Safety Risks Contributed to Shenzhen Landslide, Chinese Reports Say - The New York Times

A mountain of excavation earth and debris collapsed in Shenzhen, crushing buildings and killing many. China's code enforcement is often weak. And as I argued last weak in a lecture in Shanghai, its courts do not have adequate systems for managing mass disasters.
The central government will probably step in ~ with some compensation scheme. Those who dumped the debris and perhaps local officials will face prosecution, and perhaps the firing squad.
But the bigger need is stronger codes and enforcement agencies. Genuinely contested elections might help too. ~GWCSafety Risks Contributed to Shenzhen Landslide, Chinese Reports Say - The New York Times
by Austin Ramzy

HONG KONG — As rescuers searched Monday for survivors of a catastrophic landslide in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, a series of failures and ignored warnings that contributed to the disaster began to emerge.

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The Ministry of Land and Resources said the landslide that destroyed at least 33 buildings on Sunday was caused by the collapse not of a hillside but of a sodden mountain of dirt and construction debris in an industrial area. At least 91 people were missing as of early Monday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The rain-soaked material had built up for nearly two years at the site of a former quarry, Xinhua said, citing residents there.

China’s rapid construction of new buildings, and the short life of many of those structures, have long created problems with unregulated dumping of construction waste. Often the result is illegal, multistory piles of debris that appear on the outskirts of cities, creating problems with dust and flooding because of blocked waterways.

Continue reading the main story

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  Shenzhen, Then and Now (2008)

The landslide on Sunday appears to have been one of the most destructive episodes yet connected with the practice. The destroyed buildings included at least three worker dormitories, and an unknown number of people may still be buried.

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King & Spalding Again Implicated In GM Ignition Switch MDL - Law360

King & Spalding Again Implicated In GM Ignition Switch MDL - Law360

By Jacob Fischler

Law360, Washington (December 17, 2015, 8:02 PM ET) -- King & Spalding LLPwas among the law firms that, with General Motors Co.’s insurance administrator, helped the auto giant conceal safety defects, drivers told a New York federal court Thursday in the massive multidistrict litigation over a GM ignition switch design.

“New” GM, its outside counsel King & Spalding, claims administrator ESIS Inc., lead engineers, and other unnamed parties formed an enterprise, as construed by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, that illegally worked to conceal information about several deadly defects in General Motors Co. vehicles — especially the Delta-model ignition switch defect, according to a third amended complaint filed Thursday.

“[They] were all aware of a serious safety defect in the Delta ignition switch,” the new complaint says. “New GM hid the defect from [the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration], and K&S and ESIS went along with the cover-up and worked to confidentially settle all cases where evidence of the defect would be made public if the case did not settle.”

According to the third amended complaint, a King & Spalding attorney had become aware in October 2010 of a 25-year-old driver of a 2006 Chevrolet Cobalt who was killed after her air bag failed to deploy in a crash. In a letter to GM's in-house counsel, King & Spalding said other Cobalts had exhibited the same “anomaly,” which presented “clear evidence of defect,” Thursday's suit says.

Despite knowing GM was obligated to report the defect to authorities, King & Spalding declined to alert regulators or the public, or to investigate the matter further, according to the complaint. Instead, the firm “advised GM to suppress the facts of the case by quietly” settling, the drivers allege.

The law firm began representing the reorganized GM in 2010, in consumer protection cases related to the prebankrupt company’s vehicles, at which point the law firm began aiding — either “knowingly or unknowingly” — in GM’s scheme to conceal the defects from litigants and the public, the complaint says. Each profited from participating in the scheme, with New GM selling the affected vehicles and the other parties winning future business from the automaker, the suit says.

An NHTSA report in June 2015 reported that King & Spalding had warned GM about the defect but failed to disclose it. That same month, plaintiffs in the MDL filed a motion to compel documents from GM and the law firm, alleging that they conspired to conceal the ignition defect by quickly settling claims in order to avoid a recall. 

A King & Spalding attorney representing GM in the MDL declined to comment Thursday. Other representatives for GM did not return messages seeking comment. Representatives for the plaintiffs did not return calls seeking comment.

Wednesday, a New York federal judge ruled the driver whose suit against GM will serve as the bellwether trial was allowed to present a statement of facts associated with GM’s $900 million criminal settlement reached with the U.S. Department of Justice in September.

The statement of facts that was part of a Sept. 16 deferred prosecutionagreement between New GM and the DOJ contained admissions about the ignition switch defect, New GM’s notice and knowledge of it, and the automaker’s failure to address the defect — all “highly relevant to facts of consequence at trial,” U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman said Wednesday, just weeks before bellwether plaintiff Robert S. Scheuer’s case is set to begin.

