August 2013


WHEN the police arrived last November at the ransacked mansion of the millionaire investor Raveesh Kumra, outside of San Jose, Calif., they found Mr. Kumra had been blindfolded, tied and gagged. The robbers took cash, rare coins and ultimately Mr. Kumra’s life; he died at the scene, suffocated by the packaging tape used to stifle his screams. A forensics team found DNA on his fingernails that belonged to an unknown person, presumably one of the assailants. The sample was put into a DNA database and turned up a “hit” — a local man by the name of Lukis Anderson.

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Bingo. Mr. Anderson was arrested and charged with murder.

There was one small problem: the 26-year-old Mr. Anderson couldn’t have been the culprit. During the night in question, he was at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, suffering from severe intoxication.

Yet he spent more than five months in jail with a possible death sentence hanging over his head. Once presented with Mr. Anderson’s hospital records, prosecutors struggled to figure out how an innocent man’s DNA could have ended up on a murder victim.

Late last month, prosecutors announced what they believe to be the answer: the paramedics who transported Mr. Anderson to the hospital were the very same individuals who responded to the crime scene at the mansion a few hours later. Prosecutors now conclude that at some point, Mr. Anderson’s DNA must have been accidentally transferred to Mr. Kumra’s body — likely by way of the paramedics’ clothing or equipment.

This theory of transference is still under investigation. Nevertheless, the certainty with which prosecutors charged Mr. Anderson with murder highlights the very real injustices that can occur when we place too much faith in DNA forensic technologies.

In the end, Mr. Anderson was lucky. His alibi was rock solid; prosecutors were forced to concede that there must have been some other explanation. It’s hard to believe that, out of the growing number of convictions based largely or exclusively on DNA evidence, there haven’t been any similar mistakes.

In one famous case of crime scene contamination, German police searched for around 15 years for a serial killer they called the “Phantom of Heilbronn” — an unknown female linked by traces of DNA to six murders across Germany and Austria. In 2009, the police found their “suspect”: a worker at a factory that produced the cotton swabs police used in their investigations had been accidentally contaminating them with her own DNA.

Contamination is not the only way DNA forensics can lead to injustice. Consider the frequent claim that it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for two DNA profiles to match by coincidence. A 2005 audit of Arizona’s DNA database showed that, out of some 65,000 profiles, nearly 150 pairs matched at a level typically considered high enough to identify and prosecute suspects. Yet these profiles were clearly from different people.

There are also problems with the way DNA evidence is interpreted and presented to juries. In 2008, John Puckett — a California man in his 70s with a sexual assault record — was accused of a 1972 killing, after a trawl of the state database partially linked his DNA to crime scene evidence. As in the Anderson case, Mr. Puckett was identified and implicated primarily by this evidence. Jurors — told that there was only a one-in-1.1 million chance that this DNA match was pure coincidence — convicted him. He is now serving a life sentence.

But that one-in-1.1 million figure is misleading, according to two different expert committees, one convened by the F.B.I., the other by the National Research Council. It reflects the chance of a coincidental match in relation to the size of the general population (assuming that the suspect is the only one examined and is not related to the real culprit). Instead of the general population, we should be looking at only the number of profiles in the DNA database. Taking the size of the database into account in Mr. Puckett’s case (and, again, assuming the real culprit’s profile is not in the database) would have led to a dramatic change in the estimate, to one in three.

One juror was asked whether this figure would have affected the jury’s deliberations. “Of course it would have changed things,” he told reporters. “It would have changed a lot of things.”

DNA forensics is an invaluable tool for law enforcement. But it is most useful when it corroborates other evidence pointing to a suspect, or when used to determine whether any two individual samples match, like in the exonerations pursued by the Innocence Project.

But when the government gets into the business of warehousing millions of DNA profiles to seek “cold hits” as the primary basis for prosecutions, much more oversight by and accountability to the public is warranted. For far too long, we have allowed the myth of DNA infallibility to chip away at our skepticism of government’s prosecutorial power, undoubtedly leading to untold injustices.

