Choices of headlines…

From the NY Times front page, at the moment, the two top headlines:

“Strom Thurmond, foe of integration, dies at 100”

“Gays celebrate, and plan campaign for broader rights”

Contrary to what you may guess, these two stories are not related. The latter is about the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas earlier today. But methinks the front-page net editor is having a bit of fun…

Addendum: Reading over the ruling in Lawrence: this is one worth looking over carefully. The court gave a very strongly worded ruling, especially the majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy. It’s clearly meant to serve as a precedent in the future in a very wide variety of cases. In addition to formally stating that homosexuals have legal rights equal to heterosexuals, it makes some broader arguments about the boundaries of privacy and what the government does and does not have a right to regulate. In the long run, this decision may be one of the most significant of the past few decades from the court with regards to a wide variety of social issues.

Wow, some good news in the paper for once. 🙂

Published in: on June 26, 2003 at 22:41  Comments (1)  
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Finally!

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 — A federal judge ruled today that the government had no right to conceal the names of more than 1,000 people detained following the Sept. 11 attacks and ordered that their names be released within 15 days.

The ruling was a significant setback to the Bush administration’s policy of secret detentions of immigrants in connection with the investigation into the terrorist attacks.

Story here.

This is why a country needs an independent judiciary.

Published in: on August 2, 2002 at 14:44  Comments Off on Finally!  
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Significant news stories of the day (Another experiment)

As part of the ongoing quest to find the right voice in which to stick things on LiveJournal… (a much harder task than I’d initially supposed!) Some random news articles that struck me as particularly significant for today.

The (unfortunate) winner: Expanding the FBI’s surveillance authority (NY Times) to help it hunt for terrorist organizations within the US. Now, I’m as big a proponent as anyone of maintaining a competent intelligence service, but this new Justice Department policy seems to just release all bounds on when the FBI can monitor people, tap phones, and so on. This is clearly going to have to be whittled down by the courts, but given the Supreme Court of late I’ve got a bad feeling that we’re about to return to the Bad Old Days of the 1930’s-70’s, when the FBI’s main interest was hunting down “subversives,” including actively searching for “damaging material” which could be used to smear them. (Those are ol’ J. Edgar’s words…)

On a happier note: More details on the discovery of large amounts of ice beneath the Martian poles. (NASA) The official word is that this is a very preliminary result, we still need to take careful measurements and so on… the unofficial word is that there is no way in hell the gamma spectrometers would have spotted anything at all now unless there was an enormous amount of ice there, on the order of a frozen ocean. In some places, data indicates that it may be as close as a foot below the surface, but on this number watch out; that may be changed (upwards) as more data comes in. While this may not affect geopolitics much, it’s certainly the most cheering thing I’ve heard from a news service in a while…

Israel and India had no major developments today, just various diplomatic initiatives that don’t look likely to have any effect whatsoever. Medium-low significance for these stories.

…… ok, end of experimental post. I still need to figure out what to really do with a LiveJournal, so bear with my highly random junk a bit longer…

Published in: on May 30, 2002 at 15:22  Comments (7)  
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