crazy Muslim tries to kill Howard Dean's daughter

[xfer]

ITT we are twisting technically-true facts like Matt Drudge


http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/08/dean.daughter.ap/index.html

NORTH HAVEN, Connecticut (AP) -- The daughter of former Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean and four other young women were taken to a hospital Sunday after their sport utility vehicle rolled over on Interstate 91, state police said.

Anne Dean, 20, was treated and released from Yale-New Haven Hospital, said a hospital spokeswoman, who would not describe the nature of any of the women's injuries.

State police said Mona El Sayed, 17, of Tinton Falls, New Jersey, was the driver of the Ford SUV, which is owned by Howard Dean. The hospital spokeswoman said El Sayed was still being evaluated Sunday night.

The three other women -- Betty Townsend, 18, Eliza Berman, 19, and Catherine Hillin, 19, were all treated and released.

Anne Dean is a junior at Yale University. Broadcast reports said the women were apparently returning to Yale from Vermont, where the Dean family lives.

State police said the vehicle was traveling southbound on I-91 in North Haven when it drifted onto the grass median, moved back into the left lane and spun out of control before rolling over in the median.

 

[deadair]

women drivers

 

[Josh Seipp]

Bush's Environmental Policies Imrove Fishery POroduction and Open New Trade Routes

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/11/08/globalwarming.reut/index.html

Study: Arctic warming at twice the global rate
Species, including polar bears, may go extinct as ice melts
Monday, November 8, 2004 Posted: 3:29 PM EST (2029 GMT)

The report says polar bears are unlikely to survive.

Experts cite concerns as new studies make a stronger connection between pollution and global warming. CNN's Sharon Collins reports. (November 8)

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- Global warming is heating the Arctic almost twice as fast as the rest of the planet in a thaw that threatens millions of livelihoods and could wipe out polar bears by 2100, an eight-nation report said on Monday.

The biggest survey to date of the Arctic climate, by 250 scientists, said the accelerating melt could be a foretaste of wider disruptions from a build-up of human emissions of heat-trapping gases in Earth's atmosphere.

The "Arctic climate is now warming rapidly and much larger changes are projected," according to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), funded by the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland.

Arctic temperatures are rising at almost twice the global average and could leap 4-7 Celsius (7-13 Fahrenheit) by 2100, roughly twice the global average projected by U.N. reports. Siberia and Alaska have already warmed by 2-3 C since the 1950s.

Possible benefits like more productive fisheries, easier access to oil and gas deposits or trans-Arctic shipping routes would be outweighed by threats to indigenous peoples and the habitats of animals and plants.

Sea ice around the North Pole, for instance, could almost disappear in summer by the end of the century. The extent of the ice has shrunk by 15 percent to 20 percent in the past 30 years.

"Polar bears are unlikely to survive as a species if there is an almost complete loss of summer sea-ice cover," the report said. On land, creatures like lemmings, caribou, reindeer and snowy owls are being squeezed north into a narrower range.

Fossil fuels blamed
The report mainly blames the melt on gases from fossil fuels burned in cars, factories and power plants. The Arctic warms faster than the global average because dark ground and water, once exposed, traps more heat than reflective snow and ice.

Klaus Toepfer, head of the U.N. Environment Programme, said the Arctic changes were an early warning. "What happens there is of concern for everyone because Arctic warming and its consequences have worldwide implications," he said.

And the melting of glaciers is expected to raise world sea levels by about 10 cm (4 inches) by the end of the century.

Many of the four million people in the Arctic are suffering. Buildings from Russia to Canada have collapsed because of subsidence linked to thawing permafrost that also destabilises oil pipelines, roads and airports.

Indigenous hunters are falling through thinning ice and say that prey from seals to whales is harder to find. Rising levels of ultra-violet radiation may cause cancers.

Changes under way in the Arctic "present serious challenges to human health and food security, and possibly even (to) the survival of some cultures," the report says.