In the Anderson case, thankfully, prosecutors acknowledged the obvious: their suspect could not have been in two places at once. But he was dangerously close to being on his way to death row because of that speck of DNA. That one piece of evidence — obtained from a technology with known limitations, and susceptible to human error and prosecutorial misuse — might mistakenly lead to execution at the hands of the state should send chills down every one of our spines. The next Lukis Anderson could be you. Better hope your alibi is as well documented as his.

By OAGIE K. OBASOGIE, New York Times, July 24, 2013

Osagie K. Obasogie, a professor of law at the University of California, Hastings, and a senior fellow at the Center for Genetics and Society, is the author of the forthcoming book “Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind.”

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Starting Friday, fines for texting, emailing and using handheld phones while driving will get more expensive in New York State. Fines for using mobile devices will increase to up to $150 for a first offense, plus a mandatory $80 surcharge for moving violations, and go up to $400 (plus the $80) for a third. A violation also costs a whopping 5 driver’s license points. In addition, teen and probationary drivers — arguably those most prone to violating existing laws — will face 60-day license suspensions.

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That’s one expensive text message, and it puts your license in jeopardy.

But if that’s what it takes to deter device-dependent drivers from this obviously dangerous behavior, then so be it. Laws against handheld mobile phone use and texting have been on the books for years in New York, but we all know how widely those laws are flouted. In fact, despite drivers’ nearly universal disapproval of texting and emailing while driving, more than one in four of us admitted sending a text message or email while driving in the previous month, according to a survey conducted by AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety last year.

Texting behind the wheel is extraordinarily dangerous, research has shown. That’s because it engages the driver visually, manually and cognitively, creating a trifecta of deadly distractions. Studies show that on average, a texting driver takes his or her eyes off the road for about five seconds to read or send a text message, more than doubling a driver’s risk of a crash. At highway speeds, that’s long enough to cover the length of a football field. Yet drivers continue to do it. While increased penalties may be a painful lesson for some, a bigger stick is clearly needed to change widespread behaviors.

Over the past two decades, New York’s combination of stronger laws and enforcement led the nation in successful efforts to persuade drivers to wear seat belts and not drive while drunk. As a result, we helped establish a national model for other states, saving thousands of lives. Today, widespread texting and phone use while driving threaten the hard-earned reductions in motor vehicle crashes — a leading cause of preventable death and injury in the United States.

In fact, from 2005 to 2011, there has been about a 143 percent increase in mobile phone-related crashes in the state. In that same period, there’s been an approximately 18 percent decrease in alcohol-related crashes. We can’t let the progress we made saving lives erode.

Teenage drivers — the “digital generation” — are especially prone to distracted driving. Surveys indicate that on average, they talk on their mobile phones an hour each day and send 80 texts per day. Many have handheld devices with Internet capabilities. Ninety-four percent of them report keeping their mobile phones on while driving. Those are troubling statistics, given that car crashes remain the No. 1 cause of death and injury for that generation. Hopefully the state’s new laws will send a powerful message to our young and inexperienced drivers that texting and driving will not be tolerated in New York State.

Now that the new penalties are going into effect, state and local police departments have pledged to vigorously enforce these laws this summer, with checkpoints and undercover vehicles to catch distracted drivers. Some violators may be taken by surprise by the steep fines and points, but I say bring them on. One look around will tell you that many drivers won’t drop their devices without them.
By JOHN A. CORLETT, NewsDay,  July 24, 2013

John A. Corlett is legislative committee chair of AAA New York State, based in Garden City.

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WHEN I retired in 2011 after serving 30 years in Congress, there was one set of issues I knew I could not leave behind. I donated $1 million of unused campaign funds to create the Center for Native American Youth at the Aspen Institute, because our country has left a trail of broken promises to American Indians.

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As chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, I once toured a school near an Indian reservation where I encountered a teacher who told me that when she asked a young Indian student what she wanted for Christmas, she said she wanted the electricity turned on in her house so she could study at night.

