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Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty

Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty
Willingham was charged with murder. Because there were multiple victims, he was eligible for the death penalty, under Texas law. Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson, who had ambitions of becoming a judge, was personally opposed to capital punishment. “I don’t think it’s effective in deterring criminals,” he told me. “I just don’t think it works.” He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years. Willingham couldn’t afford to hire lawyers, and was assigned two by the state: David Martin, a former state trooper, and Robert Dunn, a local defense attorney who represented everyone from alleged murderers to spouses in divorce cases—a “Jack-of-all-trades,” as he calls himself. Willingham’s lawyers were equally pleased. His parents went to see their son in jail. Willingham was implacable.

Bill Clinton On Why The World Is Getting Better All The Time Our world is more interdependent than ever. Borders have become more like nets than walls, and while this means that wealth, ideas, information and talent can move freely around the globe, so can the negative forces shaping our shared fates. The financial crisis that started in the U.S. and swept the globe was further proof that--for better and for worse--we can't escape one another. There are three big challenges with our interdependent world: inequality, instability and unsustainability. But I firmly believe that progress changes consciousness, and when you change people's consciousness, then their awareness of what is possible changes as well--a virtuous circle. Forget what you may have heard about a digital divide or worries that the world is splintering into "info haves" and "info have-nots." In Haiti, one of the poorest places on the planet, phones have revolutionized the average person's access to financial opportunity. As a consequence, only 10% of Haitians have a bank account.

Skip Hollandsworth of Texas Monthly: His best true crime pieces, from Longform.org Kevin Winter/Getty Images. Every weekend, Longform shares a collection of great stories from its archive with Slate. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Greetings from Austin! Three Dallas prostitutes were found dead in as many months. “Dutifully, Charles spent hours on his taxidermy courses, stuffing and mounting his birds, making them look as life-like as possible. “Yet Delle wouldn’t let him. "They were, indeed, Charles Albright’s first works of art, just as the mail-order booklet had promised. “The birds had no eyes. How two love-struck, type-A high-schoolers almost got away with murder: "As their investigation began, the detectives did conduct a perfunctory interview with David Graham, but they were so certain he was not involved that they didn’t even try to give him a polygraph test. “In fact, throughout last fall, a stream of mostly female well-wishers visited Bernie in jail, bringing him cakes and pies.

The Myth of American Meritocracy Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally collaborated on their final exam.1 Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as “unprecedented.” But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America’s most prestigious academic institution? In the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together with their professional schools. The Battle for Elite College Admissions Estimating Asian Merit

7 Places to Find & Watch Documentaries Online It was in the fifth grade while watching a film (yes, a film with two reels) about Plymouth Plantation that I first realized I enjoy watching documentaries. 20+ years later I still enjoy documentaries. As a teacher I think that a good documentary video when used in the right setting can be valuable to students. Quality documentary videos can provide students with useful explanations or demonstrations of concepts. Unfortunately, documentary DVDs can be expensive acquisitions for some school departments. PBS Video is currently my favorite place to find high quality documentaries. Snag Learning and Snag Films offers access to hundreds of high quality documentary videos. Documentary Heaven is a free site that has organized more than 1600 documentary films found across the Internet. Folk Streams is a good website featuring documentary films of American life. Explore.org produces and hosts high-quality documentary films and photographs.

J. M. Coetzee - Nobel Lecture: He and His Man He and His Man Boston, on the coast of Lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. The fens are home to many other kinds of birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard, teal and widgeon, to capture which the men of the fens, the fen-men, raise tame ducks, which they call decoy ducks or duckoys. Fens are tracts of wetland. These Lincolnshire duckoys, writes his man, are bred up in decoy ponds, and kept tame by being fed by hand. By these representations, he writes, which are made all in duck language, they, the decoy ducks or duckoys, draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap them. And while they are so occupied the decoy-men, the masters of the decoy-ducks, creep into covers or coverts they have built of reeds upon the fens, and all unseen toss handfuls of corn upon the water; and the decoy ducks or duckoys follow them, bringing their foreign guests behind.

The Norumbega Inn - Camden - United States Why Legalizing Marijuana on Election Day Might Not Be a Good Idea Voters in two states will decide on Election Day whether ending the prohibition on pot is a good idea. But before they do, they should know what might go wrong. No government has ever created a commercial pot market. But next week voters in Colorado and Washington State are poised to do just that, passing ballot initiatives that legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana much like alcohol. Both efforts are polling above 50 percent, but regardless of whether they pass, the country is bending toward historic reforms and the remaining prohibitionists are on the run. Only about one in three Americans think pot should remain illegal, and that shrinking block of opposition is poorly organized and underfunded, producing no formidable spokesperson, not even a sad-sack orator to argue futilely, that legalization is the devil’s work. But such a profound policy shift deserves a two-sided debate. The case against legalization begins with a defense of its opposite: the benefits of prohibition.

