[unable to retrieve full-text content]The novel Shaman, by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson is a coming of age novel set in the ice age. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says it is the latest to take up the question of what it was like to live 30,000 years ago on the cusp of change from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon dominance of the human world.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NprProgramsATC/~3/BVRRQ1GHvQE/story.php
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বৃহস্পতিবার, ১০ অক্টোবর, ২০১৩
বুধবার, ২২ মে, ২০১৩
Monster tornado kills at least 51 in Oklahoma town
By Alice Mannette
MOORE, Oklahoma (Reuters) - A 2-mile-wide (3-km-wide) tornado tore through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on Monday, killing at least 51 people while destroying entire tracts of homes, piling cars atop one another, and trapping two dozen school children beneath rubble.
Twenty of the 51 confirmed deaths were children, the Oklahoma medical examiner said, and at least 45 of the 230 people injured were children, according to area hospitals. It was the deadliest U.S. tornado since one killed 161 people in Joplin, Missouri, two years ago.
President Barack Obama declared a major disaster area in Oklahoma, ordering federal aid to supplement state and local efforts.
Rescue teams raced against the setting sun and worked into the darkness in search of survivors throughout the wide swath of devastation, while the dangerous storm system threatened several southern Plains states with more twisters. Severe weather was expected through the night from the Great Lakes south to Texas.
Emergency crews searched the rubble of Plaza Towers Elementary School for two dozen missing children, Oklahoma Lieutenant Governor Todd Lamb said. The school took a direct hit from the tornado, Lamb told CNN.
The town of Moore, population about 50,000, was devastated with debris everywhere, street signs gone, lights out and houses completely obliterated.
Another elementary school and a hospital were among the buildings leveled.
"We thought we died because we were inside the cellar door...It ripped open the door and just glass and debris started slamming on us and we thought we were dead to be honest," survivor Ricky Stover said while surveying the devastated remains of his home.
Cyndi Christopher was at work and went to pick up her son from daycare when she heard the storm warning. After taking her son home, she was forced to flee when she noticed the storm was coming their way.
"I drove as fast as I could and I outran the storm," Christopher said.
The National Weather Service assigned the twister a preliminary ranking of EF4 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, meaning the second most powerful category of tornado with winds up to 200 miles per hour (320 km per hour).
Witnesses said Monday's tornado appeared more fierce than the giant twister that was among the dozens that tore up the area on May 3, 1999, killing more than 40 people and destroying thousands of homes. That tornado ranked as an EF5, meaning it had winds over 200 mph.
The 1999 event in Oklahoma ranks as the third-costliest tornado in U.S. history, having caused more than $1 billion in damage at the time, or more than $1.3 billion in today's dollars. Only the devastating Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes in 2011 were more costly.
The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center provided the town with a warning 16 minutes before the tornado touched down at 3:01 p.m. local time (4.01 p.m. EDT), which is greater than the average eight to 10 minutes of warning, said Keli Pirtle, a spokeswoman for the center in Norman, Oklahoma.
The notice was upgraded to emergency warning with "heightened language" at 2:56 p.m., or five minutes before the tornado touched down, Pirtle said.
Television media measured the tornado at more than 2 miles wide, with images showing entire neighborhoods flattened.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a temporary flight restriction that allowed only relief aircraft in the area, saying it was at the request of local police who wanted quiet to search for buried survivors.
Oklahoma activated the National Guard, and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency activated teams to support recovery operations and coordinate responses for multiple agencies.
SCHOOL IN TWISTER'S PATH
Briarwood Elementary School, which also stood in the storm's path, was all but destroyed. On the first floor, sections of walls had been peeled away, affording clear views into the building, while in other areas, cars hurled by the storm winds were lodged in the walls.
Across the street, people picked through the remains of their homes.
The number of injured as reported by several hospitals rose rapidly throughout the afternoon.
Oklahoma University Medical Center alone was treating 65 patients, 45 of them children, though it was no longer expecting a further mass influx of casualties, spokesman Scott Coppenbarger said.
Moore Medical Center sustained significant damage.
"The whole city looks like a debris field," Glenn Lewis, the mayor of Moore, told NBC.
"It looks like we have lost our hospital. I drove by there a while ago and it's pretty much destroyed," Lewis said.
The massive twister struck at the height of tornado season, and more were forecast. On Sunday, tornadoes killed two people and injured 39 in Oklahoma.
(Additional reporting by Lindsay Morris, Carey Gillam, Nick Carey, Brendan O'Brien and Greg McCune; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Jim Loney and Lisa Shumaker)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/monster-tornado-devastates-oklahoma-town-least-37-dead-010033332.html
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সোমবার, ২০ মে, ২০১৩
Legal Theory Lexicon: Conduct Rules and Decision Rules
Introduction
Substantive rules of law (such as the rules of torts, contract, and property) are usually assumed to be addressed to two audiences. As?conduct rules, the substantive law is addressed to everyone (citizens, officials, and noncitizens). Thus, property law tells us who has dominion over which resources. If this land is mine, then the law communicates the message that I can use my land and exclude others from its use. These very same legal rules also serve as?decision rules, they tell courts how to resolve disputes. We usually assume that the content of the conduct rules are the decision rules are identical, but this need not be the case.
