Poor Mojo's Newswire

In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into "a horrible response," as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated. "The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. "People just weren't receptive."... Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"... One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."... At Scranton's annual Saint Patrick's Day parade, some of the green Obama signs distributed by staffers were burned along the parade route. ... In a letter to the editor published in a local paper, Tunkhannock Borough Mayor Norm Ball explained his support of Hillary Clinton this way: "Barack Hussein Obama and all of his talk will do nothing for our country. There is so much that people don't know about his upbringing in the Muslim world. His stepfather was a radical Muslim and the ranting of his minister against the white America, you can't convince me that some of that didn't rub off on him. "No, I want a president that will salute our flag, and put their hand on the Bible when they take the oath of office."

How did the roads get so bad in Niagara Falls? Why have streets gone decades without repaving? Here’s one reason, which no one bothered to share with Scott Klieger, chief operating officer at Patch Management and the inventor of the Pothole Killer: Many of the city’s roadbeds contain radioactive waste, that pesky souvenir of the region’s nuclear industry.

From Lewiston to Lockport to the Falls, public works projects continue to run into the stubborn legacy of the Manhattan Project and the industries it spawned here. That legacy includes massive quantities of radiological material in a leaky containment structure on the former Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW), persistent radiological contamination issues at landfills throughout the county as well as at undocumented disposal sites no one will ever know about for certain, defunct industrial sites that continue to poison the surrounding neighborhoods decades after their abandonment, and all the attendant effects on human health and the economy.

Another legacy is road materials corrupted by what officials like to call “industrial slag,” but which might be more usefully termed derivative uranium products, the waste cast off in the process of refining uranium for weapons and reactors.

CRANBROOK, B.C.–A pedestrian crushed today under the exploding fireball of a crashed helicopter had little warning of the tragedy, witnesses said.

The person was walking along a residential street in the quiet community of Cranbrook, B.C., when the chopper dropped out of the sky and onto the pavement, killing three people on board the aircraft and the pedestrian below.

The chopper exploded into a fireball as it hit the street, leaving a trail of flames and wreckage as it skidded for several metres along the street.

"There was a pedestrian walking on the street across from me and he was just about at the back alley and I don't think he even knew what hit him," Elmer Bautz, who saw the crash from his front window, told The Canadian Press in a telephone interview.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush said on Tuesday he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of Americans killed in the war in Iraq.

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf," Bush said in an interview with Yahoo and Politico.com.

"I feel I owe it to the families to be as -- to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said.

Bush said his last round of golf was in August 2003 when he was informed that a truck bomb had wrecked the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.