School district that barred students from hearing Obama will bus them to Bush speech

The Arlington Independent School District in Texas decided not to show President Obama’s address to students live yesterday because it reportedly didn’t want to interrupt its regularly scheduled lesson plans. However, the district has now decided to bus its students off-campus on Sept. 21 to hear President Bush speak:

District officials said it’s part of a Cowboys Stadium field trip that the North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee invited 28 fifth-grade classes to attend several months ago.

In addition to hearing from Bush and former first lady Laura Bush, the students will hear from legendary Dallas Cowboys players and North Texas business and community leaders. The event launches the Super Bowl committee’s largest-ever youth education program.

Dwight McKissic, the pastor at the Cornerstone Baptist Church, which offered an alternative venue for Arlington families wishing to listen to the President yesterday, criticized the school district’s “blatant double standard.” “Why is it appropriate for students to hear from former President Bush on Sept. 21 at the Cowboy[s] Stadium, but inappropriate for the current president to address students while they remain on school campuses?” McKissic asked. (HT: Raw Story)

China's new online music rules a headache for search engines

Music providers in China will have to provide translated lyrics and licensing documents for every single song they have to offer before the end of the year, according to the country's Ministry of Culture. The rules also apply to search engines, though it's not clear how they will obtain that information for files they don't host.

China has begun a massive effort to crack down on Internet music piracy with the Ministry of Culture issuing a new directive. Before the end of 2009, the Chinese government expects all music providers out of China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan to submit mountains of paperwork for each song with the goal of cutting down on "the intermingling of good and bad content" online.

The required documents include lyrics translated to Chinese and licensing agreements proving that the music providers have the green light to offer that music online. This not only includes music produced in the region, but imported music as well, as China requires approval of all foreign music before selling it within the country. Once all the documents are submitted, interested parties must also apply for a license from the Ministry in order to sell music online within China.

This will be a huge bureaucratic headache for businesses hoping to make money by selling music in China. The Ministry said in its announcement that it hopes to standardize the behavior of the online music business in a country where piracy is rampant. However, the new rules appear to reach beyond just those who sell music directly to customers, stickifying an already complex problem. When asked whether search engines like Baidu and Google fall under the requirements, a ministry official told the Wall Street Journal, "Baidu is a search engine. Of course it's regulated by the notice."

Google acts as both a music provider and a search engine in China—the search giant struck a deal with the Big Four music labels earlier this year to make much of their catalogs available in China. For this venture anyway, Google cooperates with Chinese law and blocks songs that have been banned by the government, but it's unclear whether this compliance also applies to the company's regular search offerings in China. What isclear is that the ministry seems to expect all search engines to comply from here on out.

It's difficult to picture how search engines will provide documentation for every song their spiders find—especially since they don't host that music—and what the Chinese government will do about it if they aren't able to comply. After all, China has gotten on Google's back for disseminating porn (which is illegal) in the same manner, but it seems as if the company will have to figure something out if it wants to continue doing business in China.

MLB Refuses To Give Permission To Guy To Describe Game To A Friend

A couple years ago, law professor Wendy Seltzer used the NFL as an example of sports leagues performing copyfraud, by claiming copyright control beyond what is allowed by law. Specifically, she was talking about the warning mentioned at some point during every game. For the NFL it was: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited." In Seltzer's case, amazingly, the NFL sent a DMCA takedown of her posting that clip to YouTube -- giving her another "teachable moment" on copyright abuse.

And yet, sports leagues still continue the copyfraud. One of the fine folks over at Consumerist, Phil Villarreal, found the wording of Major League Baseball's warning quite questionable:

"Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this game, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, is prohibited,"

Unlike the NFL one, at least it didn't say "descriptions," but "account" is pretty close. So, Villarreal contacted MLB to request "express written consent" to provide an "account" of the game he had watched to a friend. To its credit, MLB responded and asked him to call someone in its business development department... who (perhaps reasonably) thought it was a joke and did not provide the written consent (and stopped responding to calls and emails).

Now, obviously, this is a bit of a joke (and a funny one), but it does highlight a rather serious problem. Copyright holders are pretty regularly claiming significantly more rights than they actually hold over content, and many people simply assume that they can do this. This leads to them to think that they don't have basic rights concerning not just "fair use" but stuff that is obviously not covered by copyright, such as an "account of this game." There really should be sanctions against such copyfraud.

Irony

When does public nakedness become a crime?

A man who stood naked on a Trafalgar Square plinth was not breaking the law say police, so when does being naked in public become a crime?

According to Justin Holwell, he was just expressing his personality when he stripped off on a plinth in London's Trafalgar Square. But ex-detective Mark Williams-Thomas didn't see it that way.

He said his wife and children were "annoyed and upset" by Mr Holwell's nakedness. He complained to police but the 24-year-old from Leicestershire was not told to put his clothes back on.

