WASHINGTON — A Supreme Court decision on Wednesday in an uncelebrated criminal case did more than resolve a dispute over whether the police can search a home without a warrant when one occupant gives consent but another objects. More than any other case so far, the decision, which answered that question in the negative by a vote of 5 to 3, drew back the curtain to reveal the strains behind the surface placidity and collegiality of the young Roberts court. It was not only that this case, out of 32 decided since the term began in October, provoked Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to write his first dissenting opinion. He had cast two earlier dissenting votes, and had to write a dissenting opinion eventually. And although there has been much commentary on the court’s unusually high proportion of unanimous opinions, 22 so far compared with only 27 in all of the last term, few people expected that rate to continue as the court disposed of its easiest cases and moved into the heart of the term. Rather, what was striking about the decision in Georgia v. Randolph, No. 04-1067, was the pointed, personal and acerbic tone […]
Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative. At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals. The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn’t going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding. But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids’ personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There’s no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings – the investigators were not […]
California’s senior senator laid out a blueprint Monday for curbing global warming, the latest congressional proposal for turning greenhouse-gas pollution into a multibillion-dollar commodity in hope of doing away with it. Environmentalists gave generally good marks to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s new climate bill because they say it commits to immediate reductions in greenhouse gases, with an initial target of returning to 2006 levels of emissions by 2010 and making gentle but steady cuts totaling just more than 7 percent from then until 2020. Feinstein pointed to signs of warming through-out the world, from more severe storms to masses of ice flowing into the oceans at the poles. ‘The clock is ticking on global warming,’ she said in a statement. ‘If we do not slow, stop and reverse global warming soon, we will do irreparable harm to the world around us.’ Her language is familiar to theorists who have been searching for ways to cut greenhouse gas releases without hurting energy supplies and crippling the economy. ‘That is actually a pretty significant reduction, because that’s avoiding a fairly significant wedge of increased emissions between now and 2010,’ said Dallas Burtraw, an economist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan […]
If Iraq wasn’t on the brink of civil war before last month’s bombing of the previously gold-domed Askariya Mosque in Samarra, which is sacred to Shi’ite Muslims, it certainly is now. The attack turned what was a low-intensity sectarian conflict hot, with media reports saying that Baghdad’s central morgue alone recorded 1,300 Iraqis dead in four days of reprisal killings after the attack. That increased violence between Arab Sunnis and Shi’ites has persisted, and fears are growing that civil war could draw Iraq’s neighbors further into the conflict, or even spark a wider war. That fear was recently expressed by US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, who warned that if US troops pulled out, a regional conflict could result. Religious extremists could triumph, he said, and use Iraq as a base for expansion, while Persian Gulf oil supplies could be disrupted. Khalilzad is hardly a disinterested party, so his motives bear scrutiny. But his belated observation that the United States had opened a Pandora’s box in Iraq echoed the concerns of those who wanted the Ba’athist lid kept on to begin with. With the lid nearly off, the incipient civil war is capsizing the failing Iraq project, […]
JHANSI, India — An ancient tractor dumps a trailer load of plant material next to a battered looking shed. Surprising as it may seem, this unremarkable event may hold the key to ending chronic power shortages in rural India. Inside the shed is a noisy, little, green generator that runs on gas produced from rotting biomass. That is where the pile of plant matter dumped by the tractor comes in. The generator produces 100 kilowatts of electricity, enough to service the modest needs of four or five typical Indian villages. However in this particular case it drives a mini-industrial complex that currently provides 130 jobs in an area where employment is hard to find. The location is a rural site about 15km from the city of Jhansi in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The initiative is called Desi Power (local power). It aims to provide a model for generating low-cost electricity from renewable resources that can easily be copied elsewhere in the vast swathes of rural India that have no connection to the mains grid. ‘This really is a viable solution for remote India’, says Dr Arun Kumar, director of the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