Farming could benefit in some areas, while more productive forests are moving north on to former tundra. "There are not just negative consequences, there will be new opportunities too," said Paal Prestrud, vice-chair of ACIA.

Scientists will meet in Iceland this week to discuss the report. Foreign ministers from Arctic nations are due to meet in Iceland on November 24, but diplomats say they are deeply split with Washington least willing to make drastic action.

President George W. Bush pulled the United States, the world's top polluter, out of the 126-nation Kyoto protocol in 2001, arguing its curbs on greenhouse gas emissions were too costly and unfairly excluded developing nations.

"Kyoto is only a first step," said Norwegian Environment Minister Knut Hareide, a strong backer of Kyoto. "The clear message from this report is that Kyoto is not enough. We must reduce emissions much more in coming decades."

 

[xfer]

"With more black people behind bars, crime rates drop"

November 8, 2004
Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates
By FOX BUTTERFIELD

The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent
last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell, according
to a study by the Justice Department released yesterday.

The continuing increase in the prison population, despite a drop or
leveling off in the crime rate in the past few years, is a result of
laws passed in the 1990's that led to more prison sentences and
longer terms, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics for
the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics and an author of the
report.

At the end of 2003, there were 1,470,045 men and women in state and
federal prisons in the United States, the report found. In addition,
counting those inmates in city and county jails and incarcerated
juvenile offenders, the total number of Americans behind bars was
2,212,475 on Dec. 31 last year, the report said.

The report estimated that 44 percent of state and federal prisoners
in 2003 were black, compared with 35 percent who were white, 19
percent who were Hispanic and 2 percent who were of other races. The
numbers have changed little in the last decade.

Statistically, the number of women in prison is growing fast, rising
3.6 percent in 2003. But at a total of 101,179, they are just 6.9
percent of the prison population.

Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, said
one of the most striking findings in the report was that almost 10
percent of all American black men ages 25 to 29 were in prison.

Such a high proportion of young black men behind bars not only has a
strong impact on black families, Professor Blumstein said, but "in
many ways is self-defeating." The criminal justice system is built on
deterrence, with being sent to prison supposedly a stigma, he
said. "But it's tough to convey a sense of stigma when so many of
your friends and neighbors are similarly stigmatized."

In seeking to explain the paradox of a falling crime rate but a
rising prison population, Mr. Beck pointed out that F.B.I. statistics
showed that from 1994 to 2003 there was a 16 percent drop in arrests
for violent crime, including a 36 percent decrease in arrests for
murder and a 25 percent decrease in arrests for robbery.

But the tough new sentencing laws led to a growth in inmates being
sent to prison, from 522,000 in 1995 to 615,400 in 2002, the report
said.

Similarly, the report found that the average time served by prison
inmates rose from 23 months in 1995 to 30 months in 2001.

Among the new measures were mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which
required inmates to serve a specified proportion of their time behind
bars; truth-in-sentencing laws, which required an inmate to actually
serve the time he was sentenced to; and a variety of three-strikes
laws increasing the penalties for repeat offenders.

In the three states with the biggest prison systems, California,
Texas and Florida, the number of newly admitted inmates grew last
year, but the number of those released either fell or remained
stable, Mr. Beck said.

Several states with small prison systems had particularly large
increases in new inmates, led by North Dakota, up 11.4 percent, and
Minnesota, up 10.3 percent.

New York had a 2.8 percent decrease in new inmates, reflecting the
continued sharp fall in crime in New York City, Mr. Beck said.

Over all, Mr. Beck said, the prison population is aging.
Traditionally the great majority of inmates are men in their 20's and
early 30's, but middle-aged inmates, those 40 to 54, account for
about half of the increase in the prison population since 1995, he
said.

This is a result both of the aging of the general American population
and of the longer sentences, Mr. Beck said.

But the number of elderly inmates is still small, despite longer
sentences and more life sentences. Those inmates 65 and older were
still only 1 percent of the prison population in 2003.