Dinosaurs With Attitude

Come on, this isn't serious, is it? There was an animal that looked like this?

It's a dinosaur ? scaly, fuzzy, with an oversized zebra-striped head, leopard-spotted legs, tiger stripes on the tail and two unfoldable wings permanently erect and attached to its feet. Really?

Yes, this is a real animal. It doesn't look like a Spielberg green scaly dinosaur, but over the last decade scientists, using new molecular imaging techniques, have decided that some of these Jurassic critters were far dandier than previously imagined.

This one, called Dimorphodon macronyx, was found wedged in a British limestone cliff by a fossil hunter named Mary Anning back in 1828. It was pretty weird back then, being a four-legged, walking, winged pterosaur, but if the latest theories on color and feathers hold true, this animal was a clash of stripes, dots, feather and fuzz.

Feathers on dinosaurs aren't new. A feathery fossil turned up in Germany in 1861, but more recently, more sophisticated instruments can magnify surface details that appear to have once supported primitive feathers, like the mohawk you see coming off this animal's spine.

This little dinosaur, about the size of a cat, was found by Xiao-Ting Zheng's team in China. It's called Tianyulong confuciusi, and it had a ridge, Zheng says, of stiff hollow stalks, primitive feathers, also known as "dinofuzz." Feathers, apparently, evolved from flat scales, the scales you can see today on modern snakes. How did that happen? Well, it took time, genetic changes and evolution, but you can the process unfold even today, writes science reporter (and Radiolab regular) Carl Zimmer. Just check out baby birds (who descend from a branch of dinosaurs):

All the feathers on a developing chick begin as bristles rising up from the skin; only later to their split open into more complex shapes. In a bird embryo, these bristles erupt from tiny patches of skin ...

So scales begat fuzz, and fuzz begat dino-fuzz, and dino-fuzz begat feathers, and the world begat feathery dinosaurs. Some used feathers to keep their balance when holding down struggling prey, like this guy ...

Some used feathers to keep warm. Some used feathers to glide. Some to impress the ladies ...

Courtesy of Sydney Mohr/University of Alberta

But how do we know they displayed these very particular streaks, splashes, stripes, dots, and iridescent sheens? How do we know they even had colors?

Well, modern feathers get color from the shape and placement of teeny, pin-sized sacs of pigment. When scientists looked, they found similar structures, called melanosomes, in dinosaur feathers. Melanosomes, it turns out, can survive for millions of years in fossilized bird feathers, which gave two scientists at Yale an idea. "We had a dream, to put colors on a dinosaur," grad student Jakob Vinther told The New York Times.

Working with Dr. Richard Prum, Vinther harvested a bunch of melanosomes from a fossil and sent them to Akron, Ohio.

Bring Me Your Purples, Your Yellows, Your Flaming Reds ...

There's a biologist in Akron, Matthew Shawkey, who knows how to read colors in modern bird feathers. He can look at an array of modern melanosomes and say "this feather is going to be brilliant yellow with touches of blue" and most of the time he's right. Well, if he can do that for modern feathers, why not dinosaur feathers?

And so, thanks to Prum, Vinther and Shawkey, we now have a method for imagining the colors on vanished dinosaurs , including, my new, iridescent, many-colored favorite, the Dancing Gigantoraptor. This is my guy. I found him on YouTube, from the Discovery Channel.

He's a big dinosaur, who in this video is trying to impress a lady by displaying his super flashy iridescent tail, his rainbow colored wings and by leaping high in the air. Unfortunately a bunch of mammals ? our great, great, great, great grandparents ? have created a soft spot on the ground below, so he's going to have an inconvenient accident. But if you wanted to gaze at the newest look in dinosaurs, here it is ...

DiscoveryNetworks/YouTube

Special thanks to artist Julius Csotonyi for his version of the Dimorphodon and the Tianyulong. Julius' site is chock-full of extraordinary paintings, drawings, and mixed media depictions of the ancient earth, and he stays very current on the science. Thanks too to my backfield of dinosaur informants, Brian Switek at Laelaps, Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science and Carl Zimmer at The Loom. Brian's the one who led me to the Gigantoraptor.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/02/05/171086622/dinosaurs-with-attitude?ft=1&f=1007

kat dennings Steve Sabol Yom Kippur 2012 Aaron Paul mumford and sons packers Dancing With The Stars All Stars

Congress considers putting limits on drone strikes

FILE - This Oct. 2008 file photo by Muhammad ud-Deen shows Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. A Justice Department document says it is legal for the government to kill U.S. citizens abroad if it believes they are senior al-Qaida leaders continually engaged in operations aimed at killing Americans. (AP Photo/Muhammad ud-Deen, File)

FILE - This Oct. 2008 file photo by Muhammad ud-Deen shows Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. A Justice Department document says it is legal for the government to kill U.S. citizens abroad if it believes they are senior al-Qaida leaders continually engaged in operations aimed at killing Americans. (AP Photo/Muhammad ud-Deen, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Uncomfortable with the Obama administration's use of deadly drones, a growing number in Congress is looking to limit America's authority to kill suspected terrorists, even U.S. citizens. The Democratic-led outcry was emboldened by the revelation in a newly surfaced Justice Department memo that shows drones can strike against a wider range of threats, with less evidence, than previously believed.

The drone program, which has been used from Pakistan across the Middle East and into North Africa to find and kill an unknown number of suspected terrorists, is expected to be a top topic of debate when the Senate Intelligence Committee grills John Brennan, the White House's pick for CIA chief, at a hearing Thursday.

