforms, the immediate impact on Malawian farmers -- paupers during the best of times -- was distress. Corn prices, no longer set by the government, became unpredictable. Given the risk caused by instability, the private sector did not mature as expected. Worse yet, the kwacha was repeatedly devalued. Falling prices in the world tobacco market had strained already thin foreign-currency reserves. At the urging of the I.M.F., the government instituted small devaluations in 1990 and 1991 and two larger ones in 1992. Finally, in 1994, Malawi moved from a fixed exchange rate for the kwacha to one that floated. For farmers, that meant the cost of fertilizer, an imported good, ballooned as the kwacha shriveled.

Before, fertilizer had been subsidized. Loans had been, too. Farmers now found themselves adrift ''in the worst of both worlds, a Bermuda Triangle,'' deprived of the benefits of a regulated economy while yet to gain the benefits of a free market, said Lawrence Rubey, the United States Agency for International Development's chief of agriculture in Malawi. He gave an example with some dismal arithmetic: in dollar terms, the price of a bag of fertilizer had actually gone down. But in devalued kwachas, the cost had risen fivefold. This was devastating to farmers with badly leached soil. ''The past arrangement of high state control of the economy was inefficient, but at least it was stable,'' Rubey said.

…Like many poor, heavily indebted countries, Malawi operates something like a business in receivership. Lenders and donors -- among them the World Bank, the I.M.F., the British, the Americans and the European Union -- carefully monitor fiscal policy and budget expenditures. Their approvals are necessary, or their generosity is withdrawn. The spigot of aid goes on, off, on, off.

Understandably, this has made for a peevish relationship. The Malawians quite correctly contend that the donors are hypocrites: while opposing state subsidies elsewhere, wealthy nations hand out $1 billion a day to their own farmers, about six times what they give in development aid to the globe's poor. (Nicholas Stern, the World Bank's chief economist, once pointed out that each day, the average European cow receives $2.50 in subsidies while 75 percent of the people in Africa are scrimping by on less than $2.) These subsidies also depress commodity prices, undercutting the ability of developing nations to compete in world markets and get their nations off the dole.

ASHINGTON, July 10 ? The House cleared the way today for the Bush administration to impose new rules on overtime pay, narrowly rejecting Democratic arguments that the plan will cost millions of workers the opportunity to earn extra money.

While considering a $138 billion measure that pays for labor, health and education programs, the Republican-controlled House defeated a Democratic proposal to block proposed wage rules that have become the subject of a struggle between business and labor. The vote was 213 to 210. The underlying spending measure was approved 215 to 208.

HOUSTON ? When Jerroll Tyler, a sophomore at Sharpstown High School here, turned 18, he met the full force of Texas' no-nonsense approach to education. He received an attendance contract, warning that if he missed more than two days of school, he was out permanently. By week's end, Mr. Tyler had caroused his way past the limit.

Months later, when he showed up to take a state math exam needed for graduation, a dean at Sharpstown told him he was no longer enrolled. "I went home, and I never looked back at school again," Mr. Tyler said.

Which was why Mr. Tyler and his mother, Karen Gamble, were shocked to see that Sharpstown High claimed it had no dropouts at all last year. It reported, instead, that Mr. Tyler had transferred to Southwest High, a charter school he had never even visited. Some 462 other students left the school that year, and Sharpstown claimed that not one had dropped out.

Sharpstown was not alone. A recent state audit in Houston, which examined records from 16 middle and high schools, found that more than half of the 5,500 students who left in the 2000-1 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not. That year, Houston schools reported that only 1.5 percent of its students had dropped out.

The city has also been a pillar of the so-called Texas miracle in education, whose emphasis on grading school performance became the model for the rest of the country under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It was largely on the strength of his success here that Rod Paige, Houston's former superintendent, followed George W. Bush east to become secretary of education.

Now, some here are questioning whether the miracle may have been smoke and mirrors, at least on the high school level. And they are suggesting that perhaps Houston is a model of how the focus on school accountability can sometimes go wrong, driving administrators to alter data or push students likely to mar a school's profile ? through poor attendance or low test scores ? out the back door.

"It was Enron accounting," said Joseph Rodriguez, a former employee of the district's office of research and accountability, who is running for an open seat on the Houston school board.