A police spokesman said it was not a crime to appear naked in public, but other people have been arrested for it. Naturist Stephen Gough, who goes by the name of The Naked Rambler, is currently in prison in Scotland after being found guilty of breach the peace. So when does it become a crime?

Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 it is not an offence to be naked in public in England and Wales. It becomes an offence if it can be proved the person stripped off with the intention to cause distress, alarm or outrage.

Then they run the risk of three possible offences, says a spokesman for law firm Kingsley Napley. These are:

• Indecent exposure - an offence under section 66 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003

• Intentional harassment, alarm or distress under section 4A of the Public Order Act 1986

• "Outraging public decency" under common law

If a case did get to court the onus would be on the prosecution to prove this intention to upset. If found guilty, the offender would face anything from a fine to several years in prison.

In Scottish law there is no statutory offence, just the common law offence of offending public decency - a strand of the breach of the peace. The test is essentially the same as in English law - that a member of the public has been put in a state of fear or alarm.

"With regards all of these offences, whilst there is obviously nudity in this case I suspect it would be very difficult to prove the necessary intent to cause distress, alarm or outrage," says the spokesman.

The police spokesman says such complaints are considered on a case-by-case basis.

Andrew Welch of British Naturism says the issue all comes down to a person's intention.

"For obvious reasons we've had to look at this issue with our lawyers," he says.

"Causing upset is definitely not what naturism is about, our challenge is a cultural one. The law is fine, we just need to change people's attitude to the naked body."

Mr Holwell posed naked for an hour on the plinth as part of the One & Other exhibition by artist Antony Gormley. Participants were chosen at random and told they could do anything on the plinth as long as it was legal.

Mr Holwell, who works in a double-glazing factory, has defended his actions saying: "It's the human form, everyone's the same, it's not like I'm showing off something that no one else has got."

He is not the first person to have used the position to strip off - in early August a man known simply as Simon also disrobed on the plinth.

Drowned Boy's Family Upset With Officer's Response

They say their three-year-old grandson might have survived if a Wichita police officer hadn't made them stop CPR. Isaiah Jones drowned in his grandparents' above-ground pool last week.

The boy's grandmother, Pam Jordan, was taking care of him as part of her daycare. She says just moments after seeing the boy playing on her locked back patio, he was gone. Thinking the boy might have sneaked back into the home, Jordan yelled Isaiah's name and called 911 to report a missing child.

Shortly after, she found him floating in the backyard pool.

Jordan says she scooped the boy up, took him into her kitchen, and the CPR she did on him was working. Jordan says the boy vomitted, regained a pulse, and color was returning to his blue lips. She says her grandson still wasn't breathing, though.

The family says they're upset because the first officer on the scene told Jordan to back away and didn't continue CPR. They say when two other officers arrived minutes later, they immediately grabbed equipment and restarted CPR.

"I trusted him to take over," says Pam Jordan, a former medical assistant. "That's why I specifically asked him, 'Are you going to take over?' It's a life and death situation."

The boy's grandfather, Mark Jordan, is an 18-year veteran of the Wichita Fire Department. He wasn't at the house when the boy drowned, but he says he's upset his grandson went minutes without CPR.

"He had a duty to act," says Mark Jordan. "Now, if he did not want to act at that point, he should have told my wife, 'You come on and you continue CPR.' Those were the options he had."

The Jordans admit they can't be sure if Isaiah would have lived under different circumstances.

"Isaiah probably could be home now," says Mark Jordan. "We don't know that, but what we do know is that whatever chance he had in that three to five minutes, it was taken away from him."

The Jordans have not filed an official complaint with the Wichita Police Department.

Police say they're investigating Isaiah Jones' death, the circumstances surrounding it, and statements made. There is currently no internal investigation into officer conduct.

A deputy chief with the department says right now there is no evidence the officer did anything wrong. The chief says some officers are trained in CPR while others aren't. The first officer to respond to Jones' drowning is a 20-year veteran of the police department, but Eyewitness News does not know if he is trained in CPR.

Teachers moan that new code of conduct will stop them getting drunk at weekends

But teachers have branded the code unnecessary intrusion into their private lives which could lead to staff being pulled up simply for letting their hair down on weekends.

They also say the code contains other vague statements that are open to wide interpretation.

Now the NASUWT union has launched a petition attacking the code, which has attracted more than 10,000 signatories over the summer holidays.

It has also sent a poster to every state school in England urging staff to campaign for the code to be withdrawn.

One teacher, who asked not to be named, said that pupils and staff sometimes socialised together, for example after sporting events.

It was a 'grey area' whether consuming alcohol around children was setting a poor example and breaching the code.

Meanwhile Brian Cookson, a geography teacher at the Friary School in Lichfield, Staffs said the code was 'practically demanding sainthood'.

'Teachers are already subjected to enormous accountability. Which other profession would stand for this code on top of that?' he said.

'It is an intrusive set of demands on people who have their own private lives to lead.

'I don't believe it's the GTC's business to actually intrude in that way.'

