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New VA chief gets clearance for change

By Times Wires
Published December 15, 2007

WASHINGTON

The Senate confirmed James Peake, a former Army surgeon general, as Veterans Affairs secretary Friday. Retired Lt. Gen. Peake, 63, spent 40 years in military medicine, including four years as Army surgeon general. President Bush said one of Peake's first tasks would be to continue to implement recommendations of the presidential commission on veterans' care chaired by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. The recommendations include aggressively treating post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, streamlining VA processes and strengthening support for families.

PHILADELPHIA

Shop owner defends English-only signs

A small sign that asked customers to order in English at a cheesesteak shop was never meant to be offensive, shop owner Joe Vento testified Friday at a hearing to decide whether the policy was discriminatory.

Vento posted two small signs telling customers of Geno's Steaks, "This is America: when ordering please 'speak English,'" and found himself defending that policy Friday before the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, which filed the discrimination complaint. He said he put up the signs because of concerns over the debate on immigration reform and the increasing number of people from the area who could not order in English.

Camille Charles, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, testified that Vento's signs harken back to the "Whites only" postings of the Jim Crow era. "The signs give a feeling of being unwelcome and being excluded," Charles said.

CINCINNATI

Flaws are found in all Ohio voting systems

All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the 2008 election, a state report found.

Those working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards, use hand-held devices to enter false vote counts and introduce malignant software into servers. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner proposed replacing all of the state's machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohio's 88 counties, with optical scan machines

Elsewhere

Transferred: The Justice Department's voting rights chief, who said voter ID laws aren't a problem for blacks because they often die before old age, has been transferred.

Resigning: Kansas' attorney general, Republican Paul Morrison, said he would resign less than a week after admitting to an affair with a former employee who says he also sought information from her about a political rival.

Suspects sought: Police searched for suspects in the shooting deaths of two Louisiana State University doctoral students.

Power still out; new storm coming

A second wintry blast this weekend could complicate efforts to restore power to the more than 280,000 homes and businesses in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri that are still blacked out after the first storm put a million customers in the dark at its height this week.

That storm, which coated much of the Plains in ice before dumping snow on the Northeast, has killed at least 38 people, most in traffic accidents. It has been blamed for 23 deaths in Oklahoma alone.

The next storm is predicted to bring 2 to 6 inches of snow to parts of Kansas and Oklahoma, said Ken Harding, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

[Last modified December 15, 2007, 01:58:10]