The Washington Post reports on the diverse groups bringing tens of thousands of people together in the nation’s capital for the One Nation Working Together march on Saturday, October 2, in support of jobs, justice, and education:
“Their goal is to reclaim the excitement that surged among left-leaning groups after the 2008 presidential race but that more recently has belonged to tea party groups and other conservative activists. Last month, for instance, conservative commentator Glenn Beck partly filled the Mall with tens of thousands of his supporters.
“The organizers of this weekend's rally, dubbed One Nation Working Together, are calling it the ‘most diverse march in history.’ The amalgam of 400 progressive groups - including environmentalists, antiwar activists, church and civil rights groups, union organizers and gay rights coalitions - is planning four hours of speeches, songs and poetry.”
USA Today brings attention to the challenge that Louisville, KY faces after the Supreme Court struck down an integration plan in 2007 that would have required every school in the Jefferson County School District to have between 15% and 50% Black enrollment to ensure a diverse student population:
“Now, Louisville is taking another swing at school integration. Under a new student-assignment plan that's tied to household income and dependent on increased cross-town busing, elementary schools slowly are being integrated in a different way. Yet the district that lost its case before the high court has fallen short of its goals of having a mix of students from higher- and lower-income areas and a blend of races in all classrooms.
“Its situation reflects the new landscape for school integration that's coming into focus three years after the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling. The new reality tests the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education—the landmark high-court decision that struck down the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ schools more than a half-century ago—as school districts decide whether to continue to make integration a priority or return to neighborhood schools, whose enrollments often reflect communities' racial divide.
“‘I think that minority schools are going to be even more isolated,’ says education professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at University of California-Los Angeles, which supports integration. ‘For very large communities, there is going to be no integration experience available...Segregation perpetuates itself.’”
Citing it as a sign of how problematic the foreclosure process has become, The New York Times writes that J.P. Morgan is following GMAC and has suspended 56,000 foreclosures in 23 states because of concerns about legal documents that may have been improperly prepared:
“Chase and GMAC, in their zeal to process hundreds of thousands of foreclosures as quickly as possible and get those properties on the market, employed people who could sign documents so quickly they popularized a new term for them: ‘robo-signer.’
“In depositions taken by lawyers for embattled homeowners, the robo-signers said they or their team had signed 10,000 or more foreclosure affidavits a month.
“Now that haste has come back to haunt them. The affidavits in foreclosures attest that the preparer personally reviewed the files, which those workers acknowledge they had no time to do.
GMAC and Chase say that their lapses were technical and will soon be remedied with new filings. But defense lawyers are seizing on these revelations and say they will now work to have their cases thrown out.
“Beyond the relative handful of foreclosure cases being contested are many more in which the homeowner did not have legal counsel. Potentially, hundreds of thousands of cases could be in doubt.”
The Los Angeles Times covers a congressional hearing to address what the government can and should do about thousands of militant websites that recruit potential terrorists and pose a threat to our nation’s safety:
“Militant websites are becoming more accessible and appealing to Americans, experts told members of Congress on Wednesday, adding that the sites must be monitored and some should be shut down.
“At the moment, though, there are no government regulations or procedures for how to keep track of, or remove, websites promoting terrorist groups and extremist ideology, the experts said.
“Officials testifying at the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation and trade discussed strategies to combat websites that attempt to recruit members by using such familiar venues as Facebook and YouTube. […]
“Gregory McNeal, an associate law professor at Pepperdine University, purposed a three-prong approach to countering militant websites, including studying the sites for information, closing selected sites and co-opting others by providing countering ideology.”