The White House on Tuesday defended its lethal drone program by citing the very laws that some in Congress once believed were appropriate in the years immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks but now think may be too broad.

"It has to be in the agenda of this Congress to reconsider the scope of action of drones and use of deadly force by the United States around the world because the original authorization of use of force, I think, is being strained to its limits," Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said in a recent interview.

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, said Tuesday that "it deserves a serious look at how we make the decisions in government to take out, kill, eliminate, whatever word you want to use, not just American citizens but other citizens as well."

Hoyer added: "We ought to carefully review our policies as a country."

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee likely will hold hearings on U.S. drone policy, an aide said Tuesday, and Chairman Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and the panel's top Republican, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, both have quietly expressed concerns about the deadly operations. And earlier this week, a group of 11 Democratic and Republican senators urged President Barack Obama to release a classified Justice Department legal opinion justifying when U.S. counterterror missions, including drone strikes, can be used to kill American citizens abroad.

Without those documents, it's impossible for Congress and the public to decide "whether this authority has been properly defined, and whether the president's power to deliberately kill Americans is subject to appropriate limitations and safeguards," the senators wrote.

It was a repeated request after receiving last June an unclassified Justice Department memo, which fell short of giving the senators all the information they requested.

First detailed publicly by NBC News late Monday, the memo for the first time outlines the Obama administration's decision to kill al-Qaida terror suspects without any evidence that specific and imminent plots are being planned against the United States.

"The threat posed by al-Qaida and its associated forces demands a broader concept of imminence in judging when a person continually planning terror attacks presents an imminent threat," concluded the document.

The memo was immediately decried by civil liberties groups as "flawed" and "profoundly disturbing" ? especially in light of 2011 U.S. drone strikes in Yemen that killed three American citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old-son and Samir Khan. Al-Awlaki was linked to the planning and execution of several attacks targeting U.S. and Western interests, including the attempt to down a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009 and the plot to bomb cargo planes in 2010. His son was killed in a separate strike on a suspected al-Qaida den. Khan was an al-Qaida propagandist.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, echoing comments Brennan made in a speech last April, called the strikes legal, ethical and wise and said they are covered by a law that Congress approved allowing the use of military force against al-Qaida.

"And certainly, under that authority, the president acts in the United States' interest to protect the United States and its citizens from al-Qaida," Carney said Tuesday.

"It is a matter of fact that Congress authorized the use of military force against al-Qaida," Carney said. "It is a matter of fact that al-Qaida is in a state of war against us and that senior leaders, operational leaders of al-Qaida are continually plotting to attack the United States, plotting to kill American citizens as they did most horrifically on September 11th of 2001."

Three days after 9/11, Congress approved a law authorizing the military to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against al-Qaida and other groups believed to be helping or harboring the global terror network, including the use of drone strikes. In the decade since the attacks, U.S. intelligence officials say, al-Qaida has splintered into a number of affiliates and allied sympathizers. That means the current laws could allow military force against thousands of extremists across the Mideast and North Africa who have limited or no ability to strike the United States.

Currently, both the CIA and the U.S. military are authorized to remotely pilot unmanned, missile-carrying drones against terror suspects. It's unknown exactly how many strikes have been carried out, but experts say that drone attacks in Pakistan are conducted by the CIA, while those in Yemen and Somalia, for example, are by military forces.

The drones have strained diplomacy between the U.S. and the nations where the strikes are carried out, as civilians have been killed alongside the targeted terrorists, even though most nations have given Washington at least tacit agreement to carry out the attacks.

A Middle Eastern diplomat said that in Yemen, for example, an uptick of U.S. drone strikes last month have killed dozens of people and upset the local public, leading some leaders in Sanaa to reconsider how often they should be used. The diplomat spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity to avoid political retribution from the Obama administration.

The Pentagon is also considering basing surveillance drones in Niger to monitor on burgeoning extremist violence in North Africa, but it's not clear if they will be armed. Scaling back the use of drones also would hamper war plans in Afghanistan after combat troops are scheduled to withdraw in 2014. Drones represent a major thrust of the post-troops campaign to help the limited number of special forces units that remain there keep the Taliban from regrouping.

Brennan, who currently serves as the White House counterterrorism czar, has signaled he is prepared to turn the CIA from carrying out lethal drone strikes and hand over those missions to the U.S. military. Sen. Ron Wyden, a senior Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence panel, declared himself unsatisfied Tuesday with the Justice memo and said he will press Brennan at the confirmation hearing about the administration's current policy.

The drone debate puts Obama ? himself a former civil rights lawyer ? in the awkward position of carrying out lethal attacks in secret and bucking his political allies in the Democratic Party. Democratic lawmakers were incensed by the refusal of the Republican administration of President George W. Bush to hand over classified Justice Department opinions justifying the use of waterboarding, the harsh interrogation tactic that critics call a form of torture. Obama repudiated those methods ? and released those opinions ? when he took office in 2009. The use of drones proved to have no political cost to Obama in his re-election campaign.

House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., defended the use of deadly drones, calling it "a lawful act of national self-defense."

"When an individual has joined al-Qaida ? the organization responsible for the murder of thousands of Americans ? and actively plots future attacks against U.S. citizens, soldiers, and interests around the world, the U.S. government has both the authority and the obligation to defend the country against that threat," Rogers said in a statement.

