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| Darla Moore, left, in a March 24, 2011 file photo, and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in January 2008 (Associated Press) |
Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters tournament, admitted the first female members in its 80-year history Monday: former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina financier Darla Moore.
"This is a joyous occasion," Augusta National chairman Billy Payne told the Associated Press. "These accomplished women share our passion for the game of golf and both are well known and respected by our membership. It will be a proud moment when we present Condoleezza and Darla their green jackets when the club opens this fall.
"This is a significant and positive time in our club's history and, on behalf of our membership, I wanted to take this opportunity to welcome them and all of our new members into the Augusta National family," Payne said.
The Georgia club, closed for the summer, opens again in October.
Augusta National came under heavy scrutiny in 2002 when Martha Burk of the National Council of Women's Organizations urged the club to include women among its members. Then-club chairman Hootie Johnson said Augusta would not be forced into admitting a female member "at the point of a bayonet."
Payne took over as chairman in 2006.
Augusta National, which opened in December 1932 and did not have a black member until 1990, is believed to have about 300 members. Although the club until now had no female members, women were allowed to play the golf course as guests, including on the Sunday before Masters week began in April.
Rice was the national security adviser under former President George W. Bush and became secretary of state in his second term.
"I have visited Augusta National on several occasions and look forward to playing golf, renewing friendships and forming new ones through this very special opportunity," Rice said. "I have long admired the important role Augusta National has played in the traditions and history of golf. I also have an immense respect for the Masters Tournament and its commitment to grow the game of golf, particularly with youth, here in the United States and throughout the world."
Moore first rose to prominence in the 1980s with Chemical Bank, where she became the highest-paid woman in the banking industry. She was the first female to be profiled on the cover of Fortune magazine.
"Augusta National has always captured my imagination, and is one of the most magically beautiful places anywhere in the world, as everyone gets to see during the Masters each April," Moore said. "I am fortunate to have many friends who are members at Augusta National, so to be asked to join them as a member represents a very happy and important occasion in my life.
"Above all, Augusta National and the Masters tournaments have always stood for excellence, and that is what is so important to me."
"Mars rover Curiosity vaporizes rock with laser" Los Angeles Times 8/20/2012
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity unleashed its laser this past weekend on a nearby rock named Coronation, hitting the softball-size chunk with 30 pulses in a 10-second span.
With more than 1 million watts of power in each 5-billionths-of-a-second pulse, the laser shots from the ChemCam instrument vaporized the rock into plasma. The device then used its spectrometers to analyze the elemental composition.
Like the initial photos taken by Curiosity’s cameras, the laser exercise was meant to test whether ChemCam was working properly. But it could provide some useful scientific insight. If the composition of the plasma seemed to change over those 30 pulses, then it could mean the laser was digging into successive layers of rock with each pulse.
Scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge have also picked their first drive-to spot — a place about 1,300 feet east-southeast called Glenelg, which is at the nexus of three different types of terrain. One of those types — layered bedrock — would be a tempting first target for Curiosity's drilling tool.
Los Angeles Times science writer Monte Morin discussed how the rover will roam around the Red Planet during a Google+ Hangout on Thursday.
Morin reported that this is a stressful time for the drivers:
They must sacrifice some of their Earthly existence and live on Mars time, an ever-changing schedule that is tougher than any graveyard shift. For months, operators will be essentially sequestered from family and friends to focus on Mars. While the mission is scheduled to run 23 months, it could last much longer.
The stress can be overwhelming. Separated from the rover by millions of miles, they know they can make no mistakes. A single slip-up can turn the ambitious scientific mission into a $2.5-billion Martian paperweight. It will feel at times like the entire world is a back-seat driver.
In the coming days, engineers at JPL will test the rover's steering actuators. Then Curiosity is to take its first few "steps" — driving perhaps a few feet before turning around and surveying the spot where it landed.
"Editorial: A 21st century test: What's a 'search'?" Los Angeles Times 8/20/2012
Even many who cherish the "original meaning" of the Constitution recognize that provisions drafted in the 18th century must be interpreted in light of changing technology. That is especially true of the 4th Amendment's guarantee of the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
When the amendment was adopted, unreasonable searches involved physical trespass. But in 1967 the court ruled that the 4th Amendment was violated when federal agents affixed a wiretap to the outside of a telephone booth being used by a gambler. What mattered, wrote Justice John Marshall Harlan, was whether the suspect had a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Flash forward to 2001, when the court held that police violated the rights of a drug suspect when they aimed a thermal imaging device at his house to determine whether the heat inside was consistent with marijuana cultivation. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: "Where, as here, the government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."
The latest controversy over adapting the privacy protections of the 4th Amendment to new realities concerns global positioning system, or GPS, devices, until recently an exotic technology but now as ubiquitous as the cellphones of which they are a prized feature. Seven months after the Supreme Court sidestepped a major decision on the constitutionality of warrantless GPS tracking of criminal suspects, a federal appeals court in Cincinnati has issued a decision on the subject that seems as antiquated as a rotary phone.