ENTEBBE, Uganda (AP) -- President Bush said Friday that intelligence services cleared his State of the Union speech, which included a now-discredited allegation that Iraq was seeking to buy nuclear material from Africa.

Bush's national security adviser specifically said the CIA had vetted the speech. If CIA Director George Tenet had any misgivings about that sentence in the president's speech, "he did not make them known" to Bush or his staff, said Condoleezza Rice.

The issue arose a day after other senior U.S. officials said that before and after Bush's Jan. 28 speech, American intelligence officials expressed doubts about a British intelligence report the president cited to back up his allegations.

Those doubts were relayed to British officials before they made them public, and were passed to people at several agencies of the U.S. government before Bush gave his nationally broadcast speech. The White House this week admitted the charge about Iraq seeking uranium should not have appeared in his speech.

Bush, asked during a meeting with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni here how erroneous material had ended up in the address, said, "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services." He did not answer when pressed again on how it wound up in his speech.

But he reiterated his belief that he made the right decision in invading Iraq and asserted that the world is a more peaceful place for it.

Rice said "the CIA cleared the speech in its entirety."

The White House officials responded that a paper issued by the British government contained the unequivocal assertion: ?Iraq has ... sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.? As long as the statement was attributed to British Intelligence, the White House officials argued, it would be factually accurate. The CIA officials dropped their objections and that?s how it was delivered.

By Peter Galli

PORTLAND?The use of open-source software is alive and well and growing among government agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau.

In an address at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (Oscon) here on Thursday titled "Open Source in Government," Lisa Wolfisch Nyman, a senior Internet technology architect at the Bureau, said the issue of open source and government was first raised at Oscon in 1999, where many public sector employees said they were forbidden from using open source.

But things have changed substantially over the past four years, she said. "In June this year, Bruce Mehlman, the assistant secretary for technical policy at the Department of Commerce, said that the 'Penguin has landed', which is quite a shift in just four years," she said.

The most disquieting thing, to me, about electronic voting machines is there is no physical artifact. Punch cards may have hanging chads, but at least chads can be counted. Without a physical artifact, proving a vote occurred, you cannot prove that votes were not stolen, totals manipulated, and democracy stolen.

Now, a New Zealand political activist, Bev Harris, has found out how last year?s election might have been stolen using the Diebold systems now in use. The story has already made its way to England and is being discussed at Slashdot.

The author has put online seven gigabytes of data, from CDs allegedly accessible in Georgia at the time of the last election, files which would have allowed Republicans to steal that election. (Background: Republicans swept the Georgia elections in 2002 after polls throughout the campaign showed Democrats comfortably ahead. Personal point: I live in Georgia.)

… The author wants you to go to their Web site, download the files, test them, mirror them, check them out, spread them around, and look for evidence to prove the 2002 elections were stolen.

If they is true, it is bigger than Watergate, bigger than any scandal ever in American political history.

WASHINGTON, July 9 - Gen. Tommy R. Franks said today that violence and uncertainty in Iraq made it unlikely that troop levels would be reduced "for the foreseeable future," and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld nearly doubled the estimated military costs there to $3.9 billion a month.

"We have about 145,000 troops in there right now," General Franks told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said he had talked to "commanders at every level inside Iraq," and found that the size and structure of those forces were appropriate for the current situation.

Mr. Rumsfeld has never laid out a timetable for bringing American troops home, and has repeatedly pledged that the forces would stay as long as required, but no longer. Even so, the acknowledgement today of the scope of the long-term military commitment to Iraq was the strongest indication to date that the reconstruction effort requires the continued deployment of large numbers of troops - and that the undertaking carries a hefty price tag.

That?s what the GOP wants Dems, and liberals in general, to do.

…Why? Because the goal is not to win a debate about whether the war was right or wrong.

The goal is getting rid of Bush.

And you don?t need to change anyone?s mind about the war to do that.

But taking away the perception that Bush is trustworthy would go a long way, since that?s where much of his personal appeal is based.

And exposing Bush as dishonest is relatively easier than winning converts about the war.

This is where the Dem split on the war -- which up until now has made the party seem rudderless ? comes in handy.

