Court makes it official: Prison is not for rehab
Once upon a time, prisons were known as reformatories or penitentiaries because they were supposed to be places for reform and penitence. At least that was the theory, inherited from the Quakers who devised the Anglo-American prison system in the 18th century to replace whips, stocks and gallows.
Today, they’re just called prisons and their purpose, under the law, is to punish criminals and protect society. The point was driven home Monday by an appeals court ruling that said federal judges have no authority to sentence someone to prison, or increase the length of a sentence, to promote their rehabilitation.
In other words, you can’t be sent to the federal pen for your own good.
The only purposes of imprisonment are “retribution, deterrence and incapacitation, not rehabilitation,” said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, relying on the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent interpretation of a 1984 sentencing law. The ruling, written by one of the court’s most conservative judges, Andrew Kleinfeld, overturned a Hawaii man’s two-year sentence for violating the terms of his release and sent the case back to the trial judge to impose a shorter term.
Welcome to the Overnight News Digest
(graphic by palantir)
The OND is published each night around midnight, Eastern Time.
The originator of OND was Magnifico.
Current Contributors are ScottyUrb, Bentliberal, wader, Oke, rfall, JML9999 and NeonVincent who also serves as chief cat herder.
EU seeks to save the euro, but S&P isn't convinced
(12-05) 19:47 PST PARIS, France (AP) --
Seeking to restore confidence in the euro, the leaders of France and Germany jointly have called for changes to the European Union treaty so that countries using the euro would face automatic penalties if budget deficits ran too high.
But not everyone on Wall Street was reassured that Europe would get control of its 2-year-old debt crisis.
Stock prices rose and borrowing costs for European governments dropped sharply in response to the changes proposed on Monday by French President Nikolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But some of the optimism faded late in the day when Standard and Poor's threatened to cut its credit ratings on 15 eurozone countries, including the likes of Germany, France and Austria which have been considered Europe's safest government debt issuers.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/...
Gov. Brown speaks out on treatment of Occupiers
Gov. Jerry Brown finally spoke out Monday on the Occupy Wall Street protests - sort of. While we still haven't heard what the governor actually thinks about the protests, he did this week wade into controversies over how university police have treated demonstrators.
In a letter to the commission that sets training standards for law enforcement around the state, Brown wrote that he is "seriously concerned that the rules governing the use of force, particularly pepper spray, are not well understood in the context of civil disobedience and various forms of public protest."
Citing the Occupy protests around California, Brown asked that the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training "carefully review" its crowd management and civil disobedience guidelines.
And while he may not be standing in solidarity with Occupy, there were hints this week that the governor is certainly paying attention to - or maybe taking advantage of - the protests,
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/...
This is more of a press release, but I think it's good news:
Endow-Bio, Inc., the First National Endowment for Biodiversity
Each year, our board selects a group of organizations working to solve our crisis of biodiversity in any of these various ways and, with their cooperation, we raise money to support particular projects of these organizations. In January of the following year, we send each of them a check. These organizations might be 501(c)(3) public charities; colleges and universities; or agencies of federal, state, county, or tribal governments. In order for us to do this, we are building a huge and ever-expanding directory of suitable organizations, and we post this on our website where it is freely available to the public. Anyone can quickly link to the website of any organization in this file we call, "Organizations We Recommend". We hope this online directory, which can easily be sorted by state or by category of interest, will help people find other organizations of interest to them. We urge the public to support these other organizations directly with financial support and through volunteering.
Endow-Bio is a very simple business, and we aim to keep it that way. This means we can function with a membership fee of as low as $1.00, which empowers everyone to participate who cares to do so. This we call grassroots philanthropy. What we want most is participation. We want more people to become involved in conservation, including well-meaning poor people, young children and youth. Because the future belongs to the young, we are trying to stimulate their sense of empowerment in the context of conservation.
Donations are split three ways: 70% goes to Program funds to be given away the following January. All interest earned supplements Program funds. We set 15% aside to build the First National Endowment for Biodiversity, the purpose of which is limited to generating income to supplement Program funds. And we set aside 15% for Operations. Once we get established, we expect this last category will require less funding and more can be shifted to Program and Endowment.
We offer members the right to vote on where our Program funds at year end should go — what percentage each of them would allocate to each of the organizations for which we have been fundraising all year.
