- Supreme Court overturns District’s ban on handguns. After thirty years, residents of DC are allowed to have handguns in their homes. The Court declared that a complete ban is unconstitutional, but some gun restrictions are reasonable, e.g. barred from felons and the mentally ill, and at schools and government buildings. Machine guns are still banned. Now the NRA plans to sue San Francisco and Chicago for similar handgun bans.
- Supreme Court slashes $2.5 billion of damage awards in Exxon oil spill. In 1989, one of the Exxon supertankers crashed, dumping 11 billions gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. Wildlife and businesses were hurt. The Court ruled that punitive damages may not exceed what the company has already paid to compensate victims for losses.
- More Americans delay health care. A recent report shows that more Americans in 2007 than in 2003 delay health care due to rising costs and larger payments out of pocket. The uninsured are still more likely to delay health care than the insured.
- Medicare, surveillance bills delayed until after Fourth of July recess. The House passed a bipartisan bill that blocks a cut in Medicare payments to doctors, but the bill has failed to pass the Senate. Medicare cuts are not new, there can be devestating results. The bill that would provide retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the government’s wiretapping program is also postponed.
- Paris Hilton donates money to children’s hospital. Is she following in Daddy’s footsteps? (It’s interesting what you come up with when you do research on medical economics.)
- Bill Gates retires from Microsoft for philanthropic pursuits. Gates is going to work full-time for his charity foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but he is still a chairman at Microsoft.
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Amber Ying is a figment of the Internet. In real life, she is an undergraduate student of biology and chemistry at Colby-Sawyer College. Amber likes kittens, postmodern American literature, public policy, and cheesecake. She dislikes eggplants, parking tickets, and cobblestone streets.
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Quoted
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould
