U, MET COUNCIL AGREE "This was a very, very difficult and protracted negotiation; there were legitimate issues on both sides, including the U's concerns over protecting their research facilities...

• • • THE GOOGLE AND VERIZON STATEMENT, which was roundly criticized when it was released, is unlikely to be the only proposal we'll see from the big boys. A couple of weeks ago,...

I am embarrassed to be collecting unemployment. I am embarrassed about it because my husband has a good job. I am more embarrassed about it because I have a new car. I feel like Ronald Reagan's...

There was an interesting confluence of articles on Aug. 30, with Peter Bell writing about the achievement gap between white and black children ("An idea: Bring back the orphanage") and...

Regardless, at least the city of St. Cloud tried for some public accountability of a Waite Park man who violated a city ordinance when he put up posters last December that expressed his hatred of the...

Last week our biking group took a ride to check out the two recently installed artist-designed drinking fountains that adorn our city. I was inspired by the high quality of the artists' works and by...

Applaud his stand against dependency Much is being said of Gov. Tim Pawlenty's "no" on health care reform as crafted by the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress ("Pawlenty...

Its Scottish business is now focused on engineering design in East Kilbride and some servicing and maintenance work in Aberdeen and Alloa. Post the sale of its iconic Glasgow pumps business to the...

Scottish football sells newspapers, fills the airwaves and carries a resonance way beyond the football field. It contributes economic benefits, social capital, the occasional feel-good factor, and...

FORGIVE ME for sounding a little on the sober side, but so far as I can see, this has not been a slow week for major political news. The Middle East peace process has restarted, after years of...

By addressing Palestinians in a markedly warm and dignified way, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged with his standing enhanced at this week's relaunch of Israeli-Palestinian peace...

Highland Council is therefore to be congratulated for beginning the search for radical solutions to our current financial difficulties by examining the feasibility of unifying the police, fire and...

Scotland's capital city is facing financial problems of some magnitude. Spending cuts of £90 million are looming over the next three years, and there are fears that this could rise to £140 million....

Are "gap" years and extended holidays a vital part of the new work-life balance? An opportunity to broaden our minds and expand our experience of other lands and cultures? Or are they just a glorious...

A: Crash worthiness B: Fuel economy and emissions C: Overall comfort D: Amount of parts made in the U.S. 2 Cuba may loosen the rules to lure what kind of...

Back in January, US vice-president Joe Biden offered up a huge hostage to fortune. Talking to fellow Democrats about the Obama plan for the economy, he promised: "You're going to see, come the...

(AP) WASHINGTON (AP) - "It's still the economy, stupid."And there's virtually nothing Democrats can do to change that reality before Nov. 2.Time has all but run out for President Barack Obama and his...

(AP) KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The new top commander in Afghanistan is talking up a weapon that has been kept in the shadows for years - special operations missions to kill or capture key insurgents...

(AP) WASHINGTON (AP) - Israel's prime minister and the Palestinian president have set off on a yearlong peace journey, taking to a well-trod road that has led only to failure for nearly two decades....

Here's a paradox for you. Most ecologists would agree that we're ravaging the Earth's natural resources at an unsustainable rate-and pushing up against some dangerous thresholds in the biosphere....

The Palin Effect on Primaries Sarah Palin may not be running for office right now, but she's made the biggest single impact on this year's mid-term races. Democratic Strategist Jamal Simmons and GOP...

(Financial Times) Suppose that the US presidential election of 1932 had, in fact, taken place in 1930, at an early stage in the Great Depression. Suppose, too, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had won...

President Obama's Address on Iraq The president will visit troops in Texas before addressing the nation from the Oval Office about the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq. Bill Plante...

When I teach law students how to analyze a constitutional case, I drill into them one lesson: always start with the facts. So when I was asked to opine on TV last week about the proposed...

(AP) KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) - Since the war began, this southern city and surrounding countryside have been marked as the heartland of the Taliban, the insurgents' springboard to retake all of...

