Out of the blue (at least to me), the BBC reports: The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption. … The Argentine court ruled that: “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state.” Supreme Court President Ricardo…
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An op-ed by Tony Newman in the New York Daily News. While New York has a reputation as a tolerant and open-minded city and New York State effectively decriminalized simple possession of up to 25 grams of marijuana more than 30 years ago, Gotham has made so many pot arrests that it now has the…
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Stanley Fish gets to the issues on teaching the craft of writing in “What Should Colleges Teach?” I was blessed to have good English teachers throughout my Evanston public-school education. I also had good and literate parents. Collectively, they somehow taught me skills I use pretty much every day: write, type, and edit (though I…
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[Detroit Police Chief] Evans reiterated his sense that people feel Detroit is supposed to have crime. He said he goes out two nights a week and works the streets, stopping motorists who rarely have driver’s license, registration, insurance. “What I say is: ‘Do you drive north of 8 Mile like this?’ And they say, ‘Hell…
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“New formula lets meth users make drug in soda bottles, avoid anti-drug laws.” The AP story by Justin Juozapavicius.
In a Heritage Foundation foundation report by Charles Stimson and Andrew Grossman, I learned a very surprising fact: Convicted persons in the United States actually served less time in prison, on average, than the world average and the European average. Among the 35 countries surveyed on this question in 1998, the average time actually served…
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Perhaps nothing speaks better to our broken justice system than the fact that people–guilty and innocent alike–are held in jail for more than year beforetrial. Lise Olsen reports in the Houston Chronicle: Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial, at least 500 county inmates [out of 11,500] have been locked up…
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Never leave your bike unlocked. The latest in bike-theft prevention. From Chetumal, Mexico.
The traditional “6-pack” is flawed because people will pick the person mostlike the suspect. Showing pictures one-by-one is supposed to change there. Here’s an AP story by Jeff Carlton about the Dallas P.D.
I couldn’t figure out this the whole let-the-terrorist-go thing the Brits did. I think the New York Times may cut to the chase: Colonel Qaddafi made his remarks as British and Scottish officials were doing their best to distance themselves from Mr. Megrahi’s release, which they insisted was decided without any pressure from London by…
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