Stephen Sugarman Notes Laws that Protect Smokers

The Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2010 by Sara Afzal
http://bit.ly/a58mJ0

“The laws are enforceable. There are laws that protect smokers,” says Stephen Sugarman, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. For instance, “I think it’s pretty clear that all of these laws prohibit an employer from firing an employee for smoking.”

Christopher Edley Says Colleges Need to Innovate in Face of Budget Cuts

Inside Higher Ed, November 17, 2010 by Doug Lederman
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/17/change

Christopher Edley Jr., the Berkeley law dean who is leading the California effort and evangelized about it at this week’s meeting, aptly summed up the approach many college leaders take when he described his state’s “business model” for higher education as “faith-based fund raising”: “Everybody sits around and holds hands and says, ‘We are so good; surely next year Sacramento will give us what we deserve.'”

Wayne Brazil Presents Police Review Report on UC Protests

The Daily Californian, November 16, 2010 by Alisha Azevedo
http://bit.ly/hButjh

The need for improvements remains for the department, especially the way some officers interact with and interview witnesses, Brazil said…. “Some members of the board think there are attitudinal displays by officers that are not necessary, and we see those occasionally in our reports,” he said.

Elisabeth Semel and Jen Moreno Question Lethal Injection Protocol

Agence France-Presse, November 14, 2010 by Lucile Malandain
http://bit.ly/dwTBFi

“The reason the first drug matters so much is because… if properly administered, it will put the inmate in a state of unconsciousness where he does not feel the second and third drug,” University of California, Berkeley professor Elisabeth Semel told AFP. “If you use a different drug, an unknown drug, then you don’t know whether or not it has been mixed differently, whether or not the staff has the expertise to administer it properly.”

The issue “becomes one of transparency,” Jen Moreno, another legal expert, told AFP. “The state shouldn’t be allowed to just switch drug in secret, without any sort of inquiry into whether or not it’s going to perform as intended,” she said.

Ty Alper Says Animal Euthanasia More Humane than Lethal Injection

The Daily Beast, November 13, 2010 by Ben Crair
http://bit.ly/bLKvvW

The three-drug formula, Alper writes, is “less reliable, and therefore less humane, than the method used to euthanize animals….” The irony of it all, as Alper points out, is that we developed the three-drug protocol in the first place because we feared a one-drug method would appear as though we were treating people no better than animals. Thirty years later, the opposite turns out to be true.

Alan Auerbach Discusses Federal Deficit

-San Francisco Chronicle, November 12, 2010 by Carolyn Lochhead
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/12/MNP81GAM81.DTL

“There’s nothing here that comes as a surprise to many groups in Washington and academics who have thought about the size of the budget imbalance,” Auerbach said. “We know how big it is and we know where money is, but to citizens who aren’t so familiar, this will probably come as a shock.”

-The New York Times, November 13, 2010 by David Leonhardt
http://nyti.ms/cuNrXT

The country cannot wait until 2030 to implement most of the changes, notes Alan Auerbach, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. If it did, the interest on the national debt could become crushingly large. Deficit cutting will probably be a regular part of politics for the next couple of decades.