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(AP) The U.S. Small Business Administration has been ordered to pay more than $500,000 to a former employee who said her boss forced her to quit for refusing to go along with a scheme to discriminate against male workers. A federal judge said the agency and its director, Hector Barreto, should have known about the mistreatment of Mary Conway-Jepson in the agency's Montana office, and failed to do anything. Jepson said she was asked to help in a scheme to rid the SBA office of what former district director Jo Alice Mospan considered too many male supervisors. When she refused,...

Fulton County has offered $12 million to settle the reverse discrimination case--which, including interest and attorneys' fees, has hit $18 million--won by seven white librarians at the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, with the provision that the five plaintiffs still employed resign. Plaintiffs' attorney Chris Anulewicz said the offer was unacceptable both in its financial and workplace terms. The county, rejected twice in appeals court, may still appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, though Anulewicz said he thought it was unlikely the court would accept the appeal.Also, the Fulton County Taxpayers Association may sue the county Board of Commissioners to force...

Diversity programs are coming under intensified scrutiny amid a weak economy and new research showing that racial and gender diversity has virtually no impact on bottom-line performance. A non-profit group set up in 1996 by CEOs and human resource professionals asked a team of researchers from a cross section of universities to embark on a large-scale field research project on the relationship between gender and racial diversity and business performance. Researchers initiated discussions with more than 20 Fortune 500 companies. Ultimately, all but four declined to participate. Based on those initial discussions, researchers found none of the 20 companies had...

<p>May 12, 2003 -- Disgraced ex-New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was reportedly in a hospital dealing with "personal problems" yesterday, as his former employer published an unprecedented article that detailed widespread plagiarism, ineptitude and outright lying in his career at the Gray Lady. Times sources told Newsweek magazine that Blair, 27, was "in a hospital setting" as of yesterday, less than two weeks after quitting the newspaper upon being exposed as a plagiarist.</p>

Kurds reverse ethnic cleansing (Filed: 21/04/2003) Arabs are being forced from the homes they seized after the first Gulf war in a dispute which threatens more conflict, reports Alex Spillius in Kirkuk For Khalid Abdullah, the knock on the door came at 10 o'clock on Friday night. A gang of four scowling armed men in civilian clothes barked instructions to leave his home within a week. "They said you are not from Kirkuk, you must go back to where you came from," he recalled, still visibly unnerved by the visit. The men were Kurds. Khalid, dressed in full-length dishdash and...

Bush Administration Denounces 'Quotas' By RON FOURNIER The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush opposes quotas and racial preferences, the White House said Wednesday as Democrats criticized administration plans to oppose a University of Michigan affirmative action program in court. Such policies ``do not serve to lift up our country and to help the average American,'' presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters as administration lawyers completed work on their Supreme Court brief. ``Instead, they have a tendency to divide people, to separate people who are deemed to be worthy of something and have it taken away from them not...

Guidelines for Countering Racial, Ethnic and Religious Profiling Diversity Guidelines for Countering Profiling On Oct. 6 at its National Convention in Seattle, the Society of Professional Journalists passed a resolution urging members and fellow journalists to take steps against racial profiling in their coverage of the war on terrorism and to redouble their commitment to: Use language that is informative and not inflammatory; Portray Muslims, Arabs and Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans in the richness of their diverse experiences; Seek truth through a variety of voices and perspectives that help audiences understand the complexities of the events in Pennsylvania,...

Ready to work, but nothing to do all day July 14, 2002 BY ART GOLAB STAFF REPORTER John Kasprowicz went to his job as a geologist at Argonne National Laboratory every day for nearly two years and did nothing. When he asked his bosses at the U.S. Department of Energy for something to do to justify his $95,000-plus paycheck, they told him something would come along. But for 22 months, nothing did--that is, he says, until he sent copies of his time sheets showing he was doing nothing all day to the DOE inspector general's office in Washington, D.C. When...

University of Virginia Admissions Predictor RACE AND UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA ADMISSIONS: WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT YOU'LL GET IN? By answering the questions below, you can learn what your chances were of being admitted to the University of Virginia in 1999. Your chances will depend on your skin color and your ethnic group, in addition to your SAT scores, your class rank, your Virginia residency, and whether either of your parents attended the University. The questions focus on several factors that appear to have been important to the University of Virginia in admitting freshmen in 1999. This program is based...

SHAKEDOWN by Russell Madden   In the midst of Black History Month, in which we (rightly) celebrate the achievements of Black Americans, an issue that sadly serves to undercut the accomplishments of these citizens received renewed publicity. The call for present-day Americans to "compensate" all Blacks for what their slave ancestors suffered in the South clawed its way into the national headlines. Especially on many of our college campuses, the clamor for "reparations" reached frenzied heights.Liberal-turned-conservative David Horowitz recently tried to inject a bit of balance into this one-sided discussion. Offering a list of "10 Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks are...