He insisted he would never advocate teachers getting drunk but added: 'I don't think it's acceptable that someone could report me for something they claim I did on a weekend.'

A draft version of the code stated that teachers must 'maintain standards of behaviour both inside and outside school that are appropriate given their membership of an important and responsible profession'.

However this was toned down following consultation.

It now says staff must 'maintain reasonable standards in their own behaviour that enable them to...uphold public trust and confidence in the profession'.

Meanwhile a late addition to the code states that it 'does not limit a teacher's right to a private life'.

But Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said the union remained 'deeply concerned' about the content of the code.

'It is riddled with vague statements which are open to wide interpretation and abuse, putting the careers and jobs of teachers and headteachers at risk,' she said.

'It is unnecessarily long, littered with pious statements, conflicts with contractual provisions and intrudes into private lives.

Teachers and headteachers must of course behave in a professional manner, but the code has unreasonable expectations about how they should conduct themselves.'

Teachers can be reported to the council by members of the public, who have a right to make allegations of professional misconduct direct to the GTC, although they should first exhaust the school's complaints procedure.

Meanwhile teachers dismissed for a breach of the code could be summoned to a GTC disciplinary hearing and struck off from the teaching register.

The GTC insisted teachers would only fall foul of the code if their behaviour sank seriously below acceptable standards. It was not designed to catch teachers out for weekend drinking.

The council had dealt with only two cases in its history of unacceptable behaviour outside school that was not deemed to constitute a criminal offence, a spokeswoman said.

One involved a teacher appearing on a porn programme and the other had encouraged unsafe sex on a website.

Keith Bartley, GTC chief executive, said: 'It is a well-established principle that individuals have a duty to uphold the reputation of their chosen profession.

'We are absolutely explicit that the code does not in any way intrude into teachers' private lives.'

Unjust and ineffective

America has pioneered the harsh punishment of sex offenders. Does it work?

ONE day in 1996 the lights went off in a classroom in Georgia so that the students could watch a video. Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old pupil at the time, was sitting near the back. The boy next to her suggested that, since it was dark, she could perform oral sex on him without anyone noticing. She obliged. And that single teenage fumble wrecked her life.

Her classmate was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday. That made Ms Whitaker a criminal. She was arrested and charged with sodomy, which in Georgia can refer to oral sex. She met her court-appointed lawyer five minutes before the hearing. He told her to plead guilty. She did not really understand what was going on, so she did as she was told.

She was sentenced to five years on probation. Not being the most organised of people, she failed to meet all the conditions, such as checking in regularly with her probation officer. For a series of technical violations, she was incarcerated for more than a year, in the county jail, the state women’s prison and a boot camp. “I was in there with people who killed people. It’s crazy,” she says.

She finished her probation in 2002. But her ordeal continues. Georgia puts sex offenders on a public registry. Ms Whitaker’s name, photograph and address are easily accessible online, along with the information that she was convicted of “sodomy”. The website does not explain what she actually did. But since it describes itself as a list of people who have “been convicted of a criminal offence against a victim who is a minor or any dangerous sexual offence”, it makes it sound as if she did something terrible to a helpless child. She sees people whispering, and parents pulling their children indoors when she walks by.

Punish first, think later

The registry is a gold mine for lazy journalists. A local television station featured Ms Whitaker in a spot on local sex offenders, broadcasting a helpful map showing where she lives but leaving the specifics of the crime to each viewer’s fearful imagination. “My husband’s family saw me on TV,” she says. “That’s embarrassing.”

What Ms Whitaker did is no longer a crime in Georgia. The state’s sodomy laws, which in 1996 barred oral sex even between willing spouses, were struck down by court rulings in 1998 and 2003. And since 2006, thanks to a “Romeo and Juliet” clause in a sex-crimes law, consensual sex between two teenagers has been a misdemeanour, not a crime, if one partner is underage but no more than four years younger than the other.

The Romeo and Juliet clause was not retroactive, however, so Ms Whitaker is stuck on the register, and subject to extraordinary restrictions. Registered sex offenders in Georgia are barred from living within 1,000 feet of anywhere children may congregate, such as a school, a park, a library, or a swimming pool. They are also banned from working within 1,000 feet of a school or a child-care centre. Since the church at the end of Ms Whitaker’s street houses a child-care centre, she was evicted from her home. Her husband, who worked for the county dog-catching department, moved with her, lost his job and with it their health insurance.

Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Centre for Human Rights, a group that campaigns against rough justice, Ms Whitaker won an injunction allowing her to return home. But her husband did not get his job back, and now works as a labourer. The two of them are struggling financially. And Ms Whitaker is still fighting to get her name removed from the registry. “When you’re a teenager, you do stuff,” she says. “You don’t think you’ll be paying for it when you’re nearly 30.”

Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number “just over 100” are classified as “predators”, which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are.