But Rep. Keith Ellison, said the new Justice memo could spur lawmakers into taking a fresh look at deadly drones, and what he called an outdated policy guiding them.

"We are sort of running on the steam that we acquired right after our country was attacked in the most horrific act of terror in U.S. history," said Ellison, D-Minn. "We have learned much since 9/11, and now it's time to take a more sober look at where we should be with use of force."

__

Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-02-05-Drone%20Targets/id-a59ea6f566e34c538a804ffb850efc49

nicollette sheridan apple dividend snow white and the huntsman snow white and the huntsman rupaul drag race walking dead comic kratom

Civil rights lawyers: NYPD spying violates rules

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The New York Police Department's focus on Muslims has renewed the political surveillance of the 1960s and '70s that was banned under a landmark legal ruling, according to a new court filing by civil rights lawyers. They are seeking an injunction against further surveillance of Muslims without evidence of crimes and a new court-appointed auditor to oversee police activities.

Describing continuing surveillance of Muslims as "widespread and intense," the civil rights lawyers complained that the NYPD has monitored public places where Muslims eat, shop and worship and has kept records and notes about police observations despite any evidence of unlawful or terror-related activities. The lawyers said the NYPD's actions violate rules, known as the Handschu guidelines, that a court had imposed as part of a 1985 landmark settlement with the NYPD to a lawsuit they filed.

"There is substantial persuasive evidence that the defendants are conducting investigations into organizations and individuals associated with the Muslim faith and the Muslim community in New York, and have been doing so for years, using intrusive methods, without a reasonable indication of unlawful activity, or a criminal predicate of any sort," the lawyers wrote in a motion filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. They said the NYPD's actions were so "flagrant and persistent" that an auditor should be appointed.

A spokesman for the NYPD did not respond to a phone message and email request for comment from The Associated Press.

The NYPD and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have said the department follows the Handschu guidelines and did not break any laws over the course of its surveillance of Muslim communities. NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said the department has plenty of oversight, including five district attorneys, a committee that investigates police corruption, the NYPD's own internal affairs office and the court-imposed Handschu guidelines.

The spying was the subject of a series of stories by the AP that revealed the NYPD intelligence division infiltrated dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups and investigated hundreds. The NYPD is the largest police department in the nation, and Bloomberg has held up its counterterrorism tactics as a model for the rest of the country. The new court motion by the civil rights lawyers refers repeatedly to the AP's reporting and includes some internal NYPD documents the AP had obtained and published.

The motion focuses on a particular section of the NYPD's intelligence division known initially as the Demographics Unit and later renamed the Zone Assessment Unit. This unit is at the heart of the NYPD's spying program, built with help from the CIA. It assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

Supporters said the Demographics Unit was central to keeping the city safe, though a senior NYPD official testified last year that the unit never generated any leads or triggered a terrorism investigation.

The Handschu guidelines came out of landmark lawsuit the lawyers filed and a subsequent 1985 court settlement that set strict time limits for investigations, imposed rules on the kinds of records police could keep and created a three-person body to oversee such investigations.

The last time civil rights lawyers in the Handshu case filed a motion like this was in November 2005. It was not immediately clear when the judge will make a ruling on the new motion.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-02-04-NYPD-Intelligence-Lawsuit/id-735a7e8e45324f0ca09ac2ba44eacdb3

bowling green marysville tornados dr. seuss dr seuss the temptations rush limbaugh sandra fluke

Windows Phone 7.8 hands-on: cosmetically yours

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when Microsoft declared that fairly fresh (and costly) Windows Phone 7 devices like the Nokia Lumia 900 would never taste its latest WP8 wares. To assuage hurt feelings and keep legacy phone owners within throwing distance of the latest devices like the Nokia Lumia 920 or HTC's 8X, Redmond introduced Windows Phone 7.8 (version 7.10.8858), which started arriving via Zune on January 31st. It was likely hoping that the upgrade would tide legacy owners over until their contracts expired or boredom set in, at which point they'd get a new device packing WP8 -- including not-too-costly models like the $249 (contract-free) Lumia 620. So the question is, will the 7.8 bone thrown at WP7 handset owners prevent them from looking at the greener Android or iOS grass across the fence? We've got a Lumia 610 here that was otherwise collecting dust, so head after the break to find out our thoughts.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Microsoft

Comments

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/Z1SYKYcSJQY/

giuliana rancic elie wiesel temptations work hard play hard tim ferriss wmt human nature

Morgan Guyton: My Church Pays For Birth Control, and I'm Glad it Does

Apparently, the Obama administration just announced a rule change in the contraception mandate to allow broader exemptions for religious employers beyond churches themselves. Well, that's fine and all, but I'm actually grateful that my health insurance through the United Methodist Church pays for my wife and me to have our IUD that keeps us from having more babies. And I think it's time someone named the fact that family planning is a legitimate part of the equation of Christian sexual ethics rather than always being a demonic conspiracy against God's will for humanity. Birth control is part of how my wife and I try to be faithful stewards of our bodies and our relationship for the sake of both our family and the ministry to which God has called each of us.

I'm very attracted to Roman Catholic theology for a lot of reasons. The Roman church's theology of the body is derived from a lot of principles I agree with: a sacramental understanding of human existence, an affirmation of God's sovereignty over modernist individualism and a suspicion of the worship of science. At the end of the day though, I'm a pragmatist. My wife and I are at the age where we would risk having a child with serious health problems if we did not use birth control. We would receive a child like that as a blessing from God and love him or her with all our hearts, but it would result in our relative lack of availability for ministry beyond our family, which is why having an IUD is appropriate stewardship for us.

