Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe BORDER PATROL Bowing to Senate pressure, the Pentagon shortly will allow nearly one third of the 1,600 National Guard soldiers manning border crossings to carry weapons. Advertisement The decision reverses a White House decree not to allow any soldiers at U.S. border crossings to carry side arms -- an attempt to avoid sending an undiplomatic message to Mexico and Canada, to prevent accidental shootings and to circumvent the possibility that the Defense Department's mission on U.S. soil will be expanded, Pentagon sources told UPI. The policy change is expected to be made final this week. The soldiers allowed to carry arms likely will be only those at remote border crossings manned by just one or two law enforcement officers, according to a Pentagon official. National Guard soldiers at airports, those that provided security at the Olympics in Salt Lake City and those at the borders working counter-drug missions all carry weapons already. Advertisement Neither the Treasury Department -- which runs U.S. Customs -- nor the Immigration and Naturalization Service could recruit sufficient numbers of reliable people quickly enough to boost border security in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, so the Defense Department was tapped to provide extra manpower for a six-month period. Part of the arrangement was that the soldiers would not carry weapons because the White House did not want to militarize the borders, a Pentagon official said. But Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., sent a letter to President Bush March 20 signed by more than half the U.S. Senate asking that the troops be allowed to carry weapons -- pointing out that soldiers in full battle dress uniforms are potentially high-profile targets. (Thanks to UPI Pentagon Correspondent Pamela Hess) SLAVERY REPARATIONS A New York woman who said she went to law school for the purpose of researching and filing this lawsuit is suing the insurance company Aetna, the railroad company CSX Transportation Inc. and Fleet Financial Services, the parent of FleetBank, for reparations for all who can claim slave ancestry. The federal lawsuit -- initiated by Deadria Farmer-Paellmann -- also names more than 1,000 unidentified corporations that may have profited from slavery in the United States between 1619 and 1865. Advertisement "Slavery constituted an immoral and inhumane depravation of Africans' life, liberty, African citizenship rights and cultural heritage," court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn said. "It further deprived African Americans of the fruits of their own labor." The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, claimed that the nation's more than 34 million blacks are still suffering the effects of 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of "institutionalized racism." Any money won in the lawsuit would go toward a fund to improve education, health care and housing opportunities for blacks. The plaintiffs named CSX because slave labor was used to construct portions of some U.S. rail lines under the political and legal system in place more than a century before CSX was formed in 1980. Aetna, a 150-year-old insurance company based in Hartford, Conn., is accused of benefiting from insuring slaves through life insurance policies that paid the slaveholder in the event of the death of the slave. Fleet Financial Services, based in Boston, dates back to 1784 and was chartered by a group led by Rhode Island merchant John Brown, who was a slave trader. However, it's unclear whether there was a financial relationship between Brown's slave trade and the bank he founded, Providence Bank. Advertisement In a statement, CSX said while "slavery was a tragic chapter in our nation's history," it believed the suit "is wholly without merit and should be dismissed." Aetna, in a prepared statement, said the historical events "however regrettable, occurred hundreds of years ago, and these issues in no way reflect Aetna today." Fleet had no comment. Thomas Burton, a Buffalo, N.Y., trial attorney, told UPI the courts are wary of ruling on behavior from hundreds of years ago. He said it's necessary in court to prove a direct harm to a person or dependent and that "it's pretty tough to do when dealing with ancestors." While earlier slave reparations lawsuits have failed, those seeking reparations cite the government apology made to each Japanese-American who was forced into internment camps during World War II and who was paid $20,000. Some $8 billion was settled in the Holocaust lawsuits last year. (Thanks to UPI's Alex Cukan in Albany, N.Y.) PUBLIC HOUSING RULING The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously upheld the Department of Housing and Urban Development's policy of kicking people out of public housing if any member of a household is caught using illegal drugs. The policy applies whether or not the tenant knew about the drug use, and whether or not the drug use occurred on public housing property. Advertisement "With drug dealers increasingly imposing a reign of terror" at public housing complexes, Congress felt compelled to enact the law that requires the policy, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said in announcing the decision Tuesday. Moreover, the language of the law is unambiguous, Rehnquist said, and "no-fault eviction is a common feature of landlord-tenant law." Federal law requires public housing leases contain a clause saying "any drug-related criminal activity on or off premises engaged in by a public housing tenant, any member of the tenant's household or any guest or other person under the tenant's control, shall be cause for termination of tenancy." Rehnquist said the statute does not raise constitutional concerns because there is no criminal punishment or civil penalty involved, just the invocation of a lease provision to which a tenant has already agreed. "I think it's a disappointing decision," Steven Shapiro, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case in support of tenants. "It threatens poor people with eviction for activity they did not know about and could not control." In the case before the high court, the HUD policy was challenged by four elderly tenants in Oakland, Calif. The four tenants were the targets of eviction proceedings in state court in late 1997 and early 1998. Three of them were being kicked out because their children or grandchildren were caught with drugs. The fourth was under the care of an in-home aide who was nabbed with cocaine. Advertisement A federal judge issued an injunction against the evictions. An appeals court panel reversed the injunction, but the full appeals court reversed that decision in favor of the original ruling. The plaintiffs then asked the Supreme Court for review. (Thanks to UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent Michael Kirkland) A STAMP OF DISAPPROVAL Citizens Against Government Waste, a non-partisan watchdog organization, is taking the U.S Postal Rate Commission to task over their recommended 7.7 percent rate increase. CAGW Vice President Leslie Paige calls the move "A Band-Aid on a gaping financial wound." "In the long run, this rate hike will not serve anyone's best interests. ... These rate increases are coming faster and are ever more draconian. We've had three hikes in four years and none of them have stemmed the flow of red ink," Paige said. The group wants Congress to force the Postal Service to engage in cost-cutting measures before asking for more money from taxpayers. These measures include a hard hiring freeze, the elimination of the USPS advertising budget, an immediate stop to all e-commerce activity and a complete inventory of all properties coupled with an audit of all construction expenditures. "In the long run," Paige says, "the postal service must be demonopolized and reborn as a purely private sector enterprise." Advertisement (From UPI Capital Comment)
