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A glance in the half-opened bolt was enough to convince him that the Browning A-Bolt 7mm rifle was ready for the flight. But as he placed the gun in its case and headed off to the airport, Deubler, an officer with a variety of state and national hunting organizations, seems not to have thought to remove the rifle's internal magazine. The oversight led to an accidental discharge that left a United Airlines ticket agent wounded after a second check of the rifle --

However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy now.

While there's been a great deal of speculation on the possibility of race hurting Sen. Barack Obama in the presidential election, renewed fervor on the part of Black voters may end up tipping the scales toward him in battleground states, CNN.com reports.

Lt. Col. Henry "BOO" Bourgeois that flew on the 2nd Tour with Pappy Boyington.Henry Mayor "Hank" Bourgeois, one of the last surviving aviators from World War II's famed Black Sheep Squadron, died Monday at St. Tammany Parish Hospital in Covington. He was 88. (Near New Orleans)

What few today remember is that one of the government's central goals in undertaking mortgage market reform was to segregate American cities by race. As the insurer of much of the national mortgage industry, the FHA fixated obsessively on fears that racial integration would harm real estate values and leave the government responsible for bailing out legions of failed loans. (snip) Wall Street Street's apologists have tried to blame the subprime crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act, Congress' tepid attempt in 1977 to atone for the FHA's sins. This argument, of course, is completely ludicrous, since the vast majority of...

NEW ORLEANS - Louisiana's plan to dole out billions in community development block grants may violate federal law requiring at least 50 percent of the money to be spent on low- and moderate-income people, according to a complaint sent today to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The complaint was submitted by Loyola University New Orleans on behalf of 13 people and organizations, including the Louisiana chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Partnership for Working Families and Advancement Project. "Louisiana is planning to spend more than $10...

The chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party, commenting on the party's stinging defeat in last week's U.S. Senate vote, called David Vitter's victory an "aberration" Monday, attributing it largely to the "long, long coattails" of President Bush and a fractured Democratic field. Speaking to the Press Club of Baton Rouge, party chairman Mike Skinner acknowledged that last Tuesday was a long day for Democrats: "We've gotten the bear for a long, long time; this time, the bear got us."

The New Orleans voter registrar got so swamped with voter-registration drive cards that the office is getting help from the Secretary of State's Office as well as registrars in Iberville, Pointe Coupee and Iberia parishes to help clear the backlog. Orleans Parish Registrar Louis Keller asked for help from the state's elections officials as thousands of cards rained down on his office in the days leading up to the Oct. 4 sign-up deadline for the Nov. 2 presidential election.

(snip..)He and his wife asked the students about other "minor" world figures and got blank stares. Castro: They had not heard of him. Churchill: One mentioned the Kentucky Derby. Stalin: Nothing was said. Mussolini and Hirohito: Ditto. Franklin Roosevelt: One mentioned Mount Rushmore. Sorry, wrong Roosevelt. That would be Teddy, the Rough Rider. Hitler: Two knew who he was. Another said, "Didn't he kill a lot of people or something?" Khrushchev: One said, "Sure, I know -- he's a wrestler." Needless to say, the point was well made. The man didn't dare ask about Lincoln or Robert E. Lee. Earlier...

Austria has unveiled what it says is the world's largest gold coin - a 31kg (68 pound) disc worth about 330,000 euros ($500,000)

Emission Of Smog Ingredients From Trees Is Increasing Rapidly Two major sources of smog-producing chemicals are automobile tailpipes and natural emissions from tree leaves. Postdoctoral researcher Drew Purves found that land use practices have altered the mix of trees across the landscape, greatly increasing the contribution from trees. One of the greatest producers is the sweetgum species. Princeton NJ (SPX) Sep 29, 2004 Changes in U.S. forests caused by land use practices may have inadvertently worsened ozone pollution, according to a study led by Princeton University scientists. The study examined a class of chemicals that are emitted as unburned fuel...

