by Emily Smith, LiveNews, June 12, 2008
Police arrested the man last year after raiding his Darlinghurst business.
It had been alleged that the 62-year-old was growing cannabis at his laundrette.
He faces several drug charges including supply and possession.
Today he has pleaded guilty to four charges - the prosecutors withdrawing the remaining drug offences.
The practising Buddhist monk wasn't in court in person, with his lawyer telling the magistrates he is in hospital with a well documented illness.
Asahi TV news reports that one of the police officers responsible for arranging security ahead of the G8 summit in Hokkaido has been arrested for entering a women's bathing area and peeping:
The officer, a 38-year-old telecommunications expert dispatched to Hokkaido from Chiba Prefecture, had crept into the dressing room area of the female bathing area of a hotel, and was caught using a digital camera to take pictures of women. When questioned by police, he admitted that he had entered the dressing room because he wanted to take pictures of naked women.
competition,
reformor
modernizingrail service. Note the objections:
But the White House says the measure provides little opportunity for competition on existing Amtrak routes and doesn't include provisions that would condition Amtrak's funding based on the progress of reforms.Funny how the $40.3 billion per year for the Federal Highway Administration isn't required to be reformed or compete with other entities. The transparency of the recent Republican proposals to mitigate high gas prices vacillate from the silly (gas tax holiday) to the disastrous (ending Amtrak) reflect the deeply unserious nature of the proposals at hand. I look forward to a veto fight with the current President and his party just in time for the Presidential Election.
Channel: Gay & Lesbian Tags: Murder SHooting California
June 10, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Out of Sight
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times
When the dismal unemployment numbers were released on Friday (at the same time that oil prices were surging to record highs), I thought about the young people at the bottom of the employment ladder.
Below the bottom, actually.
A shudder went through the markets when the Labor Department reported that the official jobless rate had jumped one-half a percentage point in May to 5.5 percent — the sharpest spike in 22 years.
The young people I'm talking about wouldn't have noticed. These are the teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats compiling the official unemployment rate don't even bother counting these young people. They are no one's constituency. They might as well not exist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10herbert.html?ref=opinion
If you think blood type has an effect on one's personality, you're in agreement with most Japanese people. According to a survey translated on What Japan Thinks, a sizable majority of Japanese people buy into pseudo-scientific BS about blood types, and nearly half of those surveyed also believed in fortune telling.
Read the full survey translation here!
Ezra reports:
...two Carnegie Mellon researchers recently broke down the carbon footprint of foods, and their findings were a bit surprising. 83 percent of emissions came from the growth and production of the food itself. Only 11 percent came from transportation, and even then, only 4 percent came from the transportation between grower and seller (which is the part that eating local helps cut).
In other words, when it comes to food the greenest things you can do, if that is your standard, is to eat less meat and have fewer kids.
Prisons might be affecting job stats
Friday, June 6, 2008 3:10 AM
By Marilyn Geewax
COX NEWS SERVICE
Columbus Dispatch
WASHINGTON -- When the Labor Department announces May employment figures today, the jobless rate likely will be about 5 percent, only half the level reached in the 1981-82 recession.
Given that home builders aren't hiring, auto companies are laying off legions and Americans lack confidence in the economy, why isn't the unemployment rate higher?
Economists cite several reasons, but some think one factor gets overlooked: Prisons are keeping so many people out of the labor market that the true jobless rate is being masked.
"Incarceration rates have gone up enormously in the last 20 years," said Rebecca Blank, an economist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a centrist research group. "We're jailing a lot more people now," which is keeping them from competing for the low-skilled manufacturing jobs that have grown scarce, she said.
Between 1980 and 2006, the number of people in prison in this country jumped from 420,000 to more than 2 million, she said. A recent study by the Pew Center on the States found that one in every 100 adult Americans is now incarcerated.
In 2006, the most-recent year Blank's research covers, the 4.6 percent U.S. unemployment rate would have been 5 percent if people behind bars and in the armed forces had been seeking private-sector jobs and therefore counted in the unemployment statistics, she said. Among black men, the rate would have pushed up from 9.6 percent to 10.6 percent.
"We have disproportionately taken young men of color out of the work force" with much stiffer penalties for drug-law violations, she said.
A 2005 study in the American Journal of Sociology said that by 1999, more than 40 percent of young black male high-school dropouts were in prison or jail, compared with 10.3 percent of young white male dropouts.
"There hasn't been a marked change in behaviors" in terms of drug use since the early 1980s, Blank said. "What has changed is public policy" involving drug sentences.
The labor market effects don't end when people are released from prison, she said. "It has a huge impact by closing off employment opportunities" for people who might otherwise seek work as a guard, cashier or other position that requires trust. "Many employers can't hire people with a prison record," she said.
That means former prisoners often have longer stretches of unemployment and typically earn lower wages when they do find work, she said.
But not everyone agrees that the nation's high incarceration rate has an impact on employment. James Sherk, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, says the unemployment rate is low simply because the labor market remains tight, with many employers seeking even low-skilled workers.
If people now incarcerated under tough drug laws had never been put into prison, the great majority of them could have found jobs if they had wanted them, he said.
Attributing the low unemployment rate to the high incarceration rate is "grasping at straws," he said.
A look at Ohio
• Prison population as of Jan. 1: 50,730
• Proportion of state residents in prison:
1 in 178.9
• 2005 incarceration-rate rank among states: 31st
• Corrections spending, fiscal 2007: $1.77 billion, or 7 percent of the general fund
• Percentage of state employees working in corrections: 11.8 percent
• State unemployment rate, April: 5.6 percent
http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2008/06/06/Jailed_Jobless_-_Cox.ART_ART_06-06-08_C10_JHADQ43.html?sid=101
