Every Thursday and Friday in January will be Blue Cross and Blue Shield day at the state Department of Insurance. Those are the days staff members have set aside for meetings of the working group set up to review North Carolina Blue’s application to go for-profit. The group met Dec. 21 with consultants hired by […]
Barbara Solow
Posted inNews
Dubious honor for local doctors
When Mindy Oshrain’s phone rang a few days after Thanksgiving with a message that she’d been selected as an honorary chairman for a national physician’s advisory board, she was not impressed. Her interest wasn’t piqued by the fact that the call came from Congressman Tom DeLay’s office, nor was she surprised that the message mentioned […]
Posted inGuides
Ashley Forte
Most high school seniors, on hearing that they qualified for a generous college scholarship, would take the money and run. Not Ashley Forte. Forte is a top student at Durham’s Southern High School and she’s applying to some pricey schools next year–MIT and Duke among them. But the scholarship she recently learned about through an […]
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Making the banks abierto
In a relatively short time span, leaders of the Triangle’s Latino communities have made major strides in opening up banking services to Spanish speakers, helped by the banks’ desire to reach a huge, still-untapped customer base. Two different initiatives were unveiled last week, one funded by a for-profit bank and the other an expansion of […]
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Out in the Cold
When the Triangle United Way announced last week that early results show it will meet its campaign fundraising goal, not everyone viewed it as altogether welcome news. With this year’s goal tied for the first time to an overall fund that only serves the organization’s member agencies, representatives of the region’s “alternative” fundraising federations fear […]
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An environmental win amid post-election gloom
Republican election gains don’t bode well for environmentalism. But Andrew George still has reason to smile. Last week, the Chapel Hill resident, who’s an organizer for the National Forest Protection Alliance, was busy celebrating the successful end to a consumer campaign against office supply giant, Staples Inc. After two years of picket lines and other […]
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Answering to Floyd
In case you were wondering, the African-American hotel employee who was mentioned in Elizabeth Dole’s acceptance speech last week is real. What’s more, he says he’s going to hold the newly elected U.S. senator to her promise to do something to help inner-city youth. Dole mentioned her conversation with Floyd Rodgers, a “young, handsome African-American” […]
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A road less traveled?
The line on the Durham map showing the latest version of the road formerly known as Eno Drive was either a reasonable compromise or a con job–depending on which part of the room you were sitting in at last week’s meeting of the regional Transportation Advisory Committee. On the side of the room where Eno […]
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The Road That Wouldn’t Die
Newman Aguiar is a relative newcomer to the decades-old debate over Durham’s Eno Drive. But it hasn’t taken him long to figure out why discussion of the project is so grinding, frustrating and emotionally charged. Aguiar was at a meeting in late September when a transportation group that includes elected leaders from three counties voted […]
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Arab women note press biasin U.S.
We Americans are ever so fond of our freedoms, yesirreee. I was feeling pretty proud myself the other day when I spoke to a group of 10 women from the Middle East and North Africa who’d come to Raleigh on a tour sponsored by the International Visitors Council of the Research Triangle and the U.S. […]