When you have two very active, socially demanding little boys, conjugal intimacy is something that happens when it can. In other words, when neither of you are sick and neither of the kids are, when the laundry and dishes are actually dealt with before midnight, when you got enough sleep the night before that you're not exhausted after putting the kids to bed, when you're not so buried in the blogosphere that you've forgotten how to be romantic (doh!), when you get around to replacing the doorknob on your bedroom door that you had to uninstall because it was sticking. Realities like these don't lend themselves to keeping tabs on a biological calendar as the means of avoiding pregnancy. I respect people who use the natural family planning approach the same way I respect people who have never fed their children fast food and who have never used the television as a babysitter. As the Yardbirds sang, "Mister, you're a better man than I."

In any case, because I work for the United Methodist Church instead of Hobby Lobby or Wheaton College or a Catholic hospital, my wife and I are able to do the thing that makes our marriage worshipful without having to add another calendar to keep track of. And if our insurance didn't pay for birth control, we would have enough money to pay for it out of pocket. But not everyone is as lucky as I am. What about a woman who works for minimum wage washing the linens at Georgetown hospital? Let's call her Maria.

Maria is a Baptist even though she works at a Catholic hospital; she and her husband Miguel have two children whose needs they have just enough money to cover. A third child would put them over the edge financially. Maria and Miguel have time alone together maybe once or twice a week because of their work schedules. Usually they're too tired to do anything romantically intimate, but they recently read this book their church was promoting by some pastor from Seattle which said that sex is critical to having a Godly marriage, which is what they definitely want to have.

Maria and Miguel have to budget tightly enough that paying out of pocket for an IUD like my wife and I have or even for "the pill" is not an option. So here's the key question -- should Maria be guaranteed the right to medically control whether she gets pregnant or not? The Obama administration decided the answer to that question was yes. The default stereotype in our heads when we think about birth control is twenty-something bar-hoppers who want to have fun without consequences. But the fact is that many married, very committed Christians use birth control because of their sense of stewardship and the recognition of the critical importance of sexual intimacy that causes Paul to tell his Corinthian couples, "Don't deprive each other" (1 Corinthians 7.5).

This is why I'm a little put out by all this talk of religious persecution by loud evangelicals engaging in opportunistic exhibitionist "solidarity" with our Catholic brothers and sisters because they want to land some culture war punches. Sexual purity has a critical self-justifying function in American middle-class identity. It's essential to our ability to explain why we have wealth and others don't (I kept it in my pants till I was married; those people didn't; my tax dollars shouldn't have to subsidize their lack of self-control). It reassures my discomfort over social inequity to believe that the minimum wage Marias out there must have gotten into their financial circumstances because they couldn't pinch the aspirin between their knees. That's why I need to make it into a moral outrage that I would have to pay into a shared insurance pool that buys their birth control and enables their debauchery (which I've projected onto them).

Fifty years ago, the threat that black male libido posed to white girls was the main justification for the social order of segregation (if they come into our neighborhood and our schools, how will we keep our women safe?). Though the racial dimensions have been sublimated (somewhat), the threat of sexual transgression has carried over into our era as the primary underlying anxiety behind middle-class evangelical family decision-making whether it's about homeschooling, suburban living, or finding a church with a strong youth program so my kids won't go to the drinking sex parties that every non-Christian high school student attends every weekend.

The irony is that the culture war over sexual purity is not at all the counter-cultural stand that it purports to be; it's completely accommodating to the mythology about the underlying causes for the social order that privilege needs to tell itself. It reassures a population of middle-class parents that focusing on their nuclear family to the exclusion of everything else is exactly what Jesus wants them to do (the same Jesus who said, "My mother and brothers and sisters are those who do my Father's will" [Mark 3:35]). This reassurance is one of the most important obstacles to kingdom living among Christians today.

In any case, if it's your conviction that birth control is part of a depraved consumerist approach to sexuality and idolatry of science that has destroyed our society's connection with God, I can respect your stance. But I am going to point out that "family values" activism can and often does contribute to the process by which the church has become a banal accessory to privileged suburban existence rather than a body of people who have been "called out" of their privilege into the new resurrected kingdom of Christ. And I will also ask your respect for the pragmatic stewardship of birth control by which my wife and I try to stay healthy in our marriage and responsible with our resources.

?

Follow Morgan Guyton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/maguyton

"; var coords = [-5, -72]; // display fb-bubble FloatingPrompt.embed(this, html, undefined, 'top', {fp_intersects:1, timeout_remove:2000,ignore_arrow: true, width:236, add_xy:coords, class_name: 'clear-overlay'}); });

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/morgan-guyton/church-pays-for-birth-control_b_2523691.html

xi jinping matt bomer westminster kennel club dog show jeremy lin game winner chocolate covered strawberries shrimp scampi kate upton si cover

Beating, torture fuel sense Egypt police unchanged

Egyptian relatives of Mohammed el-Gindy, a 28-year-old activist, who died early Monday of wounds sustained during clashes last Friday near the presidential palace, display his picture as they shout anti-president Morsi slogans during his funeral procession in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Feb. 4, 2013. More than 60 people have died in recent protests across Egypt that began on Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013, the eve of the second anniversary of the start of the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Arabic reads "my name is Mohammed and I did not deserve to die this way." (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