The use of the statement of facts as evidence in Scheuer’s Jan. 11 trial is not without stipulations, however, as Judge Furman ruled that one line of the document relating to two previous criminal cases is to be redacted.

Scheuer’s suit stems from an accident in May 2014, just months after GM sent a letter to the NHTSA proposing a recall based on defective ignition switches in vehicles such as Scheuer’s 2003 Saturn Ion.

Scheuer has said he received the recall letter from GM that month and took his vehicle to be repaired. As he waited on a replacement part, the mechanic advised him to remove all other keys from his car key chain while driving, which he did. But later in the month, another vehicle ran him off the road and his car hit a tree. Scheuer says his air bag failed to deploy because of the ignition switch defect, and he joined the MDL a few months later.

The plaintiffs are represented by Robert C. Hilliard of Hilliard Munoz Gonzales LLP, Steve W. Berman, Sean R. Matt and Andrew M. Volk of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, and Elizabeth J. Cabraser, Steven E. Fineman, Rachel Geman and Annika K. Martin of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP.

GM is represented by Richard C. Godfrey and Andrew B. Bloomer of Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

The case is In re: General Motors LLC Ignition Switch Litigation, case number1:14-md-02543, in the U.S. District Court for or the Southern District of New York.

The Haaretz conference ~a look back

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/my-haaretz-q-can-we-talk-seriously-can-we/#.VnG_m-hcmAo.facebook

More Guns Than Americans ||Commonweal

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/normalizing-carnage

Hurley photos restored

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/restored-photos-shackletons-antarctic-wreck-reveal-new-details-180957520/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia

Once in a great city /David Mariniss

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/once-great-city

Palisades view deserves protection //NJ Law Journal

http://www.njlawjournal.com/editorials/id=1202742399926/Palisades-Neighborhood-Spans-Two-States-Court-Rightly-Held?mcode=1202615181677&curindex=4

Doctors call for end to ban on gun violence research funding | US news | The Guardian

Pro-gun members of Congress have for twenty years blocked the Centers for Disease Control from studying gun violence as a public health issue. -gwc
Doctors' groups join Democrats to end ban on gun violence research funding | US news | The Guardian
by Sabrina Siddiqui

Doctors’ groups joined Democrats on Wednesday in calling on the US Congress to lift the ban on the use of federal funds for gun violence research.

A collection of physicians’ groups delivered a petition to the US Capitol signed by more than 2,000 doctors across America seeking a reversal of a 20-year ban that prohibits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct research on gun violence.

A handful of House Democrats and physician advocates spoke on Capitol Hill about the urgency of reducing gun violence, which the doctors present said was now a public health crisis in America. Their comments came less than a week after a gunman opened fire at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, leaving three dead. Mere hours after the event, news broke of a mass shooting in San Bernadino, California, where multiple victims were reported.

 “Gun violence is a public health problem that kills 90 Americans a day,” said Dr Alice Chen, executive director of the lobby group Doctors for America. “Physicians believe it’s time to lift this effective ban and fund the research needed to save lives. We urge Congress to put patients over politics to help find solutions to our nation’s gun violence crisis.”

Congress passed the ban on federally funded gun violence research in 1996 amid pressure from the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun lobbyists. Efforts to overturn the ban by Democrats in the House of Representatives have so far been thwarted by Republicans, who have dismissed the link between gun violence and public health.

You Can't Understand American Politics Without Reading This Study

The death rate of white Americans between 45 and 54 is rising while in the countries that conservatives malign as "nanny states" it is falling.  The core problem is among white men and women with little education.  Oxy, alcohol, and other self-destructive behaviour is the driver.  It is an epidemic of despair.  It is a product not only of de-industrialization, but of the politics of resentment and moralistic harping.  Cut taxes, cut welfare, cut unemployment, cut Medicaid rather than expand it,blame them for their inadequacies rather than create opportunities.  People like Maine Gov. Paul LePage and New Jersey's own bully Chris Christie are leaders in this process - a victimization which goes beyond race and is driven by contempt for the less capable and the less fortunate. - gwc
You Can't Understand American Politics Without Reading This Study
by Josh Marshall // Talking Points Memo

I don't say this lightly or often. But this is one of the most important studies in years in terms of understanding the current state of American politics and society. The study is the work of two Princeton University scholars, Ann Case and Angus Deaton, who analyzed vast quantities of federal government data about mortality rates across age cohorts, racial and ethnic groups and genders. 
They made a startling discovery. As you would expect, every age and ethnic/racial grouping has continued to see a steady reduction of morbidity (disease) and increase in lifespans for decades. But there's one major exception: middle aged (45-54) white people. Since roughly 1998, disease and death rates for middle aged white men and women has begun to rise.

