I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Due north of the city of Detroit lies Oakland County, home to more than 1 million people — and rarity of rarities, a newspaper that’s growing in circulation. According to a story by the Associated Press, The Oakland Press (“the best place for news in and around Oakland County”), notched the third highest increase of [...]
A strike authorized by the union representing Oakland University’s professors has caused the Rochester school of 18,000 students to cancel classes indefinitely. The strike was approved Wednesday by the union, and professors were on the picket line Thursday morning. The university’s website says classes are cancelled until further notice.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that Michigan will receive $10.3 million for the revitalization of contaminated industrial and commercial facilities. In a statement released as President Obama’s Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers, Dr. Ed Montgomery, toured the state, EPA said that Michigan will receive the most brownfield money and [...]
DETROIT — When Walter Swift walked out of state prison after serving 26 years on a false charge, he forgot what freedom felt like. Swift said he was “terrified” to face a world he had not seen in nearly three decades because most of his adult life was spent behind bars. Due to an untrained public defender and a hurried investigation, Swift was convicted of a rape he didn’t commit in 1982.
Swift’s story exemplifies the problems with Michigan’s underfunded and strained public defense system, which has deteriorated to such a poor condition where a study by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association done in cooperation with the State Bar Association of Michigan called it a “constitutional crisis.”
Madison Heights School District Superintendent John Telford quit his job Monday night, saying he’s been pushed out by racist residents and school board members. Telford took over the red-ink drenched district in Oakland County in March as an interim superintendant and proposed recruiting students from Detroit to bring more per-pupil aid from the state to [...]
MADISON HEIGHTS — The local school district will not allow more children from outside its boundaries to attend school, ending a month-long controversy to bring Detroit students into the Oakland County suburb to help close a projected $1.5 million deficit next year.
Now that Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson is out of the running for the GOP nomination for governor, is another prominent political figure in the state’s most populous county eying the state’s top job?
According to the Michigan secretary of state, county canvassing boards are required to issue final election results by today. It’s not clear that Oakland County will make this deadline. Late this morning, Tracy Ward, spokeswoman for the clerk’s office, told me that Oakland is “still working” on finalizing its vote totals.
Stanley Greenberg, the researcher who coined the term “Reagan Democrat” for non-college educated white voters in Macomb County, Michigan writes in the New York Times that he is retiring this group of voters as a national political barometer.
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