New York Times: “Gulf Dolphins Exposed to Oil Are Seriously Ill, Agency Says

MSNBC: Gulf shrimp scarce this season (and see the Herald Tribune‘s report)

Mother Jones: Eyeless shrimp are being found all over the Gulf

NYT: Oil Spill Affected Gulf Fish’s Cell Function, Study Finds

CBS:Expert: BP spill likely cause of sick Gulf fish (and see the Press Register’s report)

Study confirms oil from Deepwater spill entered food chain

Pensacola News Journal: “Sick fish” archive

Agence France Presse: Mystery illnesses plague Louisiana oil spill crews

MSNBC: Sea turtle deaths up along Gulf, joining dolphin trend

MSNBC:Exclusive: Submarine Dive Finds Oil, Dead Sea Life at Bottom of Gulf of Mexico

AP: BP oil spill the culprit for slow death of deep-sea coral, scientists say (and see the Guardian and AFP‘s write ups)

A recent report also notes that there are flesh-eating bacteria in tar balls of BP oil washing up on Gulf beaches'

And all of that lovely Corexit dispersant sprayed on water, land and air? It inhibits the ability of microbes to break down oil, and allows oil and other chemicals to be speed past the normal barriers of human skin.

2 Years After the BP Oil Spill, Is the Gulf Ecosystem Collapsing? « naked capitalism

sigh

Idiot Nerd Girl - pronounces meme meemee

Audi is discontinuing the hatchback A3 for North America with the 2014 model year.

I was hoping that a slightly larger A3 hatchback would make a debut here but apparently not. Scratch Audi off my list of potential replacements for my slowly dying SUV.

Audi A3 Hatchback Getting the Axe, Sedan Only for North America | AutoGuide.com News

Nearly a decade since his last videogame, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner is returning to his roots with a remake of the celebrated hit that launched his career: Karateka.

Mechner told Wired.com that he would release the Karateka reboot as a downloadable game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 later this year. He designed and programmed the original Apple II computer game in his dorm room at Yale University. It was eventually ported to many other platforms but never had a sequel or remake.

Karateka Remake Marks Jordan Mechner's Return to Games | Game|Life | Wired.com

In some countries, the equivalent of their IRS sends citizens a form listing what they owe. In California, the state has a program called ReadyReturn that lets you do this for California state taxes. You sign it and send it back, and it takes a few minutes. But for most of us, this isn’t how it works. We gather our tax forms and various banking information, and spend the weekend facing a difficult bureaucratic set of forms, hoping we did it all correctly. Or we use a costly tax filing service or software.

Candidate Barack Obama promised to end this nightmare. He said he would “dramatically simplify tax filings so that millions of Americans will be able to do their taxes in less than five minutes.” The IRS would use information it “already gets from banks and employers to give taxpayers the option of pre-filled tax forms to verify, sign and return.” Experts, he said, estimated this would save 200 million total hours or work and $2 billion.

You can file this under yet another broken campaign promise. And why? Who doesn’t like an idea that is so simple and convenient and just generally helpful? Well, the large software makers, for one.

Corruption Is Why You Can't Do Your Taxes in Five Minutes

More about the murder charges:

Hidalgo County District Attorney Rene Guerra said he planned to petition a judge to certify the boy so he can be tried as an adult.

"I'm going to be as aggressive as the law allows," Guerra said.

"When you have that kind of a situation where some people say that's an accident, no, I'm sorry that's not an ordinary accident," Guerra said. "These are things that they know. That they can anticipate."

Sometimes the law was never meant to allow what the law allows.

The Associated Press: Texas teen facing murder charges in van crash

Steven Michael Woods, Jr. (April 17, 1980 - September 13, 2011)[1] was an American who was executed by lethal injection in the state of Texas.[2] Woods was sentenced to the death penalty after a jury convicted him of the capital murders of drug dealer Ronald Whitehead, 21, and Bethena Brosz, 19, on May 2, 2001 in The Colony, Texas.[3]

Woods' co-defendant, Marcus Rhodes, pled guilty to shooting both victims to death with a firearm in the same criminal transaction and received a life sentence.

Felony murder conviction results in death sentence.
Actual murderer just gets life.

