USA
At least 65 people were arrested and several police officers were hurt in Toledo, Ohio, Saturday during a riot to protest a planned march by members of the National Socialist Movement, which calls itself "America's Nazi Party." The crowd, which numbered in the hundreds at one point, threw rocks at the police and vandalized stores and vehicles. The white supremacists said their aborted march was intended to focus on the alleged harassment of white residents by black gangs. Seeking to quell further violence, the mayor declared a state of emergency and set an 8 p.m. curfew through the weekend.
The sun was a welcome sight across the Northeast after the region received three months' worth of rainfall in a week. Eleven deaths were blamed on the abnormal weather, which led to evacuations of hundreds of people, snarled highway traffic, and disrupted airline and Amtrak service along portions of the Northeast Corridor. Governors of several states, among them New Jersey and Massachusetts, temporarily declared states of emergency as swollen rivers threatened to burst dams.
Two former chief justices of the Texas Supreme Court are due in Washington Monday to begin offering testimonials in support of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. Thomas Phillips (R) and John Hill (D) will make the rounds as part of a Bush administration strategy to quell the uproar over Miers, whose judicial philosophy is not sufficiently clear for some conservative lawmakers and critics. Phillips and Hill, who have praised Miers's "legal brilliance" in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, will focus on the White House counsel's distinguished career as a lawyer in their state and as a high-level government legal adviser.
The federal government approached, but did not meet, its self-imposed Saturday deadline for emptying shelters of hurricane Katrina evacuees. Ninety-five percent of the estimated 270,000 have been moved into other forms of housing, officials said. Of the 14,468 who are still listed in shelters, the majority are in Louisiana.
Although no official estimate was released, the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March appeared to attract a far smaller turnout Saturday in Washington than the more than 600,000 who participated in the original event on the National Mall in 1995. Its organizer, controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, used the anniversary event to criticize the political establishment. He also floated the idea of creating a new black political party. The 1995 march urged black men to work to improve their families and conditions in their communities.