100 Greatest Horror Films of All Time The common claim of the horror film is that it allows us to vicariously play with our fear of death. Inarguable, really, but that's also too easy, as one doesn't have to look too far into a genre often preoccupied with offering simulations of death to conclude that the genre in question is about death. That's akin to saying that all an apple ever really symbolizes is an apple, and that symbols and subtexts essentially don't exist. A more interesting question: Why do we flock to films that revel in what is, in all likelihood, our greatest fear? And why is death our greatest fear? A startling commonality emerges if you look over the following films in short succession that's revelatory of the entire horror genre: These works aren't about the fear of dying, but the fear of dying alone, a subtlety that cuts to the bone of our fear of death anyway—of a life unlived. Editor's Note: Click here for a list of the films that came in #'s 101—200. Inside (2007) House (1977) Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)

McAllen, Texas and the high cost of health care It is spring in McAllen, Texas. The morning sun is warm. The streets are lined with palm trees and pickup trucks. McAllen is in Hidalgo County, which has the lowest household income in the country, but it’s a border town, and a thriving foreign-trade zone has kept the unemployment rate below ten per cent. McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. The explosive trend in American medical costs seems to have occurred here in an especially intense form. The question we’re now frantically grappling with is how this came to be, and what can be done about it. From the moment I arrived, I asked almost everyone I encountered about McAllen’s health costs—a businessman I met at the five-gate McAllen-Miller International Airport, the desk clerks at the Embassy Suites Hotel, a police-academy cadet at McDonald’s. Was the explanation, then, that McAllen was providing unusually good health care? I was impressed. Others were skeptical.

True Crime: How a Mysterious Beaumont, Texas, Murder Was Solved The corpse at the Eleganté Hotel stymied the Beaumont, Texas, police. They could find no motive for the killing of popular oil-and-gas man Greg Fleniken—and no explanation for how he had received his strange internal injuries. Bent on tracking down his killer, Fleniken’s widow, Susie, turned to private investigator Ken Brennan, the subject of a previous Vanity Fair story. Once again, as Mark Bowden reports, it was Brennan’s sleuthing that cracked the case. Greg Fleniken traveled light and lived tidy. Most evenings he never left the room. He missed the ending. Greg was accustomed to solitary nights. That Wednesday night, watching his movie, Greg got an e-mail from his wife, Susie, shortly after seven. At some point during the loud, computer-generated showdown at the end of the film, amid all the fake violence, Greg was struck from nowhere with a very real and shattering blow. He was probably dead by the time his face hit the green rug. A “Natural-Causes Thing” Dr. Whodunit? Weeks went by.

What do Americans know about inequality? It depends on how you ask them Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 7, no. 6, November 2012, pp. 741-745 A recent survey of inequality (Norton and Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 9–12) asked respondents to indicate what percent of the nation’s total wealth is—and should be—controlled by richer and poorer quintiles of the U.S. population. We show that such measures lead to powerful anchoring effects that account for the otherwise remarkable findings that respondents reported perceiving, and desiring, extremely low inequality in wealth. We show that the same anchoring effects occur in other domains, namely web page popularity and school teacher salaries. Keywords: inequality, response bias, anchoring-and-adjustment, replication study. 1 Introduction National differences in wealth and income inequality are large and important (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). Logically, the Percent and Average measures of inequality are intimately connected. Of course, inequality exists, at varying levels, in many domains.

The Greatest Hits of 1958 (US) Here they are, the absolutely greatest hits from the history of popular music in the USA. The very best music. The Year is 1958 Paul Anka - You Are My Destiny - 02-58 - ABC ParamountThe Applejacks - Mexican Hat Rock - 11-58 - CameoFrankie Avalon - Dede Dinah - 02-58 - ChancellorFrankie Avalon - Ginger Bread - 08-58 - ChancellorChuck Berry - Sweet Little Sixteen - 03-58 - ChessChuck Berry - Johnny B. Herb's Country Site Back to Main Get to know MORE about the U.S. and UK top 20 charts from 1954 up to 'the present day' (ie. A Brief History of American Prosperity by Guy Sorman, City Journal Autumn 2012 An entrepreneurial culture and the rule of law have nourished the nation’s economic dynamism. Until recently, the Federal Reserve had maintained a predictable currency, encouraging investment. Worry over America’s recent economic stagnation, however justified, shouldn’t obscure the fact that the American economy remains Number One in the world. The United States holds 4.5 percent of the world’s population but produces a staggering 22 percent of the world’s output—a fraction that has remained fairly stable for two decades, despite growing competition from emerging countries. Not only is the American economy the biggest in absolute terms, with a GDP twice the size of China’s; it’s also near the top in per-capita income, currently a bit over $48,000 per year. Only a few small countries blessed with abundant natural resources or a concentration of financial services, such as Norway and Luxembourg, can claim higher averages. Democracy, too, encouraged ever-cheaper products.

VRBO - Franklin NH Vacation Rentals This property allows you to book online with a credit card. After submitting a reservation request, the owner or manager has 24 hours to accept, at which time your card will be charged and you will receive an email confirmation Map Data Map data ©2015 Google Map Satellite

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