Egyptian relatives of Mohammed el-Gindy, a 28-year-old activist, who died early Monday of wounds sustained during clashes last Friday near the presidential palace, display his picture as they shout anti-president Morsi slogans during his funeral procession in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Feb. 4, 2013. More than 60 people have died in recent protests across Egypt that began on Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013, the eve of the second anniversary of the start of the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Arabic reads "my name is Mohammed and I did not deserve to die this way." (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

Egyptian riot police beat a man, after stripping him, and before dragging him into a police van, during clashes next to the presidential palace in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, Feb. 1, 2013. Protesters denouncing Egypt's Islamist president hurled stones and firebombs through the gates of his palace gates on Friday, clashing with security forces who fired tear gas and water cannons, as more than a week of political violence came to Mohammed Morsi's symbolic doorstep for the first time. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)

Egyptian relatives of Mohammed el-Gindy, a 28-year-old activist, who died early Monday of wounds sustained during clashes last Friday near the presidential palace, carry his coffin during a funeral procession in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Feb. 4, 2013. More than 60 people have died in recent protests across Egypt that began on Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013, the eve of the second anniversary of the start of the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Arabic reads "No God but God, Mohammed is the messenger of God." (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

Egyptian relatives of Mohammed Saad, a 20-year-old protester, known to his friends as "Christi," who died of wounds sustained during clashes last Friday near the presidential palace, grieve during a funeral procession in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Feb. 4, 2013. More than 60 people have died in recent protests across Egypt that began on Jan. 24, 2013, the eve of the second anniversary of the start of the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

Egyptians carry the national flag-draped coffin of Mohammed Saad, a 20-year-old protester, who was known to his friends as "Christi, " and who died of wounds sustained during clashes last Friday near the presidential palace, during a funeral procession in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Feb. 4, 2013. More than 60 people have died in recent protests across Egypt that began on Jan. 24, 2013, the eve of the second anniversary of the start of the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

CAIRO (AP) ? The video outraged Egyptians, showing riot police strip and beat a middle-aged man and drag him across the pavement as they cracked down on protesters. The follow-up was even more startling: In his first comments afterward, the man insisted the police were just trying to help him.

Hamada Saber's initial account, given over the weekend as he lay in a police-run hospital, has raised accusations that police officials intimidated or bribed him in a clumsy attempt to cover up the incident, which was captured by Associated Press footage widely shown on Egyptian TV.

"He was terrified. He was scared to speak," Saber's son Ahmed told The AP on Monday, explaining his father's account. Saber himself recanted his story on Sunday after his own family pushed him to tell the truth and acknowledged that the police beat him.

The incident has fueled an outcry that security forces, which were notorious for corruption, torture and abuse under Hosni Mubarak, have not changed in the nearly two years since his ouster. Activists now accuse Mubarak's Islamist successor, Mohammed Morsi, of cultivating the same culture of abuse as police crack down on his opponents.

The outcry was further heightened Monday by the apparent torture-death of an activist, who colleagues said was taken by police from a Tahrir Square protest on Jan. 27 and held at a Cairo security base known as Red Mountain. Mohammed el-Gindy's body showed marks of electrical shocks on his tongue, wire marks around his neck, smashed ribs, a broken skull and a brain hemorrhage, according to a medical report.

Blatant abuses by security forces under Mubarak were one factor that fueled the 2011 revolt against his rule. The highly public nature of the new cases put new pressure on Morsi, who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, which was long repressed by security forces, to hold security officials responsible for any abuses.

Egypt's presidency said it is following up on the death of el-Gindy, adding that there will be "no return to violations of citizens' rights."

The Interior Ministry denied on Monday that el-Gindy was ever held by police. Morsi met Monday with top police officials, but the state newspaper Al-Ahram said his talks did not touch on the beating of Saber or el-Gindy's death. The paper said Morsi told officers he understands they operate under "extreme pressures" in the face of protests and that he would work for a political resolution to ease unrest.

Morsi's administration has said it is determined to stop what it calls violent protests that causing instability.

Morsi's prime minister, Hesham Kandil, indirectly warned the opposition and media not to raise public outcry against security officials. "This should not be used as a match to set fire to the nation ... to demolish the police," he said.

Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim warned that if police "collapse" Egypt will become "a militia state like some neighboring nations."

Many activists believe Morsi sought a tougher police line when he removed their previous boss, Ahmed Gamal Eddin, and installed Ibrahim as interior minister.

According to officials close to Gamal Eddin, he was fired because security forces did not intervene against anti-Morsi protests outside the presidential palace in Cairo in December. Islamists attacked those protesters, prompting clashes that left around 10 people dead. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

In contrast, police struck back heavily when several firebombs were thrown into the palace grounds during protests outside the compound Friday, part of a wave of nationwide anti-Morsi unrest the past 10 days that left more than 70 dead. Hours of clashes ensued, leaving at least one protester dead and dozens injured.

During Friday's clashes, Saber, a 48-year-old who works as a wall plasterer, was beaten.

Footage shows him writing naked in the street. Black-clad riot police yank his pants around his ankles, kick him with their heavy black boots and lean over to hit him with batons. They drag him by the legs across the pavement and bundle him into a police van.

But in interviews with Egyptian television from a police hospital the next day, a smiling Saber said it was protesters who had shot him in the leg with birdshot, then stripped and beat him. He said the riot police were only trying to help him afterward.

