No Comments

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court set the stage Tuesday for a historic ruling on whether the Second Amendment protects the rights of Americans to keep guns at home. The justices said they would review an appeals court decision that struck down a 31-year-old ban on handguns in Washington, D.C. The case will be heard in early 2008 and decided by next summer. While outright bans on the private possession of guns are rare, many cities and states regulate firearms. If the court rules in favor of gun owners, the decision could open the door to challenges to regulations and restrictions on firearms across the nation. In their appeal, District of Columbia officials say their ban on easily concealed handguns dates to 1858. They argue handguns are responsible for much violent crime. Under the city ordinance passed in 1976, residents can keep shotguns or hunting rifles at home, but these weapons must be disassembled or have trigger locks. Handguns are illegal, except for police officers. Six city residents challenged the ordinance as unconstitutional and said it denied them the right to have ‘functional firearms’ at home for self-defense. The Second Amendment is among the best-known parts […]

No Comments

NEW YORK — Scientists have made ordinary human skin cells take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells, a startling breakthrough that might someday deliver the medical payoffs of embryo cloning without the controversy. Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It’s a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice. The ‘direct reprogramming’ technique avoids the swarm of ethical, political and practical obstacles that have stymied attempts to produce human stem cells by cloning embryos. Scientists familiar with the work said scientific questions remain and that it’s still important to pursue the cloning strategy, but that the new work is a major coup. ‘This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone-the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ first airplane,’ said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief science officer of Advanced Cell Technology, which has been trying to extract stem cells from cloned human embryos. ‘It’s a bit like learning how to turn lead into gold,’ said Lanza, while cautioning that the work is far from providing medical payoffs. ‘It’s a huge deal,’ agreed […]

No Comments

WASHINGTON — More than 1,000 people from 85 countries who are accused of such crimes as rape, killings, torture and genocide are living in the United States, according to Department of Homeland Security figures. America has become a haven for the world’s war criminals because it lacks the laws needed to prosecute them, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Wednesday. There’s been only one U.S. indictment of someone suspected of a serious human-rights abuse. Durbin said torture was the only serious human-rights violation that was a crime under American law when committed outside the United States by a non-American national. ‘This is unacceptable. Our laws must change and our determination to end this shameful situation must become a priority,’ Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, said at a hearing of the subcommittee Wednesday. He’s trying to get more information about specific cases. One is that of Juan Romagoza Arce, the director of a clinic that provides free care for the poor in Washington. In 1980, Romagoza was a young doctor caring for the poor in El Salvador during the early period of his country’s civil war when the […]

No Comments

With overwhelming bipartisan support, Rep. Jane Harman’s ‘Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act’ passed the House 404-6 late last month and now rests in Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee. Swift Senate passage appears certain. Not since the ‘Patriot Act’ of 2001 has any bill so threatened our constitutionally guaranteed rights. The historian Henry Steele Commager, denouncing President John Adams’ suppression of free speech in the 1790s, argued that the Bill of Rights was not written to protect government from dissenters but to provide a legal means for citizens to oppose a government they didn’t trust. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence not only proclaimed the right to dissent but declared it a people’s duty, under certain conditions, to alter or abolish their government. In that vein, diverse groups vigorously oppose Ms. Harman’s effort to stifle dissent. Unfortunately, the mainstream press and leading presidential candidates remain silent. Ms. Harman, a California Democrat, thinks it likely that the United States will face a native brand of terrorism in the immediate future and offers a plan to deal with ideologically based violence. But her plan is a greater danger to us than the threats she fears. Her […]

No Comments