Despite the board’s findings, non-violent offenders remain listed and subject to a giant cobweb of controls. One rule, championed by Georgia’s House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. This proved unworkable. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realised that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. In the end Georgia’s courts stepped in and suspended the bus-stop rule, along with another barring sex offenders from volunteering in churches. But most other restrictions remain.

Sex-offender registries are popular. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders.

A self-defeating pillory

So laws get harsher and harsher. But that does not necessarily mean they get better. If there are thousands of offenders on a registry, it is harder to keep track of the most dangerous ones. Budgets are tight. Georgia’s sheriffs complain that they have been given no extra money or manpower to help them keep the huge and swelling sex-offenders’ registry up to date or to police its confusing mass of rules. Terry Norris of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association cites a man who was convicted of statutory rape two decades ago for having consensual sex with his high-school sweetheart, to whom he is now married. “It doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t make him a threat to anybody,” says Mr Norris. “We spend the same amount of time on that guy as on someone who’s done something heinous.”

Money spent on evicting sex offenders cannot be spent on treating them. Does this matter? Politicians pushing the get-tough approach sometimes claim that sex offenders are mostly incorrigible: that three-quarters or even nine out of ten of them reoffend. It is not clear where they find such numbers. A study of nearly 10,000 male sex offenders in 15 American states found that 5% were rearrested for a sex crime within three years. A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, Britain and America found that 24% had reoffended after 15 years.

That is obviously still too high. Whether or not treatment can help is disputed. A Californian study of sex offenders who underwent “relapse prevention”, counselling of the sort that alcoholics get from Alcoholics Anonymous, found that it was useless. But a meta-analysis of 23 studies by Karl Hanson of Canada’s department of public safety found that psychological therapy was associated with a 43% drop in recidivism. Some offenders—particularly men who rape boys—are extremely hard to treat. Some will never change until they are too old to feel sexual urges. But some types of treatment appear to work for some people and further research could yield more breakthroughs.

Publicising sex offenders’ addresses makes them vulnerable to vigilantism. In April 2006, for example, a vigilante shot and killed two sex offenders in Maine after finding their addresses on the registry. One of the victims had been convicted of having consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend when he was 19. In Washington state in 2005 a man posed as an FBI agent to enter the home of two sex offenders, warning them that they were on a “hit list” on the internet. Then he killed them.

Murders of sex offenders are rare, but harassment is common. Most of the offenders interviewed for this article said they had experienced it. “Bill”, who spent nine months in jail for having consensual sex with a 15-year-old when he was 27 and is now registered in North Carolina, says someone put up posters with his photograph on them around his district. (In at least four states, each offender’s profile on the online registry comes with a handy “click to print” function.) The local kids promptly stopped playing with Bill’s three children. And someone started leaving chopped-up sausages on his car, a possible reference to castration. Bill and his family moved house.

Jill Levenson, of Lynn University in Florida, says half of registered sex offenders have trouble finding jobs. From 20% to 40% say they have had to move house because a landlord or neighbour realised they were sex offenders. And most report feeling depressed, hopeless or afraid.

“Mike” spent a year and a half behind bars for statutory rape after having sex with a girl who said she was 17, but was two years younger. He was 22 at the time. Since his release, he has struggled to hold down a job. Once, he found work as a security guard, but his probation officer told him to quit, since the uniform lent him an air of authority, which would not do.

He is now unemployed, and lives in a flophouse in Atlanta between a jail and a strip club. The area is too desolate to have any schools or parks, so he is allowed to live there. His neighbours are mostly other sex offenders and mentally ill folk who talk to themselves. “It’s Bumville,” sighs Mike. His ambition is to get a job, keep it and move out. Any job will do, he says.

Several studies suggest that making it harder for sex offenders to find a home or a job makes them more likely to reoffend. Gwenda Willis and Randolph Grace of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, for example, found that the lack of a place to live was “significantly related to sexual recidivism”. Candace Kruttschnitt and Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and Kelly Shelton of the Minnesota Department of Corrections tracked 556 sex offenders on probation and found less recidivism among those with a history of stable employment.

Some bosses do not mind hiring sex offenders, if they know the full story and the offender does not seem dangerous. But an accessible online registry makes it all but certain that a colleague or a customer will find out about a sexual conviction. Sex offenders often report being sacked for no apparent reason. Mike had a job at a cake shop. His boss knew about his record. But one day, without warning, he was fired.

Publicly accessible sex-offender registries are intended to keep people safe. But there is little evidence that they do. A study by Kristen Zgoba of the New Jersey Department of Corrections found that the state’s system for registering sex offenders and warning their neighbours cost millions of dollars and had no discernible effect on the number of sex crimes. Restricting where sex offenders can live is supposed to keep them away from potential victims, but it is doubtful that this works. A determined predator can always catch a bus.