(CBS) You can measure the cost of Katrina in lives and treasure. But there is another cost of that disaster, less obvious, but in one sense, just as damaging: What it did to America's sense of what...

Schieffer's Plea for Stem Cell Research Being a cancer survivor himself, Bob Schieffer knows the importance of scientific research in the medical field. He comments on the federal injunction placing...

The owner of the former Hilton Pittsburgh is facing foreclosure. Lender BlackRock Financial Management Inc. filed a complaint in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court today seeking to foreclose...

The Heinz Endowment is funding a $2 million, three-year project involving a consortium of local universities to create a baseline survey of the ecosystems where drilling for natural gas in the...

Sept. 8 is the Republic of Macedonia's 19th birthday. Since 1991, Macedonia has worked its way through the painful transition from a socialist state born out of Yugoslavia to the point where it is...

One of my children's favorite bedtime stories was "The Little Red Hen." The simple tale follows the hen as she prepares a loaf of bread. At each step of the process, she asks for help from barnyard...

Rolling Stone ) in a style so readable that you might never use your bookmark.The cover shows an interesting-looking older guy wearing a tux with bow tie undone and a world-weary look. He's walking...

Associated Press President Obama, through his spokesman Robert Gibbs, says he will keep his campaign promise not to raise taxes on Americans making less than $250,000 per year. He reminded his...

John Murtha ). Instead, they are troops who have been charged with wrongdoing on the battlefield, in the heat of battle against an enemy with no uniform or identifying markers."It is often unclear...

U.S. senator, but he's been limited in his ability to implement this anti-gun agenda as president. Democratic members of Congress remember the federal assault-weapons ban as one of the lead issues...

Congress .The recently passed CARD Act limits the flexibility of credit card issuers to boost interest rates quickly on badly performing customers and also limits penalty fees. Under its provisions,...

Gov. Tim Kaine , a Democrat, struck a preliminary deal to hand over this public right of way to an Australian corporation so the company could charge solo drivers for using the same road their tax...

Two little girls I know, age 6, showed up the other day at a public pool in Washington for a swim. They were excited by the prospect of escaping, if only for a little while, the heat pushing the...

Wilberforce converted to Christianity and spent months agonizing over whether to retire from the political scene. He finally decided instead to use his political position to carry out the two burdens...

The accounts of murder, arson, and crimes against women sounded horribly familiar: Each detail, each grisly fact seemed taken out of a script enacted before; the sequence of events was as predictable...

A Butler County man has been jailed on charges that he raped and assaulted a woman, breaking her ankle and ribs, while holding her against her will for three days. State police in Butler say the...

Two employees of the Allegheny County Medical Examiner's office were suspended for leaving a body briefly unattended in their van, a county spokeswoman said. Today was the last day of the five-day...

As a newspaper that long supported him before getting thoroughly disillusioned with him put it, the former prime minister couldn’t have written a boring book even if he had tried.  Which is not a...

Congress has designated September as Pain Awareness Month. The label is redundant. Americans don't need to be reminded how much pain they're in. And that's the political problem of the moment.Every...

As our economy meanders down the road to recovery, yet to hit its stride, the American dreamslides out of reach for too many. Nearly one in 10 Americans can't find work. If you consider those who...

U.S. government lowered its estimated rate of growth in the second quarter to an anemic 1.6 percent. The unemployment rate won't budge from its perch above 9 percent and may climb even higher....

Congress and looks unlikely to become law anytime soon.But Big Labor is not going gently into that good night. In fact, the shrinking membership rolls are making Big Labor organizations and their...

Labor Day 's parades and picnics, union bosses will bellow today about workers' rights and thealleged greed of management, especially inside Big Business. Such class-warfare sloganeering would be...

Congress is poised - perhaps as soon as this month - to pass legislation that would fuel even faster growth of monopoly unionism in state and local government employment, which is already five times...

When you get a whole country - as did ours - thinking that Washington is a sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence, you are educating that country into a dependent...