HallSlug.com

Archive for August, 2008

Gasoline Prices Continue Fall

NEW YORK, Aug. 10 (UPI) — Retail gasoline prices have fallen for the 24th straight day, a AAA survey of gas station sales showed.The national average price for a gallon of regular gas are down more than 7 percent from the record high of $4.114 on July 16, CNNMoney.com reported Sunday.

Even with gas prices falling, Friday’s national average price is more than $1 higher than it was a year ago.

In Alaska, the state with the highest prices, drivers pay an average of $4.63 a gallon, the AAA study found. Oklahoma and Missouri have the lowest gas prices, at $3.58 a gallon.

Diesel, meanwhile, is up nearly 55 percent from last year’s levels. The national average price for diesel fuel fell Sunday to $4.557 a gallon.

The AAA study is based on data from credit card swipes at 85,000 U.S. fuel stations.

Maryland Mayor’s Dogs Killed After Botched Pot Raid, FBI Opens Probe

When the shooting stopped, two dogs lay dead. A mayor sat in his boxers, hands bound behind his back. His handcuffed mother-in-law was sprawled on the kitchen floor, lying beside the body of one of the family pets that police had killed before her eyes.

What police left behind was a house stained with blood and a trail of questions about their conduct. No other evidence of illegal activity was found, and no one was arrested at Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home in this small bedroom community near College Park.

This week Prince George’s police arrested two men for orchestrating a plot to deliver marijuana to the addresses of unsuspecting recipients — among them, Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic.

“Trinity was an innocent and random victim of identity theft. Apparently, so were four or five other county residents whose names and addresses were stolen and used as addresses on drug packages,” Calvo said at a news conference outside his house, near a garden of tomatoes and strawberries.

“However, Trinity and our family have not been treated as victims of a crime. Instead, our home was invaded. Our two beloved Labrador retrievers are dead. My mother-in-law and I were tied up for nearly two hours,” he said. “We were harmed by the very people who took an oath to protect us.”

Detroit Mayor Jailed

DETROIT, Michigan (CNN) — Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was jailed Thursday after a judge found that he had violated terms of his bond by taking an unauthorized trip to Canada last month.

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s booking photo from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department.

Kilpatrick, who is facing felony charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and misconduct of office, had been free on $75,000 bond.

“It’s very unfortunate,” said Kenneth Cockrel Jr., president of the Detroit City Council and one of Kilpatrick’s critics. “It’s another sad chapter in an ongoing saga, which I hope can be brought to a close soon. It’s not good for the city of Detroit; it’s not good for the southeastern Michigan region; it’s not good for the entire state.”

Walmart Warns of Democratic Win

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they’ll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies — including Wal-Mart.

In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized.

The actions by Wal-Mart — the nation’s largest private employer — reflect a growing concern among big business that a reinvigorated labor movement could reverse years of declining union membership.

Wal-Mart’s worries center on a piece of legislation known as the Employee Free Choice Act, which companies say would enable unions to quickly add millions of new members. “We believe EFCA is a bad bill and we have been on record as opposing it for some time,” Mr. Tovar said. “We feel educating our associates about the bill is the right thing to do.”

Wal-Mart has fought hard to keep unions out of its stores, flying in labor-relations rapid-response teams from its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters to any location where union activity was building.

The United Food and Commercial Workers was successful in organizing only one group of Wal-Mart workers — a small number of butchers in East Texas in early 2000. Several weeks later, the company phased out butchers in all of its stores and began stocking prepackaged meat.

When a store in Canada voted to unionize several years ago, the company closed the store, saying it had been unprofitable for years.