LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Nobody is going
to mess with your
benefits. Nobody.
All we do is make it better for people on Medicare."
Vice President Joe Biden,
speaking at the Leisure World retirement community in suburban Maryland Article, 5AIRS cuts work ties with ailing ACORN
WASHINGTON - The IRS announced Wednesday that it was severing ties with ACORN. The Internal Revenue Service said it would no longer include ACORN in its volunteer tax assistance program.
However, ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) said it had notified the IRS in a letter, dated Monday, that it was suspending all tax services for 2009.
The House and Senate voted earlier this month to sever federal funding to ACORN. The Census Bureau severed its ties with the group for the 2010 national head count.
ACORN, which was founded in Little Rock in 1970, is in hot water after a hiddencamera video surfaced earlier this month showing ACORN employees in Brooklyn, N.Y., advising a couple posing as a prostitute and pimp to lie to get housing aid. The video also shows employees in other cities, including Baltimore, counseling the pair on tax, banking and immigration issues.
The activist group has filed suit in Maryland against James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the couple in the hidden-camera video, and conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart, who posted the videos on his Web site, contending that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.
Head of university quits over scandal
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - University of Illinois President B. Joseph White resigned Wednesday after reports that the school admitted politically connected applicants over more qualified ones at its Urbana-Champaign campus.
White said he sent a resignation letter to Christopher Kennedy, the chairman of the university's board of trustees.
According to a university news release, White will remain with the central Illinois school to teach and raise funds.
Six members of the university's board of trustees also were replaced this summer over the admissions scandal.
Hopeful Iran to let hikers go, kin say
MINNEAPOLIS - The families of three American hikers detained in Iran said Wednesday that they were hopeful the three would be released and return home soon after Iran's president said he would ask the country's judiciary to be lenient in their case.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is in New York City to speak to the United Nations, said in an Associated Press interview on Tuesday that he would ask the country's judiciary to expedite the process and to "look at the case with maximum leniency."
Shane Bauer, 27, Sarah Shourd, 31, and Josh Fattal, 27, have been held in Iran for 53 days after apparently straying into the country while hiking in northern Iraq's Kurdistan region in late July. Since then, their families have had no information other than that the three were being detained somewhere in Iran.
In a joint statement, the families said that Ahmadinejad's "expression of compassion raises our hopes that the day they return to us will not be far off."
Front Section, Pages 3 on 09/24/2009