The James Logan Courier

By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

WASHINGTON — Representatives of three liberal-leaning groups came to the Justice Department in 2004, armed with evidence that hundreds of public-assistance agencies had illegally failed to offer voter registration to their mostly poor and minority clients.

Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, which imposed the requirement, in 1993. But after these agencies registered 2.6 million people to vote in 1995-1996, the total registered plunged to about 1 million in 2003-2004.

Michael Slater, the Oregon-based deputy director of the national registration group Project Vote, said officials of the Justice Department's civil rights division showed little interest in enforcing that part of the law.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service (MCT)

The following editorial appeared in the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer on Monday, June 4:

Americans being the independent sort, it's rare for them to advertise to their podmates the size of their paychecks. And corporations are notably reluctant to share information about employee pay levels. Yes, such info may be available in some workplaces — government jobs, union shops. But that is the exception, not the rule. So how is a woman, for example, who suspects that she's being underpaid, compared to men doing the same work for the same period of time, to discover that inequity within just 180 days of taking the job?

Baroness Bertha Felicie Sophie von Suttner (June 9, 1843-June 21, 1914), born Countess Kinsky in Prague, was the posthumous daughter of a field marshal and the granddaughter, on her mother's side, of a cavalry captain. Raised by her mother under the aegis of a guardian who was a member of the Austrian court, she was the product of an aristocratic society whose militaristic traditions she accepted without question for the first half of her life and vigorously opposed for the last half.

She is the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Read her Nobel lecture, The Evolution of the Peace Movement, free from NobelPrize.org.