An Inclusive Litany

8/28/02

A federal judge in Albany, New York, ruled that movie theaters providing handicapped patrons an unobstructed view of the screen do not sufficiently comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act if the view angle is not as desirable as that available to the rest of the audience.

8/10/02

Before police arrived to escort them to safety, a handful of pro-Israel demonstrators at San Francisco State University were surrounded for nearly half an hour by a larger group of ostensibly pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators who shouted such things as "Death to Jews" and "Hitler should have finished the job." Following the confrontation, a University task force offered recommendations to improve relations between the two groups, among which was the creation of an Islamic studies program.

And at Montreal's Concordia University, about two dozen protesters surrounded and assaulted a 73-year-old Holocaust survivor and Israel supporter while chanting "Palestinian checkpoint!" A Montreal Rabbi and his wife, a Concordia religion professor, were also kicked and punched. Following the incident, university officials responded by instituting a moratorium on all campus events relating to conflict in the Middle East.

8/8/02

From a list of discussion groups and papers featured at a May conference at Yale University entitled "The Chicken: Its Biological, Social, Cultural, and Industial History from Neolithic Middens to McNuggets":

  • Chicken Consumption: History, Culture, Choice, and Taste
  • Chicken Eaters and Choice in Hartford
  • Chicken Flavor—the Quintessential Ingredient of Good Taste!
  • Chickens as Social Mediators and Currency in Borneo
  • Corn People on a Poultry Lane
  • Images of the Medieval Pheasant: The Chicken and Other Fowl in Medieval Cuisine and Ceremony
  • KFC, Chicken Flu, Free-Range Chickens, and Other Poultry Politics in Post-Socialist China
  • Making the Chicken of Tomorrow
  • The Chicken and Globalization
  • The Chicken Business: Southern Women and Poultry Production
  • The Chicken in America: The Past ... the Internet, the Future?
  • The Chicken in Folklore and Symbolism
  • The Fighting Cock and the Brooding Hen: Chickens as Symbols of Gender in Folklore and Literature
  • The Historical Creation of the Chicken
  • Thinking Like a Chicken
  • We're All Mexican Here
  • When Chickens Come to Town

An election for a community board in Nottingham, England, is to feature ballots in which voters are only allowed to choose a candidate of the same racial background as themselves.

8/7/02

The Washington Post, August 6, 2002:
The 1994 revolution that gave Republicans control of the House produced a seismic shift in federal spending, moving tens of billions of dollars from Democratic to GOP districts....

Republican House districts received an average of $3.9 billion in 1995, and that ballooned to $5.8 billion in 2001, a 52 percent increase, the analysis found. Over the same period, spending in Democratic districts on average increased only 34 percent, from $3.9 billion to $5.2 billion.

8/2/02

19-year-old Cherise Mosley sued the Aaron Family Planning Clinic in Houston, Texas, which performed an abortion on her two years earlier, when she was a minor. Mosley argues that clinic staffers should have realized the identification she produced had been falsified in an attempt to keep her parents from being notified of her intentions under state law. Had they been notified, Mosley believes, her parents would have talked her out of aborting her fetus, a decision she now regrets.