He even blamed himself for any rough police treatment, saying that in his confusion he was resisting them.

"I was afraid ... They were telling me: We swear to God we will not harm you, don't be afraid," Saber said, adding, "I was being very tiresome to the police."

His wife also praised the police, telling state TV, "they are giving him good treatment" at the police hospital.

But his children said he was forced to give the story.

"There are pressures on my mother to say that he is fine," his daughter Randa told independent Dream TV. "The government is the one pressing him."

In a statement, the Interior Ministry voiced its "regret" about the assault and vowed to investigate.

But Interior Minister Ibrahim echoed Saber's account and said initial investigation results showed it was protesters who stripped and beat Saber. He said riot police found Saber and tried to get him into the van ? "though the way they did it was excessive."

On Sunday, Saber told investigators that it was indeed police who beat and stripped him. Speaking to Al-Hayat TV, he said he gave his initial account because was afraid, then broke down in tears as he recounted begging the policemen for mercy.

"But no one gave me mercy," he wept. "My whole body was smashed." He has now been moved to a civilian hospital.

Rights activists say police intimidation of victims and their families to prevent complaints was rife under Mubarak and continues unabated. In a report last month, the Egyptian Initiative For Personal Rights documented 16 cases of police violence in which 11 people were killed and 10 tortured in police stations. Three died under torture during the first four months after Morsi took office on June 30, it said.

The rights group said officers increasingly act "like a gang taking revenge."

In one case it documented, police in the Nile Delta town of Meet Ghamr stormed a cafe and beat up patrons in September. When one woman who was beaten went to the police station to complain, the man accompanying her was arrested and tortured to death, the report said.

The sister of the slain man told AP that her brother's widow was paid the equivalent of around $25,000 to say that he was killed by a rock to his head during a protest.

"The main issue is that nothing has changed about the police. No change about accountability. There is just as much impunity as there was under Mubarak," said Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch. The past two years "we've seen an increase in the police's likelihood to use lethal force ... in the context of regular policing activities."

In the case of el-Gindy, the activist who died Monday, fellow activists say he disappeared during the Jan. 27 Tahrir protest and they later learned from people who left the Red Mountain security camp that he was being held there. Soon after, el-Gindy was brought to a hospital in a coma and on Monday he died.

After his burial Monday in his hometown of Tanta in the Nile Delta, angry mourners marched on police headquarters and clashes erupted, with protesters throwing firebombs and stones and police firing back with tear gas.

At a funeral ceremony held earlier at a mosque in Cairo's Tahrir Square, there was widespread skepticism anyone would be held accountable for el-Gindy's death.

"So this blood will be wasted so easily?" one woman in black screamed.

"It will be lost," an elderly man responded. "Like others were before."

___

AP reporter Amir Maqar contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-02-04-Egypt-Police%20Abuse/id-3526965e0b4245b999e08192002b740c

Grammy nominations 2013 Butch Jones thursday night football japan earthquake Star Trek Into Darkness Heisman watch John McAfee

Law and Politics Book Review: LIVING ORIGINALISM

by Jack M. Balkin. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 480 pp. Cloth. $35. ISBN: 978-0-674-06178-1.

Reviewed by Jack Wade Nowlin, The University of Mississippi School of Law. Email: jnowlin [at] olemiss.edu.

pp.58-63

Jack Balkin?s Living Originalism is a brilliant exploration of the foundations of American constitutionalism. The book will undoubtedly find a well-deserved place on any short list of true constitutional-theory classics ? alongside such canonical works as John Hart Ely?s Democracy and Distrust and Ronald Dworkin?s Law?s Empire.

As the title Living Originalism suggests, Balkin argues for what could be a called a ?third way? in American constitutionalism, a fusion of competing originalist and living-constitutionalist methodologies. Properly understood, Balkin contends, originalism and living constitutionalism are not in fact rivals but rather necessary complements within the overarching enterprise of American constitutional interpretation.

Balkin?s theory has several key components. He first argues that the choice to accept the American constitutional project as one?s own project has necessary consequences for the selection of interpretive methods: ?Treating the Constitution as our law today means that we adopt its plan for governance as our plan for governance and that we implement and build on it in ways that are consistent with the plan? (p.36). The Constitution, as written law, establishes a basic framework of government which ?sets politics in motion? and simultaneously "constrains and enables? later decision-making (pp.3, 35). If we wish to maintain the Constitution as our plan for government, with its ?distinctive forms of constraint and delegation,? then we must use interpretive methods that ?preserve the meaning of the words that constitute the framework? and allow the Constitution to function as written law (pp.35-36).

What interpretive approach will preserve the Constitution as a plan for government? Balkin endorses the method of ?text and principle,? which is a shorthand form of ?text, rule, standard, and principle? (p.6). This interpretive method combines recognition of an originalist core of constitutional interpretation with a broader penumbra of living constitutionalist construction, which together preserve the constitutional plan?s dual ?constraints? and ?delegations.?

Balkin?s text-and-principle method is an originalist approach because it requires fidelity to the original semantic meaning of the constitutional text. Balkin endorses this core of originalism because he believes that it is necessary for the Constitution to function properly as a source of legal constraint. If we are free to interpret a rule stating that the president shall be at least ?thirty-five? years of age to mean that he or she may be thirty-four or less, then the written Constitution cannot function as a source of constraint establishing a plan for government. [*59]

However, the method of ?text and principle? also encompasses living constitutionalism because fidelity to the original semantic meaning of the Constitution is in many cases completely consistent with evolving living-constitutionalist constructions of the text. Why is this so? Because the text of the Constitution is not confined to firm legal rules that maximize constraint; it also contains open-ended standards and principles that delegate power to future decision-makers.

