Whitewater: The Foster Report
This is the full text of the report on the 1993 death of White House counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., compiled by Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr. After an exhaustive three-year investigation, Starr reaffirmed that Foster's death was a suicide. This file does not contain the report's footnotes or appendix. Read the Oct. 11, 1997 Post story about the report's findings.
Introduction
In phiosophy we sometimes consider the question, put by way of hypothesis, of how we should act in the midst of a calamity, disaster, or other danger, if it is apparent that we can save our own life only by the destruction of another’s. We can hardly imagine that such a question would have much practical importance, or that a court would ever need to rule upon conduct under such circumstances, or, for that matter, that we would ever personally encounter an ordeal in which we face a dilemma between self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of another.
In fact, there have been numerous instances of homicide by necessity, some of which have resulted in murder or manslaughter convictions, and others which have passed quietly into history with no action taken by the authorities. This topic, homicide by necessity, refers to the killing of innocents in order to produce a greater good or avert a greater...
Thought Experiments. Philosophers often engage in 'thought experiments'. They describe hypothetical situations, sometimes realistic and sometimes fantastical, and then ask about our 'intuitions' regarding the case. 'Intuition' is a key term in modern philosophical methods though philosophers disagree about what they are and what their significance is. I will here just take them to be your thoughtful judgments about various things.
Why would philosophers do this? Oddly, though this procedure is very common, there is no general agreement on what these thought experiments show or why they are valuable. But there is general agreement that we can use these thought experiments to help test what we really believe about various things. Here is one sort of use of the thought experiment. Suppose you say 'I believe such and such', where 'such and such' refers to a general principle of some kind. I wonder whether you really do believe that general principle...
Trolley problems have been used in the development of moral theory and the psychological study of moral judgments and behavior. Most of this research has focused on people from the West, with implicit assumptions that moral intuitions should generalize and that moral psychology is universal. However, cultural differences may be associated with differences in moral judgments and behavior. We operationalized a trolley problem in the laboratory, with economic incentives and real-life consequences, and compared British and Chinese samples on moral behavior and judgment. We found that Chinese participants were less willing to sacrifice one person to save five others, and less likely to consider such an action to be right. In a second study using three scenarios, including the standard scenario where lives are threatened by an on-coming train, fewer Chinese than British participants were willing to take action and sacrifice one to save five, and this cultural difference was more...
Introduction
The identification and tactical analysis of crime patterns is a primary responsibility of crime analysts at police agencies around the world. Every day, analysts query and mine data in an effort to link cases by key factors and disseminate information about known and newly-discovered patterns to fellow police personnel. This analysis improves the safety of communities by facilitating police response which can, in turn, prevent and reduce crime. While the pattern identification process is reasonably standardized, there is a diversity of perspective on what constitutes a crime pattern. Unfortunately, the profession lacks a common language, and the terms “crime pattern,” “crime series,” “hot spot,” “crime trend,” and “crime problem” are often used interchangeably. Therefore, the goals of this white paper are to 1) standardize the definition of a crime pattern, 2) differentiate pattern types, and 3) define and illustrate each of the different pattern types. This delineation of standardized and practical...
Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety
This is one in a series of papers that will be published as a result of the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety. Harvard’s Executive Sessions are a convening of individuals of independent standing who take joint responsibility for rethinking and improving society’s responses to an issue. Members are selected based on their experiences, their reputation for thoughtfulness and their potential for helping to disseminate the work of the Session. In the early 1980s, an Executive Session on Policing helped resolve many law enforcement issues of the day. It produced a number of papers and concepts that revolutionized policing. Thirty years later, law enforcement has changed and NIJ and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government are again collaborating to help resolve law enforcement issues of the day. Learn more about the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety at:...
Most states regulate the relationship between manufacturers and distributors in certain industries, such as motor vehicle or petroleum product sales, and many regulate the relationship between franchisors and franchisees in other businesses as well. Legislatures enacting franchise and distribution laws act on the basis of a shared recognition that prospective franchisees often face significant initial investment decisions without adequate information and come from a position of little, if any, meaningful bargaining power. As a result, registration and disclosure requirements exist in many states to protect prospective franchisees at the outset of the franchise relationship. Most of these laws require franchisors to disclose specific information directly to prospective franchisees, and many additionally direct franchisors to register and file documents with the appropriate state agency or authority. Some states also regulate the franchise or distribution relationship after its inception because legislatures perceive that the inequities of the franchise relationship extend beyond initial disclosures. Statutes requiring franchisors to...
Abstract
The malaise of electronic spam mail that solicit illicit partnership using bogus business proposals (popularly called 419 mails) remained unabated on the internet despite concerted efforts. In addition to these are the emergence and prevalence of phishing scams that use social engineering tactics to obtain online access codes such as credit card number, ATM pin numbers, bank account details, social security number and other personal information[22]. In an age where dependence on electronic transaction is on the increase, the web security community will have to devise more pragmatic measures to make the cyberspace safe from these demeaning ills. Understanding the perpetrators of internet crimes and their mode of operation is a basis for any meaningful effort towards stemming these crimes. This paper discusses the nature of the criminals engaged in fraudulent cyberspace activities with special emphasis on the Nigeria 419 scam mails. Based on a qualitative analysis and...