To put these numbers in context, this reversal is contrary to the trend in France, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Sweden. Indeed, it goes against the trend in every wealthy, industrialized democracy we know of. The aforementioned list is simply the other countries used as reference cases in the study. 

Within the US, this reversal is unique among racial and ethnic groups. Hispanics, African Americans, Asians. Historically, health outcomes and lifespans in the US have been heavily race and wealth dependent. So when it comes to lifespans and various disease statistics, African-Americans start off in a worse position. But they share the trend toward improving numbers which is the norm across groups in the US and wealthy countries abroad. Middle aged white people - men and women - are alone in reversing this trend and going backwards. Nor is the trend undifferentiated within this group. It is a most severe among middle-aged whites with the lowest education levels.

Keep reading

Judge Richard Posner On Homosexuality: ‘Incredibly Weird’ | Above the Law

Judge Richard Posner On Homosexuality: ‘Incredibly Weird’ | Above the Law

***The bottom line: back in the 1990s, Judge Posner was somewhat open to same-sex marriage as a policy matter (to be decided by a legislature), but not as a matter of constitutional law (to be decided by a court). What led him to decide, in the 2014 case of Baskin v. Bogan, that the Constitution requires marriage equality?

By the summer of 2014, the tide was running strongly in favor of invalidating such prohibitions, although it was not certain that the Supreme Court would go with the tide. I do think the change in public opinion was decisive for all the courts that ruled in favor of creating a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Law is not a science, and judges are not calculating machines. Federal constitutional law is the most amorphous body of American law because most of the Constitution is very old, cryptic, or vague. The notion that the twenty-first century can be ruled by documents authored in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries is nonsense.

The arguments against same-sex marriage were never strong. They didn’t need to be when there was overwhelming passionate objection to such marriage. When the objection faded (not completely, but to a great extent, and with remarkable speed), the absence of strong arguments against same-sex marriage, and the presence of strong arguments in favor of it, became the decisive factors guiding judicial action.

Needed: A GOP statement of conscience - Baltimore Sun

Needed: A GOP statement of conscience - Baltimore Sun
by Jules Witcover

 Donald Trump's behavior on the campaign trail grows ever more outrageous, the time is long overdue for leading Republican establishment figures, past and present, to speak out in unison before their Grand Old Party is irreparably compromised.

Mr. Trump's latest egregious comments and mockery of a New York Times reporter with a physical disability go beyond the pale even for him. He wasn't satisfied with earlier disparaging the looks of rival presidential candidate Carly Fiorina ("Look at that face! Would anyone vote that?").

His latest target is a man with severe malfunction of his arms, which Mr. Trump for good measure appeared to be mimicking. He also mocked the reporter's employer as "rapidly going down the tubes," even as the Times editorial board continues to pummel him for his bullying.

The current Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus of Wisconsin, is an ineffective milquetoast who earlier went hat in hand to Mr. Trump, urging him to tone down his reckless rhetoric. He got a quick brushoff from the self-declared great man. Of the 2016 candidates, only long-shot Ohio Gov. John Kasich has risked undertaking an open Stop Trump ad campaign.

But there is one Republican establishment club that has not been heard from that, if it spoke out as one, might yet start to bring concerned Republicans to their senses. That is the unofficial former presidential nominees' fraternity — the five most recent GOP standard-bearers in the last seven elections from 1988 through 2012: the two President Bushes, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

The father and the brother of current presidential aspirant Jeb Bush have let their floundering kinsmen carry the ball against Mr. Trump on the stump and in the Republican debates. But in league with Messrs. Dole, McCain and Romney, they might yet have considerable influence in mobilizing more moderate party leaders (admittedly, a vanishing breed) to sound the alarm of growing GOP irrelevance.

Under the seemingly hypnotic spell of Mr. Trump and the more soft-spoken nonpolitician Ben Carson, the party threatens to head over a dangerous cliff of amateurism fueled by anger, hate or just plain dissatisfaction in a divided federal government.

The most recent Republican standard-bearers all had to cope with the emergence of ultraconservative factions unwilling to cooperate with moderates who once saw the imperative of working across party lines. But the schism within the GOP has become even deeper and more dysfunctional, especially now in the Republican-controlled Congress.