Special report: The legacy of Romney's healthcare Rx
By Ros Krasny and Toni Clarke
BOSTON | Mon Dec 5, 2011 5:33pm EST
BOSTON (Reuters) - For many years, Rebeccah Pearson, a retail store manager in Newburyport, Massachusetts, was among the state residents who had to forego medical insurance. "It was pretty much pay rent and eat, or go to the doctor. I chose the rent and food," she recalls. "I would have to save up for two months before going to the doctor because it was ridiculously expensive."
When the state enacted comprehensive healthcare reform in 2006, Pearson, then 30, was able to buy into a subsidized Commonwealth Care insurance program. Then she made her first doctor's visit in several years, complaining of fatigue.
Doctors found "a mass the size of a fist" on Pearson's fallopian tubes. If surgery had not been performed urgently, the cyst could have ruptured and killed her.
"I am alive today because of Mitt Romney," she says. "I want to reach out and give him a hug."
At this juncture in the Republican primary, however, Romney might shrink from the embrace.
NASA discovers Earth-like planet
AFP
In another step toward finding Earth-like planets that may hold life, NASA says its Kepler space telescope has confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar system.
French astronomers earlier this year confirmed the first exoplanet to meet key requirements for sustaining life, but Kepler 22b, initially glimpsed in 2009, is the first the US space agency has been able to confirm.
Confirmation means that astronomers have seen it crossing in front of its star three times.
Europe to push for binding climate deal
By Emily Beament, South Africa
Monday, December 05, 2011
GOVERNMENT ministers from across the world are joining UN climate talks in South Africa this week as Europe pushes for action on a new legally-binding deal to tackle global warming.
The EU wants to see agreement at the latest round of talks to negotiate a new international deal on cutting greenhouse gas emissions that would be concluded by 2015 and take effect by 2020.
But the plans face opposition from major polluters, including India, whose negotiators say they are not in Durban to launch a process for a new treaty, and for whom the issue is a "red line".
EU officials still believe securing agreement in Durban on negotiating a new deal is "possible, but challenging", though they say that if such an agreement is not made at this year’s talks they will continue to push for it next year.
Read more: http://www.irishexaminer.com/...
This is cool - though it's no substitute for a comprehensive program to help students attend university:
Duke grad gives school $50M to help poor students
RALEIGH, N.C.—A Duke University graduate and investment manager, along with his wife, is giving $50 million to his alma mater to help undergraduates attend the elite school in North Carolina, campus officials announced Monday.
University trustee Bruce Karsh and his wife Martha gave $30 million to help U.S. students and $20 million for international students, the Durham school said.
...
Duke's undergraduate tuition is nearly $41,000 a year, but the school boasts that it does not consider an applicant's ability to pay for college when making admissions decisions. Duke also said it guarantees to meet the full demonstrated financial need of admitted U.S. students with a package of grants, loans and work-study opportunities.
Grad Student Plans to Reintroduce Buffalo on Reservation
A Montana State University graduate student who shares his father’s dream of reintroducing buffalo to a Wyoming Indian reservation has received a national fellowship from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Jason Baldes of Fort Washakie, Wyoming, said the Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Graduate Fellowship will help him work toward bringing buffalo back to the Wind River Indian Reservation and promote both ecological and community health. Studying for his master’s degree in land resources and environmental sciences (LRES), Baldes is the 11th MSU graduate student to receive the STAR award since 1995. His fellowship amounts to $87,000 over two years.
“I was very surprised,” Baldes said. “It’s a ticket into accomplishing something we as a family have always really, really wanted.”
Baldes, 33, is an enrolled member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe and long committed to improving life on the reservation. The youngest of nine children and father of four, he grew up hunting and exploring the back country with his father Richard, now retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Riding horses together in the mountains, they saw deer, elk, moose, pronghorn antelope and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, but never buffalo
Read more:http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/...
Cores reveal when Dead Sea 'died'
5 December 2011 Last updated at 20:38 ET
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco
Sediments drilled from beneath the Dead Sea reveal that this most remarkable of water bodies all but disappeared 120,000 years ago.
It is a discovery of high concern say scientists because it demonstrates just how dry the Middle East can become during Earth's warm phases.
In such ancient times, few if any humans were living around the Dead Sea.
Today, its feed waters are intercepted by large populations and the lake level is declining rapidly.
"The reason the Dead Sea is going down is because virtually all of the fresh water flowing into it is being taken by the countries around it," said Steve Goldstein, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, US.
"But we now know that in a previous warm period, the water that people are using today and are relying upon stopped flowing all by itself. That has important implications for people today because global climate models are predicting that this region in particular is going to become more arid in the future," he told BBC News.