The distinction between the Constitution?s rules, on the one hand, and its standards and principles, on the other, is central to Balkin?s fusion of originalism and living constitutionalism. When the framers of a constitutional provision choose a firm textual rule (e.g., the president must be at least thirty-five), the original semantic meaning of the rule is clear, and true fidelity to the Constitution leaves little or no room for creative forms of living constitutionalism. ?Thirty-five? means thirty-five.

But, Balkin argues, when framers deliberately choose open-ended textual standards and principles (e.g., prohibiting ?unreasonable? searches and seizures or laws abridging ?freedom of speech?), the original semantic meaning is quite consistent with a broad range of later living-constitutionalist constructions which can change as values and conditions change. ?Unreasonable? means unreasonable, a flexible standard, rather than a clear rule; and this kind of standard delegates to future interpreters the discretion to determine more precisely what the standard requires when applied in particular cases.

For the Constitution to function as a plan for government that delegates and empowers as well as constrains, the original semantic meaning of open-ended standards and principles must be preserved as such. When particular cases are resolved under these open-ended provisions, the interpreter must engage in the construction of the living Constitution, something each generation of Americans can do by drawing on additional interpretive strategies. These include the wide range of interpretive modes generally accepted as legitimate in the American legal community, such as arguments based on precedent, legal tradition, narrower forms of originalism (e.g., the framers? ?expected applications?), and constitutional purposes and policies.

Balkin?s views on the nature of the American constitutional project and the interpretive method of ?text and principle? are in turn linked to his distinction between ?framework originalism? and ?skyscraper originalism.? Balkin maintains that ?framework originalism? rightly views the original semantic meaning of the Constitution as establishing a basic legal framework, one which constrains by using rules to resolve many core constitutional questions concerning the basic plan for government while also delegating through the use of standards and principles many more detailed constitutional questions to be filled in and built out by later generations. By contrast, Balkin asserts that ?skyscraper originalism? mistakenly seeks to maximize constitutional constraint by interpreting the Constitution?s express standards and principles as implied rules [*60] which create not just the framework for government but the subordinate details as well. ?Skyscraper originalism,? in short, looks to the framers not just for the basic framework but for the construction of the entire constitutional ?building.?

Notably, Balkin?s conception of what is ?built out? in the process of constructing the living Constitution is quite expansive ? a kind of living constitutionalist ?super-skyscraper.? It extends well beyond judicial construction of legal doctrines in the cases that establish bodies of constitutional law to even acts of Congress that reflect evolving social norms and relate in some fashion to the Constitution?s broadest principles and purposes. In Balkin?s view, the creation of the Justice Department, the passage of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, and enactment of the Social Security Act of 1935 are all ?constructions? of the living Constitution ? built by the political branches through a process of ?constitutional politics.?

Balkin also contends that a wide range of political and social movements are engaged in the process of constitutional construction when they act to influence social and cultural values in ways that will eventually change the shape given to constitutional principles by elected officials and judges. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement ? all are participants in the process of constitutional construction and not just when they are litigating cases or expressly arguing about the Constitution. In fact, Balkin?s conception of the sweep of the living Constitution is so expansive that it is hard to cabin ? and he concludes that ?it is best not to worry too much about where constitutional construction leaves off and merely ordinary politics begins? (p.300).

Significantly, Balkin also places ordinary citizens, rather than judges, at the center of American constitutionalism. On the crucial question of constitutional interpretation, Balkin contends that we ?should start with interpretation by citizens as the standard case? and that ?interpretation by judges [is] a special case with special considerations created by the judicial role? (p.17). In Balkin?s view, living constitutionalism cannot be primarily a theory about ?what judges should do? because such a judge-centered view is at ?odds with the very assumptions behind the living Constitution? (p.278).

In fact, Balkin argues that the ?social change? which makes the living Constitution ?live? arises not from the judicial process but from much broader and deeper ?social, political, and economic forces? which are consistent with the primacy of the democratic process in the United States and the popular sovereignty foundations of the Constitution (p.278). On the related question of interpretive authority, Balkin also ?specifically reject[s]? the Supreme Court?s assertion of ?judicial supremacy? in constitutional interpretation and notes that his book ?assume[s] rather than argue[s]? for the benefits of a more limited power of judicial review (p.68).

Most fundamentally, the construction of the living Constitution occurs in the realm of politics, and this provides the basis for Balkin?s claim about the relationship of living constitutionalism [*61] to the success of the American constitutional project. American values and social conditions change over time, and each generation of Americans further disagrees about many fundamental political questions. Through the process of living constitutionalism, Americans can respond to change and express their disagreements in ways that make it possible for them to fully accept rather than reject the Constitution as a continuing framework for government. Perennial and robust democratic debate about questions of liberty, fairness, justice, order, and prudence structured by constitutional principles preserves the Constitution?s legitimacy by enabling citizens over time to view the Constitution as a ?common object of fidelity and attachment? whatever their political values (p.93).