The world's first private manned spacecraft will make its second space flight in five days Monday in the final stage of its attempt to win a 10 million dollar prize, organisers said. SpaceShipOne is scheduled to take off at around 7:00 am (1400 GMT) and blast out of the earth's atmosphere just over an hour later in its quest for the Ansari X Prize purse, aimed at spurring a new era of commercial space travel. Organisers of the so-far unique venture also confirmed Friday that the groundbreaking rocketship's pilot Mike Melvill successfully took the craft to 337,500 feet, or...

Check it out. Let's break from the "Debate" & look at Space! The rolling experienced by SpaceShipOne on its first Ansari X Prize flight on Wednesday will not jeopardise the team's chances of winning the $10 million purse, team members said in a post-flight briefing. The cause of the rolling is now being investigated. Initial radar measurements suggest the rocket reached an altitude of 103 kilometres (337,500 feet), which, if confirmed, means it passed the required 100 km (328,084 ft) threshold for reaching space. The spacecraft, designed by Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, will now have to repeat the feat...

Registering black people to vote was only part of Bob Moses' job 40 years ago in Mississippi, where he and fellow civil rights activists ran Freedom Schools as an antidote to the poor "sharecropper education" being afforded descendants of slaves. Now at the helm of the Algebra Project, a Boston-based mathematics program aimed at demonstrating that black students can learn, Moses is at the forefront of a new movement, one to have quality public education declared a civil right.

BATON ROUGE -- A St. Landry Parish School Board member and his wife admitted Tuesday to paying $1,500 to a Southern University official for a bogus master's degree in special education in the first criminal case to emerge from a probe into grade-fixing at the university. Quincy Richard Sr., 42, who is also an employee of St. Landry Parish government, and Cynthia A. Richard, 40, a teacher in the school district, pleaded guilty in 19th Judicial District Court to charges of filing false public records. Cynthia Richard was stripped of the degree she used to gain a pay raise, authorities...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of U.S. traffic deaths rose nearly 1 percent in 2003 and reached a 13-year high at 43,220, the government reported on Wednesday. It was the fifth straight year road deaths rose, although passenger car fatalities decreased. Sport utility vehicle deaths went up roughly 10 percent over 2002, with more than half of the victims in those crashes killed in rollovers. Motorcycle deaths also jumped. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (news - web sites) said preliminary figures showed 405 more highway deaths overall in 2003 than the previous year and the most since 1990 when...

Lusty Brazilians the focus of condom campaign Brasilia - Brazil on Monday began handing out a record 10 million contraceptives to stop the spread of Aids during carnival season, when casual sex rises. With the pre-Lenten festival less than two weeks away, the "nothing gets past a condom" campaign focuses on the 14 million Brazilians, or 15 percent of those sexually active, who don't believe condoms prevent the spread of HIV. "Carnival is a time when there's a lot of contact, you've got people wearing very few clothes, which ends up stimulating more intense sexual relations," said Health Minister Humberto...

Inside the system Xmas slay that the rich go for THE BIG Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) favoured by the rich are twice as likely to kill pedestrians as a normal car in an accident. The finding comes in the latest edition of the authoritative journal Accident Analysis and Prevention it is based on systematic research in the US headed by engineer Clay Gabler. SUVs have become a fashion fad among the rich for their "country estate" connotations. Many have a kind of "bull bar" grill on the front which serves no other purpose than to make it more likely someone...

HISTORY may be written by the victors but it is being adapted for the MTV generation by Hollywood and the media. Widespread misconceptions, prejudice and outright ignorance about major events of the past six decades have been revealed in a major study of undergraduates in the UK, USA and Germany. The Scottish academic who carried out the work says factually inaccurate movies and biased news reporting is skewing young people’s grasp of recent history. Greg Philo, professor of communications at Glasgow University, also blames a lack of teaching of history and politics in British schools for what he has dubbed...

Referendum danger for EU By Angus Roxburgh BBC, Brussels Will referendums be the undoing of the European Union? And,is the much-argued-over EU constitution, due to be finalised by an intergovernmental conference starting next month, doomed from the start by the requirement to have it ratified by every member state - in some cases by referendum? These are the questions that seem to spring from any analysis of Sweden's vote last Sunday on the single currency, and of earlier referendums in other countries - Ireland's on the Nice Treaty and Denmark's on the euro. The votes are rarely, if ever, merely...