Robin Shulman, Washington Post As President Bush gives his State of the Union speech Monday, there will be one man in the audience who plans to sit quietly and watch, his very presence a form of protest. Joseph Libretti, 51, is sick. He has been diagnosed with chronic lung disease since volunteering after Sept. 11,…
By Walter Pincus, The Washington Post With even more U.S. contractors now in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military personnel, government officials told Congress yesterday that the Bush administration is not prepared to manage the contractors’ critical involvement in the American war effort. At the end of last September, there were “over 196,000 contractor personnel…
Associated Press More than 3 million acres in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest would be open to logging under a federal plan that supporters believe will revive the state’s struggling timber industry. Environmentalists, however, fear that the proposal will devastate the forest. The Bush administration released Friday a management plan for the forest, the largest in…
Associated Press The federal agency that regulates the nation’s mining industry says that it has failed to issue penalties for hundreds of citations issued since 2000 and that the problem could extend back beyond 1995. Matthew Faraci, a spokesman for the agency, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, said Sunday, “We would guess it goes…
