Richard Hart

A highly trained group of armed officers are taking on their toughest foes yet: a major utility and the “War on Terror.” They’re the anonymous security guards at Progress Energy’s Shearon Harris nuclear power plant in southern Wake County, who have gone to local and national watchdog groups and sounded an alarm that security at […]

It was subtle but palpable–a sense of relief this past holiday weekend that was hard to pin down. It wasn’t only the quenching showers or the surreal scene of orange leaves in mid-air all at once, loosened when the clouds opened up at last. It wasn’t just the luxury of a four-day respite (for some, […]

Patrick O’Neill is one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever known. I met him 11 years ago when I was an editor at The Chapel Hill News and he was this tall, lanky guy who was always coming into the office (where he’d been a reporter) to change his clothes and go for a […]

The facts are so clear, the unfairness so apparent, the results so barbaric: Why does Ann Miller Kontz, who systematically, cold-bloodedly poisoned her husband–injecting the final dose into his IV while he was in the hospital–live, while Steven Van McHone, who shot and killed his mother and stepfather in a drunken rage, became the third […]

Finally, something to be optimistic about. As we head to the polls in the run-up to the Nov. 8 election, it’s understandable if we occasionally feel helpless. In the General Assembly, our most cynical fears were confirmed when The N&O revealed that a close aide to Democratic House Speaker Jim Black was on a lottery […]

It all comes back to the lies. Without the Bush administration’s campaign to mislead the American people into supporting the invasion of Iraq, so much might be different–there’d be billions more for schoolkids and families and commuters and sick people and old folks. There’d be 2,000 less families mourning the loss of their children. If […]

“You’ve got to tell people to stop giving money for Katrina victims to the Red Cross.” A friend was talking to me at a benefit cocktail party to raise money for people across the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, and I was a little dubious. The Red Cross has a Congressional mandate to step in with […]

WASHINGTON, D.C. –More than 100,000 people from across the United States–and perhaps over a quarter-million–marched Saturday past the White House to protest the U.S. war in Iraq, their chants echoing a growing opposition to the war by a majority of Americans that could push Congress to impose an exit strategy on President Bush. No American […]

Now that the water’s going down, now that people are starting to return to New Orleans, attention has turned to rebuilding. To be sure, people like Joe Allbaugh, President Bush’s former campaign manager and FEMA director, were thinking about it as the water was still rising–trolling for business for his client, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown […]