1. Alberto Gonzales was born in San Antonio on Aug. 4, 1955. He was the second of eight children born to Pablo and Maria Gonzales, who had met as migrant farm workers. The family settled in Humble, Texas (just north of Houston), in a two-bedroom home, which his father and uncles built. The house lacked hot water and the family did not have a telephone until Gonzales was in high school. Gonzales has said that his father's self-reliance and hard work strongly influenced his own political views. Pablo Gonzales died in a work-related fall in 1982.
The Berkeley tree-lovers really will do anything to save a local oak grove from being replaced by a UC-Berkeley athletic center--including nude photography. The move, marked by a photo shoot of the roughly 100 bodies lying (as far as we can tell) face down and butts up just feet from still-living trees, was meant to draw attention to the planned destruction. University police monitored the shoot, informing a photographer that nudity violates campus rules, but no one was arrested. A Berkeley freshman who participated in the photo shoot told the Daily Californian, "I wasn't sure how it was going to feel, but it felt miraculous. People are willing to be naked and vulnerable for these trees."
Democracy and business seem to operate in completely separate worlds. But that belief is a problem for the corporate world, says Traci Fenton, founder of WorldBlu. Her company studies democracy in the workplace and came up with a list of the most democratic businesses. Dominating the list were smaller companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. The smaller companies moved faster in returning the employee surveys, which measured how their bosses fared in 10 categories, says Fenton, who started WorldBlu in 2003.
AP - President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress careened closer to a full-blown legal showdown over the firing of federal prosecutors Wednesday as a House subcommittee voted subpoenas for top administration officials in defiance of the White House.
AP - Senate Democrats on Wednesday revived legislation urging President Bush to bring combat troops home from Iraq in a year, attaching the plan to a $122 billion measure needed to fund the war.
AP - The Veterans Affairs' vast network of 1,400 health clinics and hospitals is beset by maintenance problems such as mold, leaking roofs and even a colony of bats, an internal review says.
Stocks and bonds rallied Wednesday as investors read the latest Federal Reserve policy statement as implying that the central bank is more likely to cut rates than raise them anytime soon.
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