Laws that make life hard for sex offenders also affect their families. A survey by Ms Levenson found that 86% of family members felt stressed because of registration and residence rules, and 49% feared for their own safety. “It’s very difficult,” says Bill. “Pretty much all the things that make you a good father are now illegal for me to do.” He cannot take his children to a park, a pool, or a museum. He cannot be at any of their school events. And his children are ostracised. “The parents find out I’m registered and that’s it,” he sighs.

The penalties for sex offenders who break the rules can be severe. In Georgia the first time you fail to provide an accurate address or register annually with the county sheriff to be photographed and fingerprinted, you face ten to 30 years in prison. The second time: life. Yet because living on a public sex-offender registry is so wretched, many abscond.

Some states have decided that harsher sex laws are not always better. Iowa has sharply reduced the number of sex offences for which residency restrictions apply. Previously, all Iowan sex offenders who had abused children were barred from living within 2,000 feet of a school or child-care centre. Since where offenders lived was defined as where they slept, many would spend the day at home with their families and sleep at night in their cars at a highway rest stop. “That made no sense,” says Corwin Ritchie of the Iowa County Attorneys Association. “We don’t try to monitor where possible bank robbers sleep.”

The Iowan politicians who relaxed the law gave themselves cover by adding a new rule against “loitering” near schools. Mr Ritchie thinks the new rules are better, but he would rather get rid of the residency restrictions entirely and let probation officers make recommendations for each individual offender.

No quarter

Nationwide, the trend is to keep getting stricter. In 1994 Congress ordered all states that had not yet done so to set up sex-offender registries or lose some funding. Two years later it ordered them to register the most serious offenders for life. In 2006 it passed the Adam Walsh Act, named for a six-year-old boy who was kidnapped and beheaded, broadening the categories of offence for which registration is required and obliging all states to upload their registries to a national database. States had until this summer to comply with that provision. Some objected. In May they were given another year’s breathing space.

Other countries now seem to be following America’s lead. Hottest on its heels is Britain, where the sex-offenders’ registry includes children as young as 11. The British list is not open to the public, but in some areas parents may ask for a check on anyone who has unsupervised access to their child. France, too, now has a closed national directory of sex-offenders, as does Austria, which brought in some American-style movement restrictions on sex offenders earlier this year. After the disappearance in Portugal in 2007 of Madeleine McCann, a British toddler, some European politicians have called for a pan-European registry.

Human Rights Watch urges America to scale back its sex-offender registries. Those convicted of minor, non-violent offences should not be required to register, says Ms Tofte. Nor should juveniles. Sex offenders should be individually assessed, and only those judged likely to rape someone or abuse a child should be registered. Such decisions should be regularly reviewed and offenders who are rehabilitated (or who grow too old to reoffend) should be removed from the registry. The information on sex-offender registries should be held by the police, not published online, says Ms Tofte, and released “on a need-to-know basis”. Blanket bans on all sex offenders living and working in certain areas should be abolished. Instead, it makes sense for the most dangerous offenders sometimes to face tailored restrictions as a condition of parole.

That package of reforms would bring America in line with the strictest laws in other rich countries. But few politicians would have the courage to back it. “Jane”, the mother of a sex offender in Georgia, says she sent a letter to her senator, Saxby Chambliss, urging such reforms. “They didn’t even read it,” she says. “They just sent me a form letter assuring me that they were in favour of every sex offender law, and that [Senator Chambliss] has grandchildren he wants to protect.”

Transsexual prisoner wins right to be in female prison

A transsexual killer who tried to rape a woman must be moved to a female prison because holding her with men breaches her rights, a judge has ruled.

The prisoner, who cannot be identified, won a human rights battle against Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, that keeping her in a male prison was a violation.

Lawyers for the 27-year-old inmate, who is still at the preoperative stage, described her as a “woman trapped inside a man’s body” and argued keeping her among men was preventing her from having a full sex change.

She will be moved to a women’s jail within weeks following the High Court ruling but the Ministry of Justice warned it will cost taxpayers an extra £80,000 a year because she will have to be kept in segregation.

The entirely publicly funded case will also have cost tens of thousands of pounds.

The killer, known as “A”, is currently serving life for the manslaughter of a boyfriend and the attempted rape of a female shop assistant, both committed while she was man.

Although born a man, she had been undergoing the process of gender reassignment, and in 2006 was granted a certificate under the 2004 Gender Recognition Act which required her to be recognised as a woman "for all purposes".

Her birth certificate has been changed to say she is a female, while hair on her face and legs has been permanently removed by laser and she has developed breasts after hormone treatment.

She is allowed to shower in private, launder her female clothing herself and has access to cosmetics.

However, she was forbidden from wearing skirts or blouses, or more than "subtle" make-up, at the men's prison where she was being held on a "vulnerable prisoners" wing.

The court heard that in order to complete her change to full womanhood, she must live for a time as a woman and that could only be achieved if she was moved to a female jail.

Deputy Judge David Elvin QC, sitting at London's High Court, quashed Mr Straw's decision to continue detaining "A" in a male prison saying it breached her right to a private and family life the European Convention on Human Rights.

