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1. mars 2005
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The US Supreme Court has decided 5-4 to forbid executions of criminals who were under 18 years at the time of the crime.
The 5-4 decision throws out the death sentences of about 70 juvenile murderers and bars states from seeking to execute minors for future crimes.
The executions, the court said, were unconstitutionally cruel.[...]
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, noted that most states don't allow the execution of juvenile killers and those that do use the penalty infrequently. The trend, he noted, was to abolish the practice.
"Our society views juveniles ... as categorically less culpable than the average criminal," Kennedy wrote.
Not very surprisingly, the court was divided pretty much left to right:
The four most liberal justices had already gone on record in 2002, calling it "shameful" to execute juvenile killers. Those four, joined by Kennedy, also agreed with Tuesday's decision: Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as expected, voted to uphold the executions. They were joined by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
This is hailed, with some justification, as a victory for opponents of capital punishment. However, I don't think there is any slippery slope here. The execution of mentally disabled and the young has frequently been used as an argument against the death penalty. In the future, this argument is taken away from the opponents.
The cases that remain controversial are those were there might still be doubt about the actual guilt of the defendant after a court has convicted, especially if the defence has not been up to standards.
The single strongest argument against the death penalty, and the primary reason I count myself among its opponents, is that court decisions are invariably unsafe. It is possible to take an innocent convict out of a prison, but once he is executed, there is nothing to do.
Full decision in Roper v Simmons (PDF)
11:20:15 PM 
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Even the NYT editorial somewhat reluctantly admit that the dramatic changes in the Middle East can to a significant degree be credited to George Bush:
It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.
Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power.
I'm going to search for editorials in Norway making the same concession. Think I'll find any? I know Norwegian journalists read the NYT. It is, along with the Washington Post, the most right-leaning US source they'd be willing to read.
10:34:40 PM
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Tim Blair, too, calls the dramatic events in Lebanon the cedar revolution.
While I came up with the idea myself, a quick google would confirm I was not the first (although most current articles were written after mine). It was a pretty obvious term, of course. Red and white could have been just about everyone, and I just can't imagine the Swiss out in the streets...
3:18:01 PM
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When Condi Rice snubbed Egyptian president Mubarak, he announced landmark democratic reforms. Now Condi snubs the Canadian government, after it decided to opt out of the anti-ballistic missile defence shield. I doubt Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin is going to announce anything at all. Like the politicians of Old Europe, Martin's foreign policy seems to be obsessed primarily with getting back at the US for the decision to invade Iraq. If that means saying utterly ridicilous things, so be it:
Martin said last Friday that the United States must get permission before firing on any incoming missiles over Canada.
"This is our airspace, we're a sovereign nation and you don't intrude on a sovereign nation's airspace without seeking permission," Martin said.
Is he seriously saying that if the US detects a nuclear ballistic missile heading towards the American continent, a weapon that can kill millions of people and throw the world into its deepest crisis since the Black Death, and it just happens to be over Canada, then the US President must have Mr Martin's permission to attempt to stop it? It certainly appears to be what he is saying. He's a bloody idiot.
Mr Martin's statement also inspired some good ridicule from the local opposition:
Stockwell Day, the Conservative Party's foreign affairs critic, ridiculed Martin's position that Washington would have to alert Ottawa before shooting down a missile.
"These missiles are coming in at 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) a second, and if the president calls the 1-800 line and gets: `Press 1 if you want English, press 2 if you want French, press 0 if nobody's there ...' I mean, it's crazy."
The sole foundation for Canada's current foreign policy is how displeased they are with George Bush. Boo-hoo.
2:51:14 PM
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Cannabis has long been considered a very safe drug, but there is now a growing body of evidence that cannabis use increases the risk of developing serious mental problems. A study from New Zealand concludes that it almost doubles the risk of developing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.
The study, published in the journal Addiction, followed over 1,000 people born in 1977 for 25 years. [...]
The scientists found psychotic symptoms were more common among cannabis users.
They analysed their findings to take into account of the possibility that their illness encouraged people to use more cannabis, rather than the drug contributing to their condition.
But the researchers said the link was not likely to be due to people with mental illness having a greater wish to smoke cannabis.
Instead, they said cannabis may increase the chances of a person suffering psychosis by causing chemical changes to the brain.
The researchers also took into account factors such as family history, current mental disorders, and illicit substance abuse.
Still not conclusive, but growing evidence that a safe drug is as mythical as a free lunch.
It must be noted that a doubling of the risk of schizophrenia would mean the chance of getting the serious mental disease increases from around 1% to 2%. Compared to the serious and frequent consequences of tobacco and heavy alcohol use, the danger is still quite small.
2:23:04 PM
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Christopher Hitchens calls the term "Arab street" a vanquished cliché.
In retrospect, it's difficult to decide precisely when this annoying expression began to expire, if only from diminishing returns. There was, first, the complete failure of the said "street" to detonate with rage when coalition forces first crossed the border of Iraq, as had been predicted (and one suspects privately hoped) by so many "experts." But one still continued to hear from commentators who conferred street-level potency on passing "insurgents." (I remember being aggressively assured by an interviewer on Al Franken's quasi-comedic Air America that Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army" in Najaf was just the beginning of a new "Tet Offensive.") Mr. Sadr duly got a couple of seats in the recent Iraqi elections. And it was most obviously those elections that discredited the idea of ventriloquizing the Arab or Muslim populace or of conferring axiomatic authenticity on the loudest or hoarsest voice.
The London-based newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi, which has for some time been a surrogate voice for "insurgent" talk in the Arab diaspora, polled its readers after the Iraqi elections and had the grace to print the result. About 90 percent had been favorably impressed by the sight of Iraqi and Kurdish voters waiting their turn to have a say in their own future. This is a somewhat more accurate use of the demotic thermometer than the promiscuous one to which we have let ourselves become accustomed. Meanwhile, the streets of, say, Beirut have been filled with demonstrators who are entirely fed up with having their lives and opinions taken for granted by parasitic oligarchies.
You may remember I turned around the term "Arab street" some time back.
1:32:23 AM
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More about the Lebanese people's revolution. I don't doubt that this is inspired not only by the Iraqi elections, but also by the events in Ukraine's orange revolution.
But the dramatic developments — reminiscent of Ukraine's peaceful "orange revolution" and broadcast live across the Arab world — could provoke a strong response from Syria, which keeps 15,000 troops in Lebanon. It also could plunge this nation of 3.5 million back into a period of uncertainty, political vacuum or worse.
It could. Any bloodshed, however, will surely backfire on Syria's government, already under heavy pressure.
It could also accelerate the democratic process across the Middle East, and beyond.
1:20:02 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.04.2005; 01:56:42.
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