That type of story is all too familiar. I believe that American Indian children are the country’s most at-risk population. Too many live in third-world conditions. A few weeks ago, I traveled to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It’s hard just to get there. A two-hour drive from Rapid City brings you to Shannon County, the second poorest county in the United States.

The proud nation of Sioux Indians who live there — like many of the 566 federally recognized tribes — have a treaty with the United States, the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which promised that their health care, education and housing needs would be provided for by the federal government.

Tribal leaders, parents and some inspiring children I’ve met make valiant efforts every day to overcome unemployment, endemic poverty, historical trauma and a lack of housing, educational opportunity and health care.

But these leaders and communities are once again being mistreated by a failed American policy, this time going under the ugly name “sequestration.” This ignorant budget maneuvering requires across-the-board spending cuts to the most important programs along with the least important. American Indian kids living in poverty are paying a very high price for this misguided abandonment of Congressional decision-making.

When we pushed American Indians off their tribal lands, we signed treaties making promises to provide services in exchange for that land. On my visit to Pine Ridge, I saw how we continue to cheat them. Sequestration, which should never have applied to sovereign Indian reservations in the first place, only compounds the problem.

It’s easy for many to believe those who say that automatic budget cuts aren’t hurting anybody much. But that’s wrong. And I can introduce you to the kids who will tell you why.

At a round-table discussion I had with students of Pine Ridge High School, I met a young man who qualified for the state wrestling tournament this year. The school and tribe had no money to send him. So the wrestling coach spent $500 out of his own pocket to pay for travel and food. The student slept on the floor of the gymnasium because there was no money for a motel room.

When I asked a group of eight high school students who among them had had someone close to them take their own life, they all raised their hands. More than 100 suicide threats or attempts, most by young people, have been reported at Pine Ridge so far this year.

The rate of suicide among American Indian youth is nearly four times the national average, and is as high as 10 times the average in many tribal communities across the Great Plains. At the same time, mental health services are being cut as a result of sequestration, with Pine Ridge losing at least one provider this year.

The youth center on the reservation is closed because of lack of funding. Money for the summer youth program, which pays high school students to work during their break, has also been eliminated.

I met a 12-year-old homeless girl at the emergency youth shelter. Her mother is dead. She doesn’t know the identity of her father. She’s been in multiple foster homes and been repeatedly sexually abused. She found safety in the shelter, but its funding is being cut because of sequestration — an indiscriminate budget ax, I might add, that was thought of as so unconscionable when I was in the Senate that it would never have been seriously considered.

The very programs that we set up to provide those basic life necessities on reservations are the same ones feeling the indiscriminate, blunt cuts of sequestration. How can we justify such a thoughtless policy?

While I was at Pine Ridge I also met with the Tribal Council, whose members described a severe housing crisis. In one district more than 200 homes are without electricity. Throughout the reservation, I saw many dilapidated homes missing windows and doors.

Pine Ridge students told me that many of their friends and families were homeless. “Our friends sleep in tents,” one student said.

Even in normal times, the Indian Health Service operates with about half the money it needs. Tribal Council members told me that some of their health funds last only until May. If you get sick after May, too bad. Now these health care programs, already rationing care, are subject to the sequester. The Indian Health Service estimates that as a result it will have 804,000 fewer patient visits this year.

Congress should hold a series of investigative hearings on our unfulfilled treaties with American Indians. Add up the broken promises, make an accounting of the underfunding, all of it, and then work with tribes to develop a plan to make it right. In the meantime, we must exempt Indian country from sequestration — right now.

 

By BYRON L. DORGAN, New York Times, July 10, 2013 

Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, served in the House from 1981 to 1992 and in the Senate from 1992 to 2011. He is a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

AT an office party in 2005, one of my colleagues asked my then husband what I did on weekends. She knew me as someone with great intensity and energy. “Does she kayak, go rock climbing and then run a half marathon?” she joked. No, he answered simply, “she sleeps.” And that was true. When I wasn’t catching up on work, I spent my weekends recharging my batteries for the coming week. Work always came first, before my family, friends and marriage — which ended just a few years later.