Now, the pro-war and anti-war Dems, representing a broad swath of Americans, can stand together and say:

Whether or not you believed war with Iraq was necessary at this time,

no one believes a President has the right to mislead the public when our soldiers? lives are on the line, and our credibility with the world is at stake.

Several people have written, asking what I think about the almost daily media reports on attacks against Coalition forces and low morale amongst the troops.

My unit deployed here to perform a specific task, and we?ve been doing that same job since we arrived in December. What we do is somewhat more dangerous than working in a logistics office, but significantly less dangerous than kicking in doors and dodging RPGs. Sure, it got a little bit scary during the height of the conflict, with the constant air raid sirens and security alerts; and there is no denying that the threat of terrorist attack is omnipresent in this corner of the world, especially for folks like us. But I can?t pretend to know what it?s like for the guys out at the very tip of the spear, and I certainly won?t pretend to speak on their behalf?I can only write about what I have personally experienced.

We?ve been here for a long time, and we?re looking forward to going home. We?ve been given a tentative date for our return, but we?re pretty guarded about getting prematurely excited. One of our sister units recently found out that they are going to have to stay several months longer than they had expected, and we don?t pretend that something similar couldn?t possibly happen to us?although it appears less likely the closer we get to that magic day.

We?ve adjusted to our lifestyle here, as uncomfortable as it may be, and we make the best of it. People tell jokes and laugh at mealtimes, we get together to watch movies in the morale tent, and we share our care packages from home. Some people play basketball or volleyball after the sun goes down, or just sit outside at a picnic table and chat with their buddies. Sure, we hear a lot of complaining?but complaints are merely the background noise of military life.

Just like you folks back home, it hurts us every time we hear about soldiers being hurt or killed in an ambush. I?ve been fortunate in that with the exception of my brother?s friend Tom, none of the deaths or casualties have been anyone close to me. But I try to put these events in perspective. We?re engaged in a war, fighting for what I believe to be a just cause: the elimination of a hostile regime, and the liberation of Iraq. We knew we would take casualties before it began, and we prepared ourselves for that eventuality.

We are the mightiest military to ever walk the face of the Earth. We have the capability and the will to finish this job.

Let's see it through to the end.

Then accept some risks. You can't have both liberty and absolute security. There is always a balance between the two, but for over 200 years the United States has generally erred on the side of liberty.

It has been a winning bet. Liberty allows collaboration, which results in innovation. Innovation makes societies more flexible. Open lines of communication make for transparent markets. A free press is our great guarantor of democracy.

Democracy is to government as markets are to economies, and as liberty is to innovation. These are our three pillars. Without them we are nothing.

…So choose. In the words of James Madison, "There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation." Or take Ben Franklin's advice, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

WASHINGTON, July 8 ? Lawyers for a Qatari student who was jailed by the military last month asked a federal court today to free him and challenged President Bush's authority to treat terrorism suspects as "enemy combatants."

Lawyers for the student, Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, argued in an appeal filed in federal court in Illinois that Mr. Bush's June 23 order declaring Mr. Marri to be an operative for Al Qaeda and an enemy combatant represented an act of "unbridled authority" that was illegal and unconstitutional.

Specialists in military law said that the legal challenge, coming just days after the Bush administration announced it was considering the use of military tribunals against six terrorism suspects, could present an important test of the executive branch's power to imprison suspects outside the reach of the civilian court system.

Mr. Marri, 37, had been scheduled to go on trial this month in Illinois on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, about his travels and engaged in credit card fraud. But in a surprise decision last month, the Bush administration instead had him removed from the court system and jailed in a Navy brig in South Carolina as an enemy combatant. Officials said recent intelligence indicated that he had visited a Qaeda terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and that he was prepared to help "settle" operatives in the United States for further attacks after Sept. 11.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on the legal challenge today. "If we have any response, we'll respond in court," said Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman.

… Mr. Loomis was discharged just one week shy of the 20-year career mark that would have entitled him to full retirement benefits after his home was burned and a firefighter found a videotape of him engaging in sex with other men.

The Army discharged Mr. Loomis, who was wounded in the Vietnam War, in which he won two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, under "other than honorable" conditions, a move that deprived him of pension and benefits that he says are worth more than $1 million.