He said: "It follows that, so long as the claimant remains within the male prison estate, she is unable to progress towards the surgery which is her objective."

The judge said the Ministry of Justice had recently produced a draft Prison Service Order (PSO) to give guidelines on managing gender dysphoria cases, but final approval had been delayed until the result of A's case was known.

He ruled that far greater restrictions were being imposed on A than would be the case in a female prison - "I doubt that similar restrictions would apply in the rare case of a biological woman held in a male prison".

The prisoner, dressed in a dark blue blouse and striped jacket and wearing gold earrings, listened by video link.

She was originally convicted of manslaughter in 2001 and jailed for five years after smothering her boyfriend with a pillow and strangling him with a pair of tights.

She says that, although at first accepting of her gender dysphoria, he moved to hostility when she became increasingly feminised and she lost control after a row.

Less than a week after her release on licence two years later, "A" attacked a shop assistant, forcing her into a back room, tied her up with a suspender belt and tried to rape her.

She was given a life sentence for that offence under a "two strikes" system following the manslaughter conviction.

Her legal team said the attempted rape was closely linked to her obsession with becoming a woman and her intense frustration at the authorities' refusal to help her qualify for full gender reassignment surgery.

In July 2007, the Parole Board refused her release because "the risk to life and limb" were too high.

Phillipa Kaufman, A’s barrister, said: “So long as she stays in the male estate, she has no hope of realising her desire to become fully a woman.

"There is absolutely no security reason why she should be kept where she is. If she remains in the male estate, she is looking at the bleakest future in terms of what matters to her.

"What she would have in the female estate is hope; hope that she will be able to live in role and persuade her doctors that she should have gender reassignment surgery."

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said: "We contested this case and are disappointed at the judgement. We are studying it carefully and will consider whether to appeal."

Evolution: Has Human Culture Replaced Biology?

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the planet. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change.

Freeman Dyson -Institute for Advanced Study

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

Freeman Dyson predicts that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

Dyson's mentor in the field of biology, Carl Woese, professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois and the world's greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy is the creator of the Three Domain Hypothesis, which explored the ancestry of microbes by tracing the emergence of defined species from the pool of primitive gene-swapping cells that characterized the early history of life.

Woese and other scientists began to find evidence for a previously unknown group of prokaryotic organisms. These organisms lived in extreme environments - deep sea hydrothermal vents, "black smokers", hot springs, the Dead Sea, acid lakes, salt evaporation ponds.

Because they appeared prokaryotic, they were considered bacteria and named "archaebacteria" ('ancient' bacteria). However, it eventually became obvious from biochemical characteristics and DNA sequence analysis that there were numerous differences between these archaebacteria and other bacteria. Before long, it was realized that these archaebacteria were more closely related to the eukaryotes (including ourselves!) than to bacteria. Today, these bacteria have been renamed Archaea.

Woese’s big idea is that primitive life existed as a community of cells that freely exchanged genes. They shared a basic translation system for making proteins, but had little else in common. These cells evolved as a community and not as distinct lineages. Before Woese, the tree of life had two main branches called prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the prokaryotes composed of cells without nuclei and the eukaryotes composed of cells with nuclei.

Woese refers to this time as the “progenote era” where the word “progenote” refers to a cell that has not yet established a definite link between a stable genotype and a heritable phenotype. At some point in time, certain cells make the transition from progenote to the founders of a stable lineage. The transition point is known as the “Darwinian threshold.”

"The real mystery, however," writes Woese, "is how this incredibly simple, unsophisticated, imprecise communal progenote—cells with only ephemeral genealogical traces—evolved to become the complex, precise, integrated, individualized modern cells, which have stable genealogical records. This shift from a primitive genetic free-for-all to modern organisms must by all accounts have been one of the most profound happenings in the whole of evolutionary history. Although we do not yet understand it, the transition needs to be appropriately marked and named. “Darwinian threshold” seems appropriate: crossing that threshold means entering a new stage, where organism lineages and genealogies have meaning, where evolutionary descent is largely vertical, and where the evolutionary course can begin to be described by tree representation."

According to Woese, bacteria were the first species to emerge from the pool. From that point onwards, the evolution of bacteria was “Darwinian” and could be represented by a bifurcating tree.

Woese asks a profound question: When did Darwinian evolution begin? In his "New Biology" article in the journal Nature, Woese describes a "golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist."

By Darwinian evolution Woese means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of non-interbreeding species. He underscores the radical observation that Darwinian evolution does not go back to the beginning of life. When Woese compared genomes of ancient lineages of living creatures, he found evidence of numerous transfers of genetic information from one lineage to another. In early times, Dyson emphasizes, horizontal gene transfer, the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more pronounced the further back we go in time.

"Life was then a community of cells of various kinds," Dyson points out "sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer."

In the Earth's history of cell evolution, some three billion years ago, a single cell separated itself from the community and its offspring became the first species of bacteria—and the first species of any kind—"reserving their intellectual property for their own private use."