Building on this thought, Balkin contends that ?normative theories? of constitutional interpretation are ?important? principally because they can help citizens and other participants in debate ?understand and express claims? concerning the ?legitimacy or illegitimacy? of their ?current constitutional arrangements? and political practices (p.93). Thus the principal function of theories of constitutional interpretation is not to provide judges with determinate, constrained, or putatively ?correct? answers to legalistic constitutional questions but rather to allow citizens to express their political values in the broad language of the Constitution. Balkin?s own method of ?text and principle? is meant to serve precisely as a ?platform for persuasion,? one which can be used by anyone to argue for a conception of the Constitution that reflects his or her own preferred principles and policies ? rather than as a method that will provide detailed instructions to judges on the resolution of difficult constitutional cases (p.129).

In fact, one of the great strengths of Balkin?s book is the capacity of his theory to provide a satisfying account in its own terms of its most obvious interpretive rivals: the cluster of narrower ?originalist? theories that emerged as conservative responses to the controversial liberal ventures of the Warren Court in the 1960s. Balkin repeatedly claims that the forms of originalism associated with the late Robert Bork and with Justice Antonin Scalia can be better understood as an exercise in living constitutionalism drawing implicitly on the method of ?text and principle.? On this view, the Borkian theorist starts with a concern for text-based constitutional principles of democratic accountability and federalism. The Borkian?s unacknowledged living-constitutionalist construction of these principles reflects conservative values of populism and states? rights, favoring the power of elected legislatures over unelected courts and the power of the fifty states over the power of the federal government. Borkians then seek to preserve their understanding of these constitutional principles from the threat posed by assertive federal judges who may prefer to remove many policy questions ? such as abortion, capital punishment, flag desecration, and the like ? from the state and federal democratic processes.

Borkians, in essence, work to ?build out? facets of the living Constitution by asserting constitutional limitations on the exercise of the judicial power ? arguing that federal judges may not justify the [*62] invalidation of legislation simply by pointing to open-ended constitutional texts and citing controversial policy arguments (e.g., recourse to abortion is a substantive due process ?liberty? government must respect for policy reasons is persuasive only to individuals who are pro-choice). Instead, the Constitution?s principles demand that federal judges justify their conclusions by drawing on legal arguments that firmly limit their power to invade the traditional province of legislatures ? such as arguments from ?original-expected applications? or long-standing legal traditions. On this view, Borkian originalism is a special theory of judicial interpretation (rather than a general theory of citizen interpretation) because judges present a ?special case? and their exercise of power over the living Constitution must be limited in light of ?special considerations created by the judicial role? (p.17 )

Even the Borkian attacks on the very legitimacy of active policy-driven judging are easily preserved under the rubric of Balkin?s theory since the Borkian theorist could contend that federal judges are in fact violating fundamental constitutional principles of democracy and federalism when they engage in aggressive judging, not merely misinterpreting provisions of the Constitution. (Of course, whether any form of originalism can actually provide the source of constraint on judging that Borkians seek is another question entirely.)

Not surprisingly, a book with the panoramic scope and ?third way? mediating impulses of Living Originalism will trouble as well as persuade. Progressive living constitutionalists, while recognizing Balkin as one of their own, may worry that the originalism at the foundation of his theory smuggles a potentially conservative ticking time-bomb into liberal constitutional theory. They may also be concerned that Balkin?s argument will inevitably confer further legitimacy on originalism as an interpretive method and thus on conservative theories of the Constitution more broadly.

Conservative originalists are unlikely to mistake Balkin for a conservative or a close fellow traveler. They may worry that Balkin?s theory is meant to provide a mere originalist fig leaf for an otherwise very naked form of progressive living constitutionalism. They may further doubt whether the ready translation of political arguments into constitutional claims will support rather than erode constitutional legitimacy as winners and losers inevitably emerge and a Constitution potentially ?neutral? on many issues becomes instead closely identified with controversial policies.

Proponents of expansive judicial power more generally may worry that Balkin?s brand of constitutional populism ? which places the citizen rather than the judge at the center of constitutional interpretation ? combined with his rejection of judicial supremacy could ultimately encourage judicial passivity in the face of majoritarian political forces. Proponents of more limited judicial power will likely view Balkin as an enabler, if not a defender, of expansive judicial power ? someone seemingly not unsatisfied with the energetic judicial invalidation of legislation that has become so commonplace over the last century in the [*63] face of routine political acquiescence. Some of them may also wonder whether Balkin?s stated ?citizen-interpreter? focus will function to distract from (or otherwise provide cover for) energetic judicial living constitutionalism.

Finally, some constitutional theorists may question Balkin?s expansive conception of the realm of the living Constitution. These theorists may prefer a more legalistic conception of the living Constitution, one which leaves a clearer and broader expanse of non-constitutional space in which the play of politics occurs as politics, to Balkin?s view, a ?super-skyscraper? conception, which seeks to incorporate a seemingly vast array of legislative and political activity (e.g., passage of the Social Security Act) under the rubric of the living Constitution.

This wide range of potential disagreement, however, is really a tribute to the author?s independence, originality, and depth. Balkin has written a compelling classic ? powerful, rich, lucid, and incisive. Every American constitutional theorist will need to read ? and contend with ? Living Originalism?s sweeping and magisterial account of our constitutional project. That will no doubt be both a duty and a pleasure.

REFERENCES

Dworkin, Ronald. 1986. Law's Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ely, John Hart. 1980. Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

---

Copyright 2013 by the author, Jack Wade Nowlin.

Source: http://www.lpbr.net/2013/02/living-originalism.html

alex o loughlin the godfather cape breton bowling green marysville tornados dr. seuss