More than one in 100 adult Americans is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released today. With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second, noted the report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States. The ballooning prison population is largely the result of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been hit particularly hard: One in nine black men age 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women age 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 white women in the same age group. While studies generally find that imprisoning more offenders reduces crime, the effect is influenced by changes in the unemployment rate, wages, the ratio of police officers to residents, and the share of young people in the population. In addition, when it comes […]
NEW YORK — When Shai Agassi, long the heir apparent at SAP, was told in March 2007 that he would not become chief executive for at least another two years, he quit. And when the German software giant then tried to change his mind by offering to make him boss right away, he realised he was ‘much more excited’ about the new chance that his unexpected freedom would grant him. In January Mr Agassi’s new start-up, Better Place, announced its first deal, in partnership with Renault, a carmaker, and the government of Israel: to ‘get an entire country off its addiction to gasoline’ by switching to electric cars. Though Mr Agassi is the most senior executive so far to quit a mainstream information-technology firm for clean tech, he is far from alone. Mr Agassi (pictured right, above) joins Elon Musk (pictured left), a co-founder of PayPal who is now chairman of Tesla Motors, an electric-car start-up, and Vinod Khosla (pictured centre), a legendary venture capitalist who has switched his focus from dotcommery to greenery, among many others. ‘There is an unbelievable migration of talent from traditional technology to clean technology,’ says Adam Grosser, a partner at Foundation Capital, a […]
After wildly lowballing the cost of the Iraq conflict at a mere $50 to $60 billion, the Bush administration has been concealing the full economic toll. The spending on military operations is merely the tip of a vast fiscal iceberg. In an excerpt from their new book, the authors calculate the grim bottom line. In March 19, 2008, the U.S. will have been in Iraq for five years. The Bush administration was wrong about the need for the Iraq war and about the benefits the war would bring to Iraq, to the region, and to America. It has also been wrong about the full cost of the war, and it continues to take steps to conceal that cost. In the run-up to the war there were few public discussions of the likely price tag. When Lawrence Lindsey, President Bush’s economic adviser, suggested that it might reach $200 billion all told, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the estimate as ‘baloney.’ Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz went as far as to suggest that Iraq’s postwar reconstruction would pay for itself through increased oil revenues. Rumsfeld and Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels estimated the total cost of the […]
After six years of US-led military support and billions of pounds in aid, security in Afghanistan is ‘deteriorating’ and President Hamid Karzai’s government controls less than a third of the country, America’s top intelligence official has admitted. Mike McConnell testified in Washington that Karzai controls about 30% of Afghanistan and the Taliban 10%, and the remainder is under tribal control. The Afghan government angrily denied the US director of national intelligence’s assessment yesterday, insisting it controlled ‘over 360’ of the country’s 365 districts. ‘This is far from the facts and we completely deny it,’ said the defence ministry. But the gloomy comments echoed even more strongly worded recent reports by thinktanks, including one headed by the former Nato commander General James Jones, which concluded that ‘urgent changes’ were required now to ‘prevent Afghanistan becoming a failed state’. Although Nato forces have killed thousands of insurgents, including several commanders, an unrelenting drip of violence has eroded Karzai’s grip in the provinces, providing fuel to critics who deride him as ‘the mayor of Kabul’. A suicide bomb at a dog fight near Kandahar last week killed more than 80 people. Yesterday fighting erupted in neighbouring Helmand when […]
The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a ‘virtual fence’ along the U.S.-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from linked, tower-mounted sensors and communications and surveillance gear, federal officials said yesterday. Technical problems discovered in a 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson prompted the change in plans, Department of Homeland Security officials and congressional auditors told a House subcommittee. While the department took over that initial stretch Friday from Boeing, authorities confirmed that Project 28, the initial deployment of its Secure Border Initiative network, did not work as planned or meet the needs of the U.S. Border Patrol. The announcement marked a major setback for what President Bush in May 2006 called ‘the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history.’ The virtual fence was to be a key component of his proposed overhaul of U.S. immigration policies, which died last year in the Senate. Investigators for the Government Accountability Office had earlier warned that the effort was beset by both expected and unplanned difficulties. But yesterday, they disclosed new troubles that will require a redesign and said the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