Dyson describes the next stage of cell evolution: "With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archea. Some time after that, a third cell separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes. And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species."

The Darwinian interlude an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer that had begun two to three billion years is over. The basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Freeman states, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.

The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the . Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change.

Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization.

And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species.

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Dyson sees the world as moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, "when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was before separate species and intellectual property were invented."

The nonliving universe is as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also dominated by patterns of organization that are not yet understood. This picture of living creatures, as patterns of organization rather than collections of molecules, applies also to sand dunes and snowflakes, thunderstorms and hurricanes.

The reductionist physics and the reductionist molecular biology of the 20th century will continue to be important in the 21st century, but they will not be dominant. The big problems, the evolution of the universe as a whole, the origin of life, the nature of human consciousness, and the evolution of the earth's climate, cannot be understood by reducing them to elementary particles and molecules. New ways of thinking and new ways of organizing large databases will be needed, Dyson adds.

The way will be open for biotechnology to move into the mainstream of economic development, to help us solve some of our urgent social problems and ameliorate the human condition all over the earth. Open Source biology could be a powerful tool, giving us access to cheap and abundant solar energy.

The shifting balance of wealth and population between villages and cities is one of the main themes of human history over the last ten thousand years. Freeman sees the shift from villages to cities coupled with a shift from two kinds of technology: green and gray.

Green technology is based on biology, gray technology on physics and chemistry. For the first five of the ten thousand years of human civilization, wealth and power belonged to villages with green technology, and for the second five thousand years wealth and power belonged to cities with gray technology.

Green technology gave birth to village communities ten thousand years ago, starting from the domestication of plants and animals, the invention of agriculture, the manufacture of textiles and cheese and wine.

Gray technology gave birth to cities and empires five thousand years later, starting from the forging of bronze and iron, the invention of wheeled vehicles and paved roads, the building of ships and war chariots, the manufacture of swords and guns and bombs. Gray technology also produced the steel plows, tractors, reapers, and processing plants that made agriculture more productive and transferred much of the resulting wealth from village-based farmers to city-based corporations.

Beginning about five hundred years ago, gray technology became increasingly dominant, as we learned to build machines that used power from wind and water and steam and electricity. In the last hundred years, wealth and power were even more heavily concentrated in cities as gray technology raced ahead. As cities became richer, rural poverty deepened.

Within a few more decades, as the continued exploring of genomes gives us better knowledge of the architecture of living creatures, we shall be able to design new species of microbes and plants according to our needs. The way will then be open for green technology to do more cheaply and more cleanly many of the things that gray technology can do, and also to do many things that gray technology has failed to do.

In his book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, Dyson describes a vision of green technology enriching villages, halting the migration from villages to mega cities. There are three key components of the vision: the sun to provide energy where it is needed, the genome to provide plants that can convert sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently, the Internet to end the intellectual and economic isolation of rural populations. With all three components in place, every rural village in the world could enjoy its fair share of the blessings of civilization. People who prefer to live in cities would still be free to move from villages to cities, but they would not be compelled to move by economic necessity.

Is It Ethical To Engineer Delicious Cows That Feel No Pain?

By Jeremy Hsu

Most people don't think too much about bovine hurt when they chow down on a Big Mac or Whopper. But for those with moral pangs, scientists say genetic engineering might provide a solution, by creating pain-free animals that can satiate the human appetite without suffering.

A paper published this month in the journal Neuroethics argues for minimizing animal suffering by creating beasts that lack the ability to sense pain.

The argument is controversial. In 2006, researchers found six Pakistani children who felt no pain due to an inactivated gene, and who constantly had bruises and cuts. One fell into the habit of putting knives through his hand and walking barefoot on coals, before his untimely death.

Still, scientists already know that humans can intellectually dissociate the sensation of pain from how much it bothers them. Lab experiments with mice have also suggested a way to disconnect that pain sensation without totally leaving animals vulnerable to a world of hurt.

Some consumers may feel good about buying meat with a "pain-free" label, but genetically engineered meat could also run into the same opposition that has risen against cloned beef and other meat. That did not prevent the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from approving cloned meat for market in January 2008.

If creating pain-free cows, pigs, and other animals sounds unpalatable, another alternative for a cruelty-free burger may soon arise -- growing meat from cells in a lab. Scientists around the world have already managed the feat with varying degrees of success, although a commercially tasty and viable product remains a ways off.

Is Free Will an Illusion?

By Brandon Keim

Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it.

If that’s the case, do people actually make decisions? Or is every choice — even the choice to prepare for future choices — an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid?


Those questions are raised by a study conducted by Max Planck Institute neuroscientists and published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand; seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions.

For more on the experiment, see my Wired.com story, for which I had the privilege of speaking to Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and a prominent neuroethicist. As is so often the case in journalism, we had a fascinating (email) conversation that didn’t fit into the article itself, and I decided — ha — to publish it here.