Acoustic Separation
Professor Meir Dan-Cohen of U.C. Berkeley proposed a very famous thought experiment. He asked us to imagine?acoustic separation?between ordinary citizens, who would only "hear" the conduct rules, and officials (such as judges), to whom the decision rules would be addressed. You might imagine that courtrooms are isolated by a giant "cone of silence".
Dan-Cohen's thought experiment leads naturally to the following question: should decision rules and conduct rules have the same content or should they differ?? And if they differ, how could the law prevent acoustic leakage, e.g. prevent ordinary citizens from learning about the content of the decision rules?
Example?
Here's a pretty clear example. Suppose that we have a conduct rule that says, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." This might be a good conduct rule, because we want citizens to inform themselves about the content of the law, and we certainly don't want citizens deliberately insulating themselves from knowledge of the law in order to create a defense if they charged with its violation. But at the same time, we might prefer that ignorance of the law would serve as an excuse, at least some of the time, when it comes to actually convicting and punishing defendants. Punishment is expensive and injurious, and sometimes no really good purpose will be served by punishing someone who is reasonably ignorant of the law's content.
The Technology of Acoustice Separation
But how can we excuse ignorance of the law without altering the conduct rule?? One way to accomplish this goal would involve some obfuscation by judges. Opinions might state boldly: "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," while simultaneously excusing ignorant defendants on the ground that "knowledge of the legal status of the intentional content is part of the mental state that is an element of the crime." The first formulation is easily accessible to ordinary folks; the second is couched in language that may be opaque except to those trained in the law.
Normative Implications
Even if it is possible to create acoustic separation between conduct rules and decision rules, doing so may be problematic on normative grounds.? For utilitarians or welfarists, the only question is whether acoustic separation will produce good consequences, but for fairness-based (or deontological) approaches, the deception involved in acoustic separation seems problematic.? This intuition is reflected in a variety of legal doctrines (such as the "void for vagueness" doctrine in constitutional law) and in the notion of "publicity" that is usually included in formulations of the ideal of the rule of law.
Using the Distinction?
The distinction between conduct rules and decision rules may not arise frequently--because the conditions for acoustic separation may be rare and because the law usually aims at congruence between the two sorts of rules, but in almost every legal context the distinction could become relevant.? It is almost always worth asking, "Is there any discrepancy between the conduct rules and decision rules in this area of law?"? And if there is such a discrepancy, then further questions are in order: "Is this accidental or does it serve some function?" and "Is this instance of acoustic separation normatively justified?"
References
Meir Dan-Cohen?Decision Rules and Conduct rules: On Acoustic Separation in Criminal Law, 97 Harvard Law Review 625 (1984) (available to subscribers on Jstor?and anthologized in Meir Dan-Cohen,?Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality(Cambridge University Press 2002).
Criminal Law Conversations?(Paul H. Robinson, Stephen Garvey, & Kimberley Kessler Ferzan eds., Oxford University Press 2009). ?This volume contains several essays that comment on Dan-Cohen's idea.
Paul H. Robinson,?Rules of Conduct?and Principles of Adjudication, 57 U. Chi. L. Rev. 729 (1990).
(Last modified on May 19, 2013.)
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রবিবার, ৫ মে, ২০১৩
New efforts to curb cellphone theft
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Disturbed by the nationwide epidemic of cellphone robberies and thefts, law enforcement officials across the country are looking to the wireless industry to help find a cure.
In San Francisco, where half the robberies were phone-related last year, District Attorney George Gascon is calling on major companies in nearby Silicon Valley to create new technology such as a "kill switch" to permanently and quickly disable stolen smart phones, making them worthless to thieves.
The prosecutor said he's recently had two discussions with Apple, maker of the popular iPhone, and has talked informally with Google, creator of the Android, the world's most popular operating smartphone platform. And, he also wants to meet with Samsung, the global smartphone market leader.
"We know that the technology can be developed to prevent this. This is more about social responsibility than economic gain," Gascon said.
The stakes are huge in the battle to combat cellphone theft. Nearly 175 million cellphones ? mostly smartphones? have been sold in the U.S. in the past year and account for $69 billion in sales, according to IDC, a Massachusetts-based research firm.
And, now almost one out of three robberies nationwide involves the theft of a mobile phone, reports the Federal Communications Commission, which is coordinating formation this fall of a highly-anticipated national database system to track cellphones reported stolen.
The FCC is also working with officials in Mexico to crack down on the trafficking of stolen mobile phones that make it across the border.
San Francisco's district attorney is not the only high-ranking big-city law official seeking solutions.
