Labor movements are a natural democratic response to the environment created by commerce and industry. A united workforce electing leaders to decide the rules of the economic game -- how much workers should be paid, working conditions, even business practices pursued by their employer -- is the same concept as...

Gwen Ifell and Oliver Stone were at Kent State this weekend to commemorate the May 4, 1970 shootings at the university that claimed four lives and wounded nine people. The celebrities will share their thoughts on what happened 43 years ago as the university dedicates its new May...

One hot August night in 2008 High School senior Alex Motiuk went to his parents and said, "Mom, Dad, there's something I want to talk to you about," Leo Motiuk explained with a smile. "As parents of a young son you just wonder what that's all going to be about."...

Last week I was invited by the Georgia Alliance to End Homelessness to speak at their annual conference. So too was Georgia's 5th district congressman. The congressman spoke eloquently about the need to "put on the American agenda the issues of hunger, poverty, homelessness." He said that these issues were...

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) between 2006 and 2011, domestic coal consumption has decreased by about 10 percent but coal exports have more than doubled. Consumption isn't the only thing that's down, so is production. What that means is that for a number of reasons...

I struggled back in January to explain the trip homeless advocate Diane Nilan and I were about to take across the U.S desert Southwest. Then I read President Obama's State of the Union speech and it came to me. We were journeying so that we might...

Shortly before Christmas 2012, the Center for Investigative Reporting released data revealing, "Long wait times are contributing to tens of thousands of veterans being approved for disability benefits and pensions only after it is too late for the money to help them." To be specific, 19,550 veterans died...

The historic interpreter at Lyndon Johnson's boyhood home -- part of the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park -- ended her presentation with an anecdote about how each night, her dad would say, "Remember, Lyndon loves you."

Certainly any resident of Johnson's original congressional district -- which...

The Salton Sea is California's largest lake. It covers 360 square miles and is 227 feet below sea level. That elevation's just a little bit higher than Death Valley, but if you measure to the bottom of the sea, it wins. At one time the Salton Sea was part of...

"I want to play it at a Dodgers game when they come back in April," Nathaniel Ayers proclaimed. The inspiration for the book and subsequent movie, The Soloist -- Ayers was standing across the street from his Skid Row apartment. "I want to play the National Anthem opening day. I...

Flagstaff, Arizona area McKinney-Vento homeless liaison, Stephanie Sivak, says that more than 500 kids in her district are homeless. And that means that they, "don't have a fixed regular night time residence." Right now though, in the Coconino County juvenile detention facility, 13 kids have a...

It's hard telling when the last Marine stood watch along the banks of the Arkansas River, but considering Fort Smith, Arkansas, was once the last fortified outpost along the U.S. border with the expansive Oklahoma frontier territory, odds are there've been plenty. Unlike the military men that were once stationed...

Greetings from Little Rock, Arkansas. I got here Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It was also the day President Barack Obama delivered an inaugural address exposing what he's been hiding these past four years -- a little fire in his belly for the poor, the ridiculed, the marginalized...

I met with a woman this week who is under investigation for raping her child. I met with her because three years ago, I was the person who gave her child a safe place to live while this woman was being investigated for a different set of allegations. I've lost...

Nothing says Merry Christmas like approving billions of dollars worth of military expenditures. Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives approved a $633.3 billion defense budget. I must say I wasn't in the mood to celebrate with them. So instead, I gave away my shoes. The striking difference between...

West Virginia Mountain Party's Jesse Johnson says he'll keep running for Governor of the Mountain State until he wins or until he dies trying. He just hopes there are still some mountains left by the time he gets his chance to govern. Johnson, 53, who declared his most recent of...

Lulu looked thin. She looked healthy but very thin. You could really only tell that Lulu had lost a lot of weight by looking at her face. Her trunk and legs still looked chunky because of her decades old habit of packing her clothes - regardless of outside temperature -...

In November of 2008 bodies were found while work crews were digging in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Workers had stumbled onto additional remains of a slave cemetery -- first discovered in 2003, that dated back to 1705. Archeologists swooped in and collected the artifacts which had been neglectfully covered...

To the best of my knowledge from information gleaned from internet data sources, there are three countries that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). They are India, Pakistan and Israel. One additional country -- North Korea -- withdrew in 2003 after being a signatory for 18 years.

Iran...

Waterville Maine is a small town on the Kennebec River. About 16,000 people live there and by Maine standards they are young. See Maine's got the oldest population in the country and Waterville's per capita elderly population is lower than the state average. These young people have young...