Me: The big question is how much people should feel comfortable extrapolating these results to other, more seemingly complex decisions about which we feel a deep personal connection — do I rent an apartment, get involved in a relationship, leave my job in search of another, and so on.

Martha Farah: The authors have taken an important first step toward understanding how we make decisions, and toward revealing the apparently prolonged cascade of unconscious processes that precede the conscious decisions we make with what seems like "free will." But of course there is always a trade-off in science between making a process scientifically tractable and making it realistic. Remember, Galileo rolled balls down inclines and theorized about infinite frictionless planes; he didn’t set about trying to understand the fluttering, zig-zagging motion of a falling leaf! The authors started with a very simple decision-making task, and their results now form the basis for some good working hypotheses to be tested with more complex decisions.


Me: How do these results square with our notion of free will? Do they obviate free will, which in that light is an illusion; or might there still be a balance between free will and unconscious decisions; or is free will still paramount, but operating at some other level?


MF: Let me start with a very general observation. Neuroscience is changing the way we think about ourselves. One of the hardest changes for people to assimilate is the idea that our intentional, voluntary behavior is the product of a physical system, the brain. If physical processes in the brain cause our actions, then how can there be free will? How can we be held responsible for our behavior? Can’t we just all plead "my brain made me do it"?

The Soon et al paper jumps right into the middle of these issues. It shows us how limited, even misleading, our introspections are. According to the authors, many seconds before we are aware that we have made a decision, we have — or at least, our brain has! All of the data of cognitive neuroscience are pushing us to replace the idea of mind-body duality, which is so intuitive, with the idea that mental processes are brain processes. But these results on the neural processes underlying free decisions rub our noses in it! One can assimilate findings about color vision or motor control being brain functions a lot more easily than findings about consciously experienced "free will" being a brain function, and hence physically determined and not free at all!

I don’t think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don’t need neuroscience to reject it — any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality — that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning. And there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system — After all, computers are rational physical systems!

Me: As I’m sure you often hear, this makes my head spin a bit. One follow-up: re: the replacement of free will with the concept of rationality, selecting actions based on practical reasoning — I can see how rationality and the mind as physical system don’t conflict, but doesn’t the very concept of selection (and, arguably, reasoning) imply an agency that is rendered illusory by findings like these?

MF: Depends what you mean by agency… If you think of a computer selecting certain actions based on a combination of inputs and stored information about goals etc, then there is a (not too head-spinny) sense in which the computer is the agent selecting the actions. (Of course, what makes the computer that kind of agent that it is, making the selections that it does, is its whole history — how it was designed, what kind of goals and knowledge have been programmed in, etc. — But it is the computer, in its current state, that is selecting and so it seems reasonable to say it is the locus of the rational decision.)

Going back to the Nature Neuroscience findings, the parts of the brain whose activity are correlated with the decision and precede the person’s conscious awareness of having decided — as well as potentially other parts — are the analogs of the computer described above… And this happens well before the conscious experience of "free will" making the decision.

One advantage of focusing on rationality rather than free will is that it enables us to retain the concept of moral and legal responsibility. If someone is rational and is not under coercion (eg someone holds a gun to your head and says you’ll be shot if you don’t do X) then it is reasonable to hold him or her responsible…

Me: Still struggling a bit. But not because of any deficiencies or illogic in your own excellent explanation — I suspect my response to all this is skewed by some instinctive (subconscious — ha) need to cling to the idea of free will. Perhaps because my sense of free will is tied in some inexplicable way to my sense of self and …
authenticity? That’s not the right word. Maybe I should come right out and say (non-religious) soul, of which free will is a manifestation.

Somehow the computer doesn’t seem satisfactory, in the sense that a rational program would make the same decision again and again again. Somehow that doesn’t seem alive. I’m always unsettled by computational analogies to the soul, in the sense that the appearance of self-awareness is not the same thing as self-awareness.

That the Turing test was devised by someone for whom disguising or transcending the body was so (sadly) necessary, and Norbert Wiener himself such a person of mind rather than body, adds to my unsettlement. But that’s my own superstition, rather than a real critique.

Clearly I have enormous difficulty accepting that that my conscious experience of choice is false. The very possibility threatens my sense of self; more fundamentally, it doesn’t make sense to me. Thinking about this produces a sensation I usually equate with self-contradictory instruction sets — "try not to think of a white elephant; what existed before the universe began?" — or certain optical illusions. It just doesn’t compute.

I’m quite aware that my perspective is based on feeling, not rational arguments, but I just can’t shake it. Maybe I’m simply programmed to conflate choice with self, and would think differently if I’d been raised differently. Maybe my kids will someday be just as frustrated with my anachronistic self-conception as I am with my dad’s seemingly hard-wired antipathy to computers. ("The program’s still open, but the window is hidden! How many times do I have to explain this?!") I hope they’re more patient than I am.