: I think I speak for many (read: most) bloggers when I say that we don't really give a shit about the RSS v. Echo wars.

Most mortals -- and now that weblogs are widespread, remember that most bloggers are now mortals, not warrior geeks -- still don't fully understand what RSS is or what it does, least of all what it stands for (either version). That doesn't mean we won't use it or its variants and depend on them; that doesn't mean that XML and RSS and Echo are not revolutionary and better than sex. But that's not the point.

If the leaders of the blogging world keep on fighting about this, it will hurt everyone -- not just because there will be confusion about standards and compliance and how and where to get the data and functionality you need but also because it will continue to doom "blogging" to the world of greasy-haired geekdom, not mass-market significance.

So I don't give a damn who's right and who's wrong. I don't give a damn who started it. I don't give a damn who's screwing whom.
I have just one message for all of you:

SHUT UP ALREADY!

This fight is getting to be embarrassing and certainly unproductive and probably destructive. It's tiresome and childish and wearying.

So find a way to get along.

Or some big company will just come in and do it for you

For those who dream of a National African American Museum, something always comes along to jolt them awake. In the early 1990s, everyone from then Democratic representative Gus Savage of Illinois to Republican senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina played the role of No-Doz and squelched the idea. After the 1994 GOP junta in Congress, all arts funding became suspect. Museum advocates believed that as long as Republicans ran Congress, a black museum would be a nonstarter. They may well have been right?but for the wrong reasons.

On its face the black museum movement is moving at full steam, Republican majority be damned. In May, Democratic senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, and Republican senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, of Kansas and Pennsylvania respectively, introduced a bill authorizing the creation of a black museum?to be part of the Smithsonian in Washington?and providing $17 million in funding.

But details of the bill have become a sore point for the nearly two-year-old presidential commission charged with creating a blueprint for the museum.

In 1821 a group of freed American slaves retraced the steps of their forebears to West Africa to start a new country. At first the Africans didn't want to turn over a huge hunk of land to the American blacks, but when a U.S. naval officer accompanying the group ordered the Africans at gunpoint to knock it off, they agreed to give it up for baubles and biscuits worth $300. The country of Liberia was founded.

The emigrating blacks proceeded to organize a society around the only social structure they had experienced, that of the antebellum South. So just like the Southern whites, they set up plantations, adopted the formal dress of Southern gentry, joined the Masons, sipped bourbon on the verandas, and sent their kids abroad to school. Liberia's main city, Monrovia, is named after President Monroe. As for the Africans who worked the plantations, the transplanted former American slaves called them "aborigines."

This is an admittedly thumbnail sketch of what President Bush last week referred to as Liberia's "unique history," which he said had created "a certain sense of expectations" about the U.S. getting involved in trying to stabilize it. During the 2000 election Bush came out against so-called nation building, but last week his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the president thinks the stability of West Africa is "important" to our interests. Last week Rice told reporters Bush felt it necessary to "bring about reconciliation" between Africa and America due to their odd ties, i.e., slavery, which she has termed America's "birth defect."

The cameras are already in place. The computer code is being developed at a dozen or more major companies and universities. And the trial runs have already been planned.

Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch. Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon.

The military is scheduled to issue contracts for Combat Zones That See, or CTS, as early as September. The first demonstration should take place before next summer, according to a spokesperson. Approach a checkpoint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during the test and CTS will spot you. Turn the wheel on this sprawling, 8,656-acre army encampment, and CTS will record your action. Your face and license plate will likely be matched to those on terrorist watch lists. Make a move considered suspicious, and CTS will instantly report you to the authorities.

Fort Belvoir is only the beginning for CTS. Its architects at the Pentagon say it will help protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where for the past few weeks fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos. But defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye.

This isn't some science fiction nightmare. Far from it. CTS depends on parts you could get, in a pinch, at Kmart.

While there, I saw something that frankly made my jaw drop. I hadn't commented on Liberia yet, but I'm pretty sure that when I do, it won't include this sentence:

...the news that Donk Presidential Candidate Howard 'How Many Ways Can I Lick Kofi's Ass?' Dean supports sending our troops into this festering hell-hole of savages.

The really scary thing?

He's ranked 40th.

I obviously need to work harder at getting blogrolled.