NINA MARTIN, - Salon/ProPublica
Stephan: Just when I think the Theocratic Right's war against women cannot get any worse or more hateful the degenerating troika of Mississippi, Lousiana, and Alabama comes up with something to amaze. This is an unbelivably evil law, as an woman who has had a difficult pregnancy will attest.
Rennie Gibbs’s daughter, Samiya, was a month premature when she simultaneously entered the world and left it, never taking a breath. To experts who later examined the medical record, the stillborn infant’s most likely cause of death was also the most obvious: the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
But within days of Samiya’s delivery in November 2006, Steven Hayne, Mississippi’s de facto medical examiner at the time, came to a different conclusion. Autopsy tests had turned up traces of a cocaine byproduct in Samiya’s blood, and Hayne declared her death a homicide, caused by ‘cocaine toxicity.”
In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for ‘depraved heart murder” – defined under Mississippi law as an act ’eminently dangerous to others…regardless of human life.” By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had ‘unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously” caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison.
Seven years and much legal wrangling later, Gibbs could finally go on trial this spring – part of a wave of ‘fetal harm” cases across the country in recent years that pit the rights of the mother against what lawmakers, health care workers, prosecutors, judges, jurors, […]
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Scott Nine, executive director of the Institute for Democratic Education in America - Nation of Change/Yes!
Stephan: This very important mea culpa by the former Bush Administrator who was the principal architect of "No Child Left Behind", an approach to education that has severely afflicted American schools. The story is getting no play in corporate media. Instead the media spent the week giving us talking heads, speaking in an information free environment concerning a wreck about whose fate they knew nothing. It has been an amazing performance revealing the vapidness of American video media.
Diane Ravitch is a household name-for households where EdWeek, Rethinking Schools, and #edreform are standard reading. For most Americans, though, her newest book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, probably didn’t jump off the shelf or raise eyebrows. But it’s important information at a time when everyone needs to be thinking about and rethinking education.
Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education, was a leading architect of the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law. She is among the few national public figures in education who have shown the courage to acknowledge publicly that the policies she promoted were wrong. Ravitch now has one of the strongest followings and loudest megaphones among teachers and education activists who want an end to high-stakes standardized tests and other tools of the ‘accountability era”-what she now sees as a ‘corporate education reform agenda” aimed at breaking public education as we’ve known it.
This reversal leaves her open to challenges of her change of head and heart. I witnessed such a moment this fall at Dartmouth College, where Ravitch addressed a room full of Vermont school board members and superintendents.
The first question after her […]
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CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, - The New York Times
Stephan: The price of our paranoia is beginning to come due. We are an unhealthy country and we have unhealthy social policies. It is turning other countries against against us. In this story you see it very clearly.
SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft has lost customers, including the government of Brazil.
IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government.
And tech companies abroad, from Europe to South America, say they are gaining customers that are shunning United States providers, suspicious because of the revelations by Edward J. Snowden that tied these providers to the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance program.
Even as Washington grapples with the diplomatic and political fallout of Mr. Snowden’s leaks, the more urgent issue, companies and analysts say, is economic. Technology executives, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, raised the issue when they went to the White House on Friday for a meeting with President Obama.
It is impossible to see now the full economic ramifications of the spying disclosures – in part because most companies are locked in multiyear contracts – but the pieces are beginning to add up as businesses question the trustworthiness of American technology products.
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Mark Zuckerberg, right, Facebook’s chief executive, and other industry officials met with President Obama on Friday. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
The confirmation hearing last week for the […]
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SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I think a strong case can be made that the climate deniers have won. They have gotten the country, and the world to not address what is coming in a really meaningful way, and now it is too late to mitigate much of what is going to happen. By 2036 we're locked in.
Like Easter Island I increasingly think you just can't save people from themselves.
Click through to see video.
The world is at growing risk of ‘abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes” because of a warming climate, America’s premier scientific society warned on Tuesday.
In a rare intervention into a policy debate, the American Association for the Advancement of Science urged Americans to act swiftly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – and lower the risks of leaving a climate catastrophe for future generations.
‘As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do,” the AAAS said in a new report, only what we know.
‘But we consider it our responsibility as professionals to ensure, to the best of our ability, that people understand what we know: human-caused climate change is happening, we face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes, and responding now will lower the risks and costs of taking action.”
The United Nations’ climate science panel, the IPCC, will gather in Yokohama, Japan next week to release the second in a series of blockbuster reports, this time outlining how a changing climate is affecting rainfall and heat waves, sea level and the oceans, fisheries and food security.
But the AAAS scientists said they were releasing their own assessment ahead of time because they were concerned that Americans […]
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PETER ALDHOUS, - Slate/New Scientist (U.K.)
Stephan: This, wedded to the surveillance state is going to have a huge effect on society. It will become very difficult to evade arrest as the two technologies develop, and that will have an impact on people's behavior. This is a game changer.
Click through to see the reconstructions and photos of the actual people. Amazing.
SOURCE: (PLoS Genetics, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1004224).
A murder has been committed, and all the cops have to go on is a trace of DNA left at the scene. It doesn’t match any profile in databases of known criminals, and the trail goes cold. But what if the police could issue a wanted poster based on a realistic “photofit” likeness built from that DNA?
Not if, but when, claim researchers who have developed a method for determining how our genes influence facial shape. One day, the technique may even allow us to gaze into the faces of extinct human-like species that interbred with our own ancestors.
It’s already possible to make some inferences about the appearance of crime suspects from their DNA alone, including their racial ancestry and some shades of hair colour. And in 2012, a team led by Manfred Kayser of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, identified five genetic variants with detectable effects on facial shape. It was a start, but still a long way from reliable genetic photofits.
To take the idea a step further, a team led by population geneticist Mark Shriver of Pennsylvania State University and imaging specialist Peter Claes of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium used a stereoscopic […]
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