Kate Sheppard

A trial underway in the U.S. district court in Duluth, Minn. marks the first time that the recording industry will have to go before a jury in their attempt to crack down on piracy. The Recording Industry Association of America has sued 26,000 people in recent years, and all of them were either dismissed or […]

Obama is getting more explicit in his condemnation of Clinton‘s initial backing of the war. In a foreign policy speech yesterday at DePaul University, without naming her specifically, he implied that her decision was not only a poor choice at the time, but an indication of deeper character flaws: But the conventional thinking in Washington […]

The Washington Post reports today that under a six-nation agreement reached this week, North Korea is set to begin disabling nuclear facilities and releasing details of its nuclear programs. So does this mean they’re off the Axis o’ Evil list? Removing North Korea from the terrorism list would be a largely symbolic move, but it […]

There was plenty of good news yesterday from the Supreme Court — they’re letting a New York court’s ruling forcing social service agencies affiliated with a religious group to cover contraception for employees stand, and they also upheld the right of a public library in California to refuse to make their meeting room available for […]

Gregory Rodriguez asks why the press gets so excited about violence between black and Latino residents of Los Angeles: Last January, a CNN anchorwoman asked a visibly perturbed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosawhether Los Angeles was “in the middle of a race war.” That same month, this newspaper published an opinion piece claiming that “Latino ethnic cleansing […]

Megan McArdle is right here: the massive subsidy that is free roads undermines efforts to endorse other forms of transit. But it’s more than free roads — it’s also the subsidies for the oil industry (which the House energy bill aims to cut), the still comparatively low price on gasoline for consumers, and the tax […]

While listening to the vague aspirational plans and thuds of repeated patting-of-oneself-on-the-back coming from the Bush administration at last week’s Major Economies meeting, I had to fight my cynical streak that automatically wanted to write off all the positive-gain figures Bush’s reps. were offering. They claimed that greenhouse-gas emissions intensity declined 6.14 percent between 2002 […]

Yesterday, the Senate approved a measure to expand hate crime legislation by extending coverage to violence against gays, which of course comes after plenty of debate and threats of a filibuster. The bill is named after Matthew Shepard, the gay college student whose violent death in Wyoming in 1998 sounded calls across the nation to […]

I headed over to the press conference on Bush‘s Major Economies meeting yesterday, but was waiting to hear what the man himself would say in his address this morning to post on it. An excerpt: Our guiding principle is clear: We must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and we must do […]

I was reading this post over on Seed‘s Science Blogs this morning in which Jake Young hypothesizes about the correlation between wealth and weight. While countries in dire poverty obviously tend toward skinnier citizens, and relative wealth makes for greater access to food and therefore, greater obesity rates, he posits that the rates would model […]