CNN reported July 11 that according to the National Institutes of Health, U.S. teen pregnancies in 2006 rose for the first time since 1991. Translation: "One-third of girls in the U.S. got pregnant before age 20."
In the same article, CNN reported a "striking decrease" in the percentage of eighth graders smoking, down from 10 percent in 1996 to 3 percent in 2007.
While federal health experts were at a loss to explain the spike in teen pregnancies, a Centers for Disease Control official said smoking abated due to "efforts convincing kids and adults not to smoke," according to CNN...........
Jill Stanek: Linking U.S. teen pregnancies and AIDS in Africa
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About one thing Aharon Barak, former president of the Supreme Court of Israel, is right: constitutionalismthe imposition by judges of their moral intuitions on an unsuspecting publicis on the rise everywhere. The opinion of Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court in Kennedy v. Louisiana could have been written by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, so lacking was it in anything bordering on coherent analysis.
A five-to-four majority of the court ruled that imposition by Louisiana of the death penalty on Patrick Kennedy for brutally raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter and inflicting internal injuries far too gruesome to describe would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. According to Justice Kennedy, the Constitution contemplates that in the end our [i.e., the justices] own judgment will be determinative. Yet the only argument he offered for why murder, alone of crimes against individuals, may be punished by death is that murder victims are dead. Such profundity is Kennedys trademark.
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On June 17, 2006, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts granted the request of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services to cut off the respirator from Haleigh Poutre, an 11-year-old girl who had been savagely beaten by her aunt and stepfather. The court was informed that Haleigh was in an irreversible and permanent coma, with the least amount of brain function that a person can still have and be considered alive...........
Supreme Arrogance The Devolving Value Of Life
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