Salem, MA--The Greenhouse School, a small independent school in Salem serving many low- and middle-income families from surrounding towns, has secured a serious donation of art materials. "It's a bit overwhelming," said the school's assistant director, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. "We're so happy to have landed such a gift; now we have to live up to it!"

The donation comes with many components, from a lifelong teacher and artist, Gail Rosenthal, from Needham, MA. She and her husband Leonard, both retired, are in the process of selling their home in Needham and moving to Portland, OR. She chose The Greenhouse School to receive almost her entire collection of art books and materials, collected over decades from an eclectic and fascinating life.

CORNUCOPIA, WISCONSIN: The Cornucopia Institute has filed a formal legal complaint with the USDA requesting a full investigation into allegations of multiple violations of federal organic regulations at the nation’s largest organic dairy. The Aurora Organic Dairy, located in Colorado and with a herd approaching 6000 cows, appears to have violated numerous organic regulations governing the rearing of animals entering its vast factory farm operation.

“We have filed this complaint following our visit to the site of a nearby ranch that has been supplying – on a contract basis – hundreds of replacement cows to the Aurora Dairy,” said Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst for the Wisconsin-based Institute.

“From our investigation, review of records and extensive interviews with the ranch owner, it appears that the operation has never had its livestock practices certified as organic,” Kastel said.

Washington D.C. – Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi has been playing hard ball with Bush administration officials during his eight day trip to Washington D.C.

According to senior associates of the Iraqi official, who have accompanied him to meetings with Bush administration officials, Mr. Chalabi has been threatening his friends in the Bush administration that if they do not support his candidacy to become the next prime minister of Iraq that there will be no way to contain Iran. He has told them in no uncertain terms that he is the only one who can make the Iranians behave.

With nary a peep from the mainstream media, the US Supreme Court has stabbed yet another partisan knife into the American electoral system.

This time the court has let stand Florida's infamous 137-year-old ban on voting rights for ex-felons. It was this same Jim Crow ban that the GOP used to disenfranchise thousands of Floridians in 2000, providing the margin by which George W. Bush took the presidency. The ruling continues to take the vote from millions of African-Americans and non-violent offenders----and, in practice, others who have broken no laws at all. It is highly likely to strengthen the lock of the Republican party and its future candidates on the US presidency.

In Florida 2000, Republican Governor Jeb Bush used the ban as a pretext for disenfranchising tens of thousands of mostly black voters who committed no crime at all, but whose names allegedly resembled those who did. In the lead-up to his brother's test at the polls, Bush hired a Republican computer firm to compile a dubious list which Bush then used to deprive perhaps 120,000 Floridians, perhaps more, of their right to vote.