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In recent weeks I have been following with interest the escalating debate about work-life balance and the varying positions of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo and the academic Anne-Marie Slaughter, among others. Since I resigned my position as chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers in 2008, amid mounting chaos and a cloud of public humiliation only months before the company went bankrupt, I have had ample time to reflect on the decisions I made in balancing (or failing to balance) my job with the rest of my life. The fact that I call it “the rest of my life” gives you an indication where work stood in the pecking order.

I don’t have children, so it might seem that my story lacks relevance to the work-life balance debate. Like everyone, though, I did have relationships — a spouse, friends and family — and none of them got the best version of me. They got what was left over.

I didn’t start out with the goal of devoting all of myself to my job. It crept in over time. Each year that went by, slight modifications became the new normal. First I spent a half-hour on Sunday organizing my e-mail, to-do list and calendar to make Monday morning easier. Then I was working a few hours on Sunday, then all day. My boundaries slipped away until work was all that was left.

Inevitably, when I left my job, it devastated me. I couldn’t just rally and move on. I did not know how to value who I was versus what I did. What I did was who I was.

I have spent several years now living a different version of my life, where I try to apply my energy to my new husband, Anthony, and the people whom I love and care about. But I can’t make up for lost time. Most important, although I now have stepchildren, I missed having a child of my own. I am 47 years old, and Anthony and I have been trying in vitro fertilization for several years. We are still hoping.

Sometimes young women tell me they admire what I’ve done. As they see it, I worked hard for 20 years and can now spend the next 20 focused on other things. But that is not balance. I do not wish that for anyone. Even at the best times in my career, I was never deluded into thinking I had achieved any sort of rational allocation between my life at work and my life outside.

I have often wondered whether I would have been asked to be C.F.O. if I had not worked the way that I did. Until recently, I thought my singular focus on my career was the most powerful ingredient in my success. But I am beginning to realize that I sold myself short. I was talented, intelligent and energetic. It didn’t have to be so extreme. Besides, there were diminishing returns to that kind of labor.

I didn’t have to be on my BlackBerry from my first moment in the morning to my last moment at night. I didn’t have to eat the majority of my meals at my desk. I didn’t have to fly overnight to a meeting in Europe on my birthday. I now believe that I could have made it to a similar place with at least some better version of a personal life. Not without sacrifice — I don’t think I could have “had it all” — but with somewhat more harmony.

I have also wondered where I would be today if Lehman Brothers hadn’t collapsed. In 2007, I did start to have my doubts about the way I was living my life. Or not really living it. But I felt locked in to my career. I had just been asked to be C.F.O. I had a responsibility. Without the crisis, I may never have been strong enough to step away. Perhaps I needed what felt at the time like some of the worst experiences in my life to come to a place where I could be grateful for the life I had. I had to learn to begin to appreciate what was left.

At the end of the day, that is the best guidance I can give. Whatever valuable advice I have about managing a career, I am only now learning how to manage a life.

Autor: Erin Callan, New York Times, March 9, 2013

Erin Callan is the former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers.

 

 

 

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Animal rights groups said they will oppose at North Hempstead‘s town board (Long Island-New York), meeting Tuesday night a controversial plan to remove Canada geese from parks by euthanizing them.

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A torrent of criticism followed Newsday’s report Sunday on a permanent way to cope with 600 geese that officials said eat grass in town parks and foul waterways and fields with droppings. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is surveying the situation, said its preferred method of euthanasia is carbon dioxide; in response, the town said Monday, it has received 20 calls and emails.

One animal advocacy group has mounted an online petition; another called the proposal “monstrous.”

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Edita Birnkrant, New York director of Friends of Animals, an international group, said the town should consider alternative measures, such as modifying the geese’s landscape. Because geese prefer areas where they can watch for predators, the town could let grass grow taller and plant shrubs and trees to block their sight lines.

