New America in the News: 2007

It's no secret that labor unions are struggling with declining membership and loss of negotiating clout, but don't tell that to the hundreds of activists who gathered Friday for a rally outside the Hilton Hotel at Los Angeles International Airport...

KAI RYSSDAL: It's not a Wall Street scandal, but it's got the hallmarks of one. Kickbacks in return for market access. Shady dealings between marketers and banks. And no real regulations covering most of what's been going on.

Investigations into the student loan industry continue to widen. Schools and lenders are putting people on paid leave while everybody sorts things out. Today, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo compared his probe to the peeling of an onion. He said he's discovering layer after layer of wrong-doing.

Arnold Schwarzenegger may have signed the world's toughest anti-global-warming law, but it is Democrat Terry Tamminen, his environmental adviser, who is emerging as the state's real Terminator, winning industry support and the endorsement of a Republican Governor for a mandate to reduce the state's emissions 80% by 2050.

[JOHN] ROBERTS [CNN ANCHOR, THIS WEEK AT WAR]: Thursday Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that there was a great reluctance to indulge in happy talk about the security situation in Iraq and that it could be months before any real progress is seen there. In military terms in political terms, can the administration wait that long?.. With me here in Washington in the studio, [is] Flynt Leverett. He's the former Middle East analyst on the national security council, now a senior fellow with the New America Foundation...

A coalition of consumer groups wants open access for a portion of valuable wireless spectrum to be auctioned by the FCC in early 2008.

The six groups, calling themselves the Save Our Spectrum Coalition, filed comments with the FCC Thursday, suggesting competitors to the large DSL and cable modem service providers could use the open access to provide a broadband alternative. Sometime next year, the FCC is due to auction 60MHz of spectrum in the upper 700MHz band, which is being abandoned by U.S. television broadcasters as they move from analog to digital broadcasts...

USC placed its financial aid director on paid leave Thursday as New York authorities continued to examine her business ties to a lender she recommended to students, part of a widening investigation sending ripples of shock through higher education circles.

In a brief statement, USC said it had launched its own inquiry of Catherine Thomas' relationship with Student Loan Xpress Inc., which had been placed on the university's list of preferred lenders.

The U.S. Department of Education is investigating a senior official in its financial-aid office who owned about $100,000 worth of stock in a student loan company that has been subpoenaed by New York authorities, department officials said yesterday.

A senior official at the federal Education Department sold more than $100,000 in shares in a student loan company even as he was helping oversee lenders in the federal student loan program.

The official, Matteo Fontana, now general manager in a unit of the Office of Federal Student Aid, was identified yesterday from government documents as a stakeholder in the parent company of Student Loan Xpress who sold shares in 2003...

Like a fresh spring breeze, new radio-frequency spectrum is in the air. It is so close that you can almost smell it -- and seek to keep others away from it.

The next big spectrum land grab is over 700 Megahertz (MHz.) It’s the promised land of “beachfront property” that broadcasters are set to vacate on February 19, 2009, when the transition to digital television is supposed to be complete. Lots of folks are jockeying now to lock up these airwaves...