More inmates in Canadian prisons will be charged for their room and board starting next year. It’s one of the latest tough-on-crime measures Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announced Wednesday. Charging more to stay in prisons, getting rid of incentive pay tied to certain inmate work and ensuring offenders are charged for their phone calls are among the changes the minister says will save a total of $10-million each year. More related to this story “All too often, victims have told us they feel the criminals have all the rights,” Mr. Toews said in a statement. “We’ve listened.” The Correctional Service of Canada currently charges inmates at the top of the prison pay scale $25 per week for room and board. It comes out of ... Continue reading →
Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times At the Nasher museum in Dallas, Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” sits in dappled light as glare streams through a patterned screen. DALLAS — Two things were supposed to happen when the Nasher Sculpture Center opened here in 2003. Famous works like Rodin’s “Age of Bronze” and Matisse’s “Madeleine I” were to be bathed in copious sunlight streaming through a glass roof. And new vigor was to come to the surrounding neighborhood. Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more. A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics. Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times Glare from a condo tower is a problem for a ... Continue reading →
The defense official said the plan was developed in response to a classified study completed last year by the director of national intelligence that concluded that the military’s espionage efforts needed to be more focused on major targets outside war zones.The new service will seek to “make sure officers are in the right locations to pursue those requirements,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss what he described as a “realignment” of the military’s human espionage efforts. The official declined to provide details on where such shifts might occur, but the nation’s most pressing intelligence priorities in recent years have included counterterrorism, nonproliferation and ascendant powers such as China. The realignment is expected to affect several hundred military operatives who already ... Continue reading →
Levine has been following federal tax policy for most of his adult life. “My main job was to forecast the economy,” he shrugs. “So taxes are tremendously important to that. And tax policy changes are tremendously important.” And, to him, those changes mostly went the same way: cutting taxes on people, like Levine and his friends, who didn’t need tax cuts, as the working class struggled.He brandishes a table that tells the whole story: John F. Kennedy brought the top tax rate down to 70 percent. Ronald Reagan brought it to 50 percent, and then to 28 percent. Levine still sounds offended. “I was making seven figures,” he says. “They lowered my marginal tax rate to 28 percent. And the median American, he was paying ... Continue reading →
Obesity researcher David Allison was on the team that identified the chunky urban rats. He and his colleagues also found signs of weight gain among captive populations of macaques, chimpanzees, vervets, marmosets, dogs, cats, and mice. For their study of vermin in the field, they reanalyzed weight data from rats captured in Baltimore alleyways as well as from rural rats trapped on parklands and farms between 1948 and 2006. The city rats had porked up more than the country rats, but both groups had probably needed to widen their burrows. I interviewed other rat experts who agreed that city rats tend to be huskier than their wild siblings, which subsist on bugs, slugs, acorns, and one another instead of half-eaten bagels and chicken wings. (Laboratory ... Continue reading →
