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Editorials
Closer oversight of DCF
House Speaker Tom Feeney made the right decision this week in creating a special committee to oversee the state's beleaguered child-welfare agency. Done correctly, the inquiry can cast light on continuing problems at the agency and spur needed improvements. But this should be a serious and thoughtful quest, not a vehicle for bashing the Department of Children and Families. Lawmakers should understand that correcting deficiencies at the agency is as much up to them as to DCF itself.

Protect the innocent
As more and more people on death row are found innocent based on scientific evidence, we should question the use of the death penalty in our fallible system of justice.

Letters
In adoption case, put best interests of the child first
Re: The past in his future, April 7.

 

Columns today
Lucy Morgan
Campaign plies Harris' e-mail from the recount
Thousands of people e-mailed Secretary of State Katherine Harris in late 2000 when Florida was the temporary center of the universe.

Gary Shelton
Please present your visa when turning in your card
AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Something must be done. Now. The situation is desperate.

Sandra Thompson
Signs of a big city creep into Tampa
Saturday at noon in Pane Rustica on S MacDill Avenue, a group of elderly women had pushed two round tables together and were eating lunch and kibitzing alongside the trendy types waiting in line to order.

 

Perspective
Taking jobs, alienating customers
For weeks Americans have been told that the outsourcing of high-tech jobs is good for our economy. So said Greg Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in a recent report signed by President Bush. So, too, writes Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in articles praising the rise of call centers in India used for everything from making airline reservations and reading medical X-ray films to providing tech support for American computer firms.

Philip Gailey: Democrats fall off campaign finance reform wagon
Well, what do you know. Soft money is back, and it's making hypocrites of all those Democrats who fervently championed the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law, not to mention those Republicans who objected to the law's restrictions on issue advocacy.

Bill Maxwell: Who is for the farm worker?
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is touting legislation to improve the lives of Florida's 300,000-plus farm workers, who endure institutional and systemic injustices each day in our fields and groves and their personal lives.

Robyn E. Blumner: For some defendants, an American gulag
In Bernard Malamud's masterpiece The Fixer, inmate Yakov Bok was subjected to psychological torture in a Soviet gulag through the humiliations of constant shackling and repeated strip searches.