DEFAMATION-LIABILITY OF BROADCASTING STATION FOR EXTEMPORANEOUS
DEFAMATION BY ONE NOT IN EMPLOY OF STATION
Defendant broadcasting company leased its facilities to an advertising corporation which hired a performer to speak on a series of programs sponsored by another company. Defendant approved a prepared script and a rehearsal of the program. During the actual broadcast the performer made an extemporaneous remark upon which plaintiff brought action in trespass for defamation. Held, defendant not liable. Summit Hotel Co. v. National Broadcasting Co. (Pa. 1939), 8 A. (2d) 302. The principal case presents for the first time the question of liability of a broadcaster for an alleged defamation not in the script, made on an unprivileged occasion, 1 by one not the agent of the broadcaster. 2 One previous case declared radio defamation to be libel and the station responsible in damages where the defamatory remarks appeared in a prepared script available for inspection. 3 In this case and three...
THE DEVELOPMENT OF VICTIMOLOGY
The second half of the twentieth century saw the development of social concern, protest, activism, intervention, legal, political, and social services reform, research, and teaching about victims of crime. In some countries, the victim movement became an important separate political force leading to substantial reforms in many fields. It is particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world that the movement began and flourished, expanding eventually to other parts of the world. In the United States, the victim movement began in the 1970s. The women’s movement, inspired by the civil rights movement, was one of its primary moving forces. Another was the social concern about the dramatic increase in crime rates in the United States. Conservatives and right-of-center activists and politicians pointed out that the system of constitutional protections in the United States favored the suspect and the convicted criminal while it trampled on the needs of...
ABSTRACT
Objective: The authors conducted a descriptive, archival study of adolescent ($19 years of age) mass murderek-subjects who intentionally killed three or more victims in one event-to identify demographic, clinical, and forensic characteristics. Method: A nonrandom sample of convenience of adolescent mass murderers was utilized. Reaulta: Thirty-four subjects, acting alone or in pairs, committed 27 mess murders between 1958 and 1999.The sample conslsted of males with a median age of 17. A majority were described as'loners" and abused alcohol or drugs; almost half were bullied by others, preoccupied with violent fantasy, and violent by history. Although 23% had a documenled psychiatric history, only 6% were judged to have been psychotic at the time of the mass murder. Depressive symptoms and hlstorlcal antisocial behaviors were predominant. There was a precipitating event In most cases--usually a perceived failure In love or schod4nd most subjects made threatening statements regarding the mass murder to third partles...
INTRODUCTION
On Sunday morning, November 3, 2013, Aaron Hubbard went to church. It was the last time his family would see him alive. A few hours later, Chicago police received a report that Hubbard had been kidnapped. According to witnesses, Hubbard, a seventeen-year-old high school student, was attacked and thrown into a truck that quickly drove away. After eight days of searching, police found Hubbard’s decomposing body in an abandoned building not far from where the abduction had occurred. A handful of short news stories documented the story in Hubbard’s hometown of Chicago, but the case received no coverage on a regional or national scale. Three months earlier, in August, California native Hannah Anderson disappeared, triggering a massive manhunt for her and her alleged kidnapper. The incident sparked a media firestorm, with news agencies across the country covering the sixteen-year-old’s disappearance. Local and national media outlets tracked the investigation, with CNN.com alone .
KIMT is a television station in Mason City, IA that serves the Rochester - Mason City - Austin television market. The station runs programming from the CBS network and identifies itself as "News Channel 3". KIMT is a digital full-power television station that operates with 100 kilowatts of power and is owned by Media General.
Abstract
The Kennedy assassination and September 11, 2001: these were the beginnings of two distinctive catastrophic events in U.S. history, both of which were captured by network news stations. The purpose of this research was to determine how and why broadcast production decisions were made during such crises. Six qualitative interviews were conducted with news producers and reporters. These subjective narratives were used to analyze the overall patterns of decision-making at a television station during a catastrophic event. Analyzing techniques involved 1) the identification of production themes within each station and 2) the comparison of these themes to other interviewee accounts. Snowball sampling was used to gather quantitative statistics regarding viewer’s opinions on a station’s coverage of an iconic event. The sample consisted of 200 viewers across the country. This research found the qualities valued when the stations broke the news of a crisis, as well as determining factors in viewers’
Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (SDMB) system, as studied within the European IST integrated project MAESTRO. The SDMB takes advantage of the satellite inherent capability to provide broadcast services over global coverage, to constitute an efficient way to serve mobile multimedia contents to a potentially unlimited audience. The paper includes an introduction to mobile multimedia markets and explains how the broadcast will help the mobile operators to serve the mass market. The main part of the paper is devoted to SDMB system description: services and delivery methods are first presented; then an example coverage for an European system is described. The key point of the low cost impact on the 3G mobile phone is justified, as well as the way the SDMB system interfaces with the mobile terrestrial networks. Later on, techniques to enhance the distribution reliability and capacity are pointed out. At the end, services personalisation, security aspects and the ...
Understanding what happens to a body after death is helpful to crime scene investigators in determining when the death occurred. In addition to the actual physical conditions present in the corpse, researchers study the kinds and life stages of insects present in a decaying body to help pinpoint the time of death. There are five decomposition stages. Many factors influence how quickly the decomposition stages progress, such as temperature, moisture and whether the body is exposed or buried. Decomposition is faster at high temperatures, if the body has traumatic injuries, or if the remains are exposed.
The Beginning Two Stages
As soon as death occurs, enzymes within dead body cells begin to break down tissues, a process called autolysis, and bacteria within the digestive tract begin to digest the intestines. During the first stage, called the fresh stage, usually lasting a day or two, the body doesn't change much outwardly, but chemicals released during cellular death begin to attract flies. The second stage begins
Additional Resource: The Stages of the Human Decomposition Process