WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices keep many opinions private but Sandra Day O’Connor no longer faces that obligation. Yesterday, the retired justice criticized Republicans who criticized the courts. She said they challenge the independence of judges and the freedoms of all Americans. O’Connor’s speech at Georgetown University was not available for broadcast but NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg was there. Nina Totenberg: In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O’Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms. O’Connor began by conceding that courts do have the power to make presidents or the Congress or governors, as she put it really, really angry. But, she continued, if we don’t make them mad some of the time we probably aren’t doing our jobs as judges, and our effectiveness, she said, is premised on the notion that we won’t be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts. The nation’s founders wrote repeatedly, she said, that without an independent judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of government those rights and privileges would amount to nothing. But, said O’Connor, as the founding fathers knew statutes and constitutions don’t protect […]
BOSTON — The Boston Archdiocese’s Catholic Charities said Friday it would stop providing adoption services because state law requires them to consider gays and lesbians as parents. The social services arm of the Roman Catholic archdiocese has provided adoption services for about a century. But it says state law allowing gays to adopt runs counter to church teachers on homosexuality. “The world was very different when Charities began this ministry at the threshold of the twentieth-century,” the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir and trustees chairman Jeffrey Kaneb said in a joint statement. “The world changed often and we adapted the ministry to meet changing times and needs. At all times we sought to place the welfare of children at the heart of our work. “But now, we have encountered a dilemma we cannot resolve,” they said. The state’s four Catholic bishops said earlier this month that the law threatens the church’s religious freedom by forcing it to do something it considers immoral. Eight members of Catholic Charities board later stepped down in protest of the bishops’ stance. The 42-member board had voted unanimously in December to continue considering gay households for adoptions.
A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at a major trade fair in Germany. The device could provide a way for paralysed patients to operate computers, or for amputees to operate electronically controlled artificial limbs. But it also has non-medical applications, such as in the computer games and entertainment industries. The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface (BBCI) – dubbed the “mental typewriter” – was created by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and Charité, the medical school of Berlin Humboldt University in Germany. It was shown off at the CeBit electronics fair in Hanover, Germany. The machine makes it possible to type messages onto a computer screen by mentally controlling the movement of a cursor. A user must wear a cap containing electrodes that measure electrical activity inside the brain, known as an electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, and imagine moving their left or right arm in order to manoeuvre the cursor around. “It’s a very strange sensation,” says Gabriel Curio at Charité. “And you can understand from the crowds watching that the potential is huge.” Learning algorithms Curio says users can operate the device just 20 minutes after going through 150 cursor […]
Each spring, Erdman Palmore celebrates his birthday by completing his own special version of a triathlon. He bicycles his age in miles – this year, that means 76 – then does just as many push-ups and sit-ups. “It is to counteract the assumption,” says the professor emeritus at Duke University, “that growing older means inevitably going downhill” – unless it is on his bicycle. Seniors like Dr. Palmore are helping redefine notions of “getting older.” Forgotten by the media, passed over for promotions, and teased by birthday cards, they have long struggled for dignity in a youth-obsessed society. But increasingly active and independent seniors, and the baby boomers who will follow, are helping to chip away at the ageism that spans Hollywood to Hallmark. Seniors today are healthier, wealthier, and more educated than their predecessors – and their population will double in the next 25 years. Those are the highlights from a US Census Bureau report released Thursday on Americans 65 and older. Among its findings: ¢ Poverty is declining. The proportion of those living in poverty decreased from 35 percent in 1959 to 10 percent in 2003. ¢ Disability is decreasing. The disability […]
PHOENIX — Thursday began like the 141 days before it, sunny and crisp, dust settling everywhere except on the record set again for the number of days without rain. Phoenix knows all about dry weather. It is a place where children are drilled throughout elementary school to conserve water, where hotels boast of covered parking areas not to protect from rain, but to offer a bit of shade. Grown men spread lotion all over their bodies every morning. Noses bleed. Newcomers watch in horror as their hands seem to age right in front of them. But even the desert suffers droughts, and this winter has brought a strong one, the fickle air currents pushing approaching storm clouds to the east. Until this year, the record for days without recorded rainfall was set in 2000, a measly 101 days. The recording instrument for rainfall is at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, referred to as “the bucket” by meteorologists, and drier than a Sunday morning during Prohibition. “People are sort of losing their grip,” said Gary Woodard, who, as associate director of the University of Arizona Center for Sustainability of Semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas, is […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