The town said it has tried, with little success, to scare off the geese, with noisemakers and specially trained dogs. Town spokesman Collin Nash said Monday in an email that “the Town is continuing to explore all options in regards to the public health and safety issue caused by the overpopulation of Canada geese.”

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The euthanasia solution, advocates contend, is shortsighted. “They’re going to defy the laws of nature and say there’s no geese allowed in North Hempstead airspace or they will be gassed to death,” said Birnkrant, who plans to address the board Tuesday night.

David Karopkin, director and founder of GooseWatch NYC, a group that has challenged geese removals citywide, called the town’s plan “egregiously cruel.” The group has an online petition — he said it has several hundred signatures — and commenters have posted on the group’s Facebookpage.

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“By killing the geese and creating a vacant desirable habitat, they’re ensuring that more geese will fly in to be killed next summer and the summer after that,” he said.

But Martin Lowney, New York State director of the USDA’s Wildlife Services program, argued other solutions come with a price. “You build a park so people can play soccer,” he said. “If you put in a forest, you’ll get rid of the geese, but you can’t play soccer. It’s a choice.”

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Advocates look to Mamaroneck, in Westchester County. The village’s mayor said a contract with the USDA was signed to cull the geese last December. But three trustees were newly elected to the board that fall, and after public hearings earlier this year the village amended the contract to exclude lethal eradication measures.

Mayor Norman Rosenblum called the change unfortunate, but added he was content with the deal: Eggs will be oiled and the village will buy a giant vacuum to clean up the droppings. But, he said, “within a day or two, it’s covered again.”

So he is hopeful North Hempstead won’t buckle under pressure. “I encourage the supervisor and board to go ahead with it,” he said.

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By SCOTT EIDLER , Newsday (Long Island-New York), May 14, 2013

 

Here’s a selection of photos and videos you may have missed posted on UN social media accounts from around the UN system over the past few weeks and shared with our social media team. Thank you to all who contributed!

Fred Tissandier ‏@ftissandier 16h On vaccine trail with Kiaku. 22 km biking to deliver vaccines to children of Kizulu Sanzi #sud-Congo

Bicycles are used to deliver vaccines to children in Congo. Thanks to Fred Tissandier of GAVI Alliance for posting this photo on Instgram.

Peacekeepers from Jordan recently hosted a free medical clinic for 350 students in Liberia. Thanks to our UN Mission in Liberia (@UNMILNews) colleagues for posting this photo on their Twitter account.

A group of young graduates recently received their certificates after a training cycle on life skills for ‘out of school youth’ at a technical school for boys in Darfur. Thanks to the UN Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) for posting this and more on their Facebook page.

As part of Malala Day on July 12, UNICEF Africa tweeted this photo of young people in Democratic Republic of Congo standing up to support Malala’s fight for the right to education for all. Thanks to @UNICEFAfrica for posting this and more on their Twitter account.

 

Check out the highlights from the 51st Graduate Study Programme, one of UN’s flagship educational programmes, which took place in Geneva this summer on the theme of “Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.” Thanks to our colleagues in Geneva for posting this and more on their YouTube account.

UN Special Envoy on Youth Ahmad Alhendawi is scooting away at UN Headquarters! In his own words, this is part of what happens when young people get an office at the UN. Thanks to @AhmadAlhendawi for posting this and more on his Twitter account.

At the ECOSOC Humanitarian Fair in Geneva earlier this month, the UN Refugees Agency presented these prototype solar-powered shelters to the audience. Thanks to UNHCR United Kingdom (@UNHCRUK) for posting this and more on their Twitter account.

At the Economic and Social Council Humanitarian Fair in Geneva earlier this month, the UN Refugee Agency presented these prototype solar-powered shelters to the visitors. Thanks to UNHCR United Kingdom (@UNHCRUK) for posting this and more on their Twitter account.

Students at a technical school in Lebanon were taught the secrets of making pasta when a visting chef came to visit their Italian cuisine course recently. See more photos and read about the event here. Thanks to United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) for posting this and more on their website.

* UN, Jul 21, 2013

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