In 1997, a group of nurse’s aides, housekeepers, secretaries and other service workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Yale University’s teaching hospital, asked 1199 New England to help them form a union.  After 10 years of fighting a virulent anti-union campaign orchestrated by the hospital and its team of union-busting consultants, the workers still don’t have a union.  But each of them will have about $1,200 extra bucks in their pockets, hopefully in time for Christmas, thanks to an arbitrator who just ordered the hospital to cough up $4.5 million in damages to the workers and the union. 

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Kamal Abbas, Gamal Mubarak and Ibrahim Eissa are all their early forties.  All three are deeply involved in the debate over the future of Egypt.  All three have dedicated followings.  By this time next year, Gamal probably will be president of the Arab Republic of Egypt, having been boosted there by the heavy hand of his father, Mohamed Hosni Mubarak, the military strongman who has run the country as a closely-held dictatorship for the past 27 years. Kamal and Ibrahim will most likely be serving time in Egypt’s hellish prison system, sent there by the same heavy hand for opposing Gamal’s ascension to power. (More)

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First posted on the AFL-CIO’s News Blog
by Seth Michaels, Oct 18, 2007

Republicans in Washington have had their hands dirtied by plenty of scandals in recent months, but this latest action has to rank among the lowest. In an effort to beat back full funding for children’s health care, the staff of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) supported a smear campaign against a 12-year-old survivor of a car crash.

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San Simeon, Calif. — I’m sitting in a movie theater that resembles the IMAX Theater at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in other words a doozy of a theater, about to watch a film about William Randolph Hearst, whose “castle” I’ve just toured.  The movie begins with a stylish reenactment of Hearst touring great cities with his mother as a boy, developing a love for architecture, art and graceful living that would eventually inspire him to recreate all that he’d seen high atop a hill on the California coast.  The film traces the careful design and building of Hearst Castle, replete with religious architecture, art and artifacts from the cathedrals of Spain, France and Italy. It documents Hearst’s determination to share his many riches with others, and glamorizes the visits of famous celebrities who came to San Simeon to rest from their stressful lives.

The film — written and produced by the National Geographic Society — is, of course, a preposterous lie.  (More)

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