In Washington D.C, where than 40 percent of its robberies in 2012 involved cellphones, police Chief Cathy Lanier said new federal laws are necessary to require all wireless providers to participate in the national stolen phones database, which is now done by choice.
"This is a voluntary agreement and the decision makers, heads of these (wireless) companies may transition over time and may not be in the same position five years from now." Lanier said in an email. "Something needs to be put in place to protect consumers."
On the theory that an inoperable phone is as useless as a "brick," Lanier and Mayor Vincent Gray also have urged residents who have their phones stolen to call their carriers and ask that the device be "bricked," or disconnected remotely to prevent resale on the black market.
In New York City, police have created a smartphone squad and partnered with Apple to track down stolen iPhones using the device's tracking number. For example, when an iPhone is stolen, Apple can report to police where the phone is located, even if it's been switched to a different carrier.
Police said the city's overall crime rate last year increased three percent mostly due to the more than 15,000 thefts of Apple-related products ? a majority of them iPhones ? said Paul Browne, a police spokesman.
"We would've had a one percent decrease in overall crime if you subtracted the Apple thefts," said Browne, adding that police have coined the phenomenon, "Apple-picking."
"We're trying to protect the orchard, so to speak," Browne said.
He added that police often use officers as decoys using their own iPhones to catch would-be robbers and stings to catch those who sell them on the black market. About 75 percent of the stolen devices stay within the city's five boroughs and some have been tracked down as far as the Dominican Republic.
In addition, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been working with U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, the FCC and CTIA, a trade group for wireless providers, on the national stolen phone database, along with six of the largest wireless companies.
Computer security expert Darren Hayes said law enforcement agencies, major corporations and the wireless industry have responded slowly to the spike in mobile phone thefts, leaving individuals as well as businesses vulnerable.
"Smartphones have become such an extension of our lives with all of our personal information on them and criminals recognizing its mass appeal," said Hayes, a professor and computer information systems program chair at Pace University in New York. "Professionally, there are some corporate network administrators who can control their company servers from their smartphone. While it's convenient, it could also put them at risk and could be the biggest source of data loss if they are stolen.
"We could see a potential nightmare emerging," Hayes said.
Jamie Hastings, a CTIA vice president, said the national stolen phone database is a step in the right direction and deserves a chance.
"To suggest that our members don't care about their consumers is completely inaccurate," Hastings said. "Our members are now focusing their energies on the database and achieving the start-up goal by November. The important thing at this stage is to allow our members to execute the plan that all of the stakeholders agreed upon."
The national database will be similar to a global database devised by GSMA, a wireless trade group based in the United Kingdom. Nearly 100 wireless companies across 43 countries participate in the overseas database for reported stolen mobile phones, said Claire Cranton, a GSMA spokeswoman in London.
But Gascon said a national network to track stolen phones comes up short and he is adamant that a kill switch is the best strategy to render a phone useless.
In March, he met with Apple's government liaison officer Michael Foulkes to talk about creating a kill switch technology. He described the encounter as "disappointing" but said a subsequent phone conversation with Apple's general counsel Bruce Sewell last month led to plans for talks that would include Apple's technical people.
Representatives of the tech giant did not respond to requests for comment.
"For me, a technical solution is probably better than just a criminal solution," Gascon said. "We can always create more laws, but look at how long it already takes to prosecute somebody at the expense of the taxpayers?
"If a phone can be inoperable at the flick of a switch, then a database will become moot."
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শনিবার, ৪ মে, ২০১৩
Bye 'Celebrity Rehab'! Dr. Drew's Tired of Blame for Deaths
Yesterday, Dr. Drew Pinsky haters heard the words they've been longing for. There will be no more sessions of VH-1's Celebrity Rehab. "I don't have plans to do that again, " Pinsky told the Zach Sang & The Gang radio show. "I'm tired of taking all the heat. It's just ridiculous."
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No charges for Calif. teacher accused of tying toddler
May 1 (Reuters) - Post position for Saturday's 139th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs after Wednesday's draw (listed as barrier, HORSE, jockey, trainer) 1. BLACK ONYX, Joe Bravo, Kelly Breen 2. OXBOW, Gary Stevens, D. Wayne Lukas 3. REVOLUTIONARY, Calvin Borel, Todd Pletcher 4. GOLDEN SOUL, Robby Albarado, Dallas Stewart 5. NORMANDY INVASION, Javier Castellano, Chad Brown 6. MYLUTE, Rosie Napravnik, Tom Amoss 7. GIANT FINISH, Jose Espinoza, Tony Dutrow 8. GOLDENCENTS, Kevin Krigger, Doug O'Neill 9. OVERANALYZE, Rafael Bejarano, Todd Pletcher 10. PALACE MALICE, Mike Smith, Todd Pletcher 11. ...
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/no-charges-calif-teacher-accused-tying-kid-214326538.html
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