This was in 2011.

We're a sophisticated civilization! Wheee!!!

Conviction and execution of Steven Michael Woods, Jr. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contemporary commentators continue to instruct lawyers and law students that England bequeathed America a sweeping default principle of strict liability for all deaths caused in all felonies. This Article exposes the harsh "common law" felony murder rule as a myth. It retraces the origins of American felony murder rules to reveal their modern, American, and legislative sources, the rationality of their original scope, and the fairness of their original application. It demonstrates that the draconian doctrine of strict liability for all deaths resulting from all felonies was never enacted into English law or received into American law.

A lot of deeply unjust aspects of our system are the product of undue and historically inaccurate deference to supposed ancient principles which authoritarians claim they cannot now overturn, you know, due to their ancientness. Many of these ancient principles are not nearly as ancient as their defenders claim. For example, the Supreme Court rests our "anything goes" border search doctrine on ancient principles whose history is thinly documented and which several observers have questioned.

This article makes it very clear that nothing about the history of felony murder justifies charging someone with that crime because they got in a car accident in conjunction with a felony.

In historical felony murder cases in America:

There are no cases of a victim voluntarily contributing to his or her own death. There are no suicides, no voluntary drug overdoses, no overzealous police officers plunging off roofs or into icy rivers or in front of carriages while pursuing felons. There are no cases of victims having heart attacks out of mere fright (although there is one case in which a victim died while struggling with an assailant). There are no cases of victims getting the wrong medicine or contracting diseases at hospitals, or getting killed accidentally in traffic (unless you consider a planned train wreck accidental). Perhaps most importantly, there are no cases of feloniously shooting at livestock or game and unforeseeably hitting a man. So the proposal in the English treatises to predicate murder liability on accidental death in stealing poultry was never put into practice in England or America.

In reviewing nineteenth-century American felony murder convictions, we come across no freak accidents of any kind.

The Origins of American Felony Murder Rules by Guyora Binder :: SSRN

I think the Zimmerman/Martin case has been over sensationalized by the news media. I was originally concerned that it was an example of an overzealous act that wasn't being prosecuted properly because police identified with the shooter as a security person. That might yet be the case, but its no longer my primary concern. My feelings have shifted as I've seen irresponsible reporting and large numbers of people rushing to judgement without support of evidence. As time goes on, the set of problems related to that incident continues to multiply. Beyond whether or not Zimmerman is guilty, did the police properly investigate it or not? Were the charges of second degree murder appropriate or not? If they were, then why didn't this happen immediately and what is being done to address that problem? What if they aren't appropriate, will Zimmerman receive a fair trial? The situation seems to be getting worse and not better. The questions keep multiplying as do the numbers of people who have an unjustifiable confidence in their emotional convictions about the case.

However, this example is still notable:

15-year-old South Texas boy has been charged with nine counts of murder among other charges after a van he was driving crashed, killing nine of the suspected illegal immigrants packed inside.

Barrera said prosecutors would decide whether to try the boy as an adult.

I can't find any reports on this incident that explain why the boy was charged with murder. The article doesn't seem to imply that he intentionally crashed the vehicle. One assumes that its some sort of situation where people are charged with murder if someone dies as the consequence of a crime they are committing, or some other such creative legislating.

The fact remains, on the one hand we have a 15 year old who was immediately charged with murder apparently because he accidentally wrecked a car he was too young to know how to drive. On the other hand, we have a 28 year old who intentionally shot and killed an unarmed 17 year old and was not initially charged with anything.

Its easy to understand why people might feel that this does not add up.

The "prison for some, miniature American flags for others" policy mishmash that our state governments have cooked up doesn't really sit well when consequences don't seem to bear any relationship to intent or even to facts.

Zimmerman Martin case and American Justice

Rather than dying out in the dimly lit aftermath of a ginormous asteroid impact, dinosaurs on Earth may have instead spread to other planets and built a terrifying space-conquering empire.

Organic chemistry expert Prof Ronald Breslow has suggested from new research into DNA that the Jurassic Park monsters may in fact be living in highly evolved civilisations on other worlds - quite possibly with their own interstellar exploration programmes.

Death Star dinosaur aliens could rule galaxy • The Register