Melvin "Big Foot" Skinner was a drug runner who was apprehended after Drug Enforcement Administration agents established his location through signals sent by his pay-as-you-go cellphone. The agents could have sought a warrant for the information by showing probable cause that Skinner was involved in drug trafficking, but instead they obtained an order by convincing a magistrate judge that the desired data were merely "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."
Writing for the court, Judge John M. Rogers dismissively observed: "When criminals use modern technological devices to carry out criminal acts and to reduce the possibility of detection, they can hardly complain when the police take advantage of the inherent characteristics of those very devices to catch them." Perhaps not, but the 4th Amendment and the requirement of probable cause are designed to protect innocents as well.
Rogers' decision reflects two legal principles that have been undermined by technological changes. The first is that although the contents of a phone conversation may be protected from casual police intrusion, phone records are not. In the era of land lines, the courts concluded that callers didn't anticipate that the exchanges they dialed to and from would be kept secret. In the cellphone era, however, those records can pinpoint not just who called whom but also the phone's variable location.
The decision also is consistent with a distinction the Supreme Court has drawn between papers in the sole possession of a citizen, and bank and phone records that are the legal property of a corporation. But that difference is also an anachronism.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested as much earlier this year in a concurring opinion when the court held that the surreptitious attachment of a GPS device to a drug dealer's vehicle was a "search" under the 4th Amendment. It may be necessary, Sotomayor wrote, "to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."
The framers of the Constitution could not have envisioned the cellphone, much less its ability to establish the whereabouts of its owner, but the language of the 4th Amendment to protect persons and "effects" will, as it so often has, adapt to modern life.
"Op-Ed: Newton: Anaheim's ballot battle" by Jim Newton, Los Angeles Times 8/20/2012
When Disneyland first opened to the public on a sweltering July day in 1955, the city of Anaheim wasn't much more than an orange grove. It had all of 15,000 residents and was known mostly for its Halloween parade.
More than half a century later, almost everything has changed. Disneyland helped spur a development boom that has made the city California's 10th largest. Once a suburban and almost entirely white town, it now is 53% Latino and about 15% Asian. Whites make up about 27% of the city's population.
But one thing hasn't changed. The city continues to elect its representatives just as it did in 1955: Four council members and a mayor all are elected by the city at-large. The result: Four of the city's five elected leaders live in the wealthy, and predominantly white, area known as Anaheim Hills. Only one comes from the center of Anaheim, and none lives in the poorer, denser western part of the city.
Mayor Tom Tait, an earnest Republican who has attempted to infuse Anaheim government with, as he puts it, "the core values of kindness and freedom," recognizes the stresses that Anaheim's election system has placed on its geographic and social fabric. Faced with an ACLU lawsuit challenging the city's election rules, and convinced that reform is needed, Tait introduced a motion that would have allowed Anaheim residents to consider a ballot measure in November to create council districts and move their city into, if not the 21st century, at least the 20th. Districts, he said, would make for more effective representation, especially given Anaheim's peculiar geography — it stretches more than 20 miles east to west while being compact from north to south, so council members who live at the far western end of the city are far from their constituents in the east — both geographically and socioeconomically.
"The vastness of the city," he explained, "makes it hard to cover."
And yet, by a vote of 3 to 2, he lost.
Tait's colleagues protested, unconvincingly, that they're not opposed to creating districts, just that they weren't ready to endorse this particular proposal. Instead, they voted to appoint a committee to study the matter. At the same time, some have complained that districts would distort the city's politics, replacing officials whose concern is for the overall welfare of Anaheim with more narrowly focused council members, inclined to defend their constituents at the expense of the city's larger interests.
The crux of the matter is really self-protection. Because the Anaheim City Council was elected on an at-large basis, moving to districts almost certainly would cost some of those members their part-time jobs. Although the jobs pay only $18,000 a year, they also have good benefits, including a car allowance, and public officials aren't often eager to give up power voluntarily.
But even if holding citywide elections makes short-term political sense for the current crop of council members, it's bad public policy, legally risky and manifestly unfair. The lawsuit challenging at-large voting in Anaheim recites the city's sometimes unsavory past in matters of race: In the 1940s, nonwhites were only permitted to swim in Anaheim public pools the day before they were cleaned; until 1957, Anaheim continued to segregate Latinos into so-called Mexican schools, even though California had legally outlawed such schools 10 years earlier. More recently, the Anaheim Planning Commission in 2002 opposed letting a Mexican grocery chain open a Gigante supermarket in a redevelopment project because it was felt to be "too Hispanic," according to the lawsuit. The City Council eventually approved the project, but only after public outcry.
Racial tensions still divide Anaheim, which has been the scene of protests in recent weeks, as residents, many of them Latino, have claimed mistreatment at the hands of the city's police. Tait's proposal offered an opportunity for the council to demonstrate sensitivity to those concerns, but self-interest trumped broad-mindedness. "We have issues of people not feeling a sense of belonging," the mayor said. "This would have been a great first step."
It also would have saved the city what could be a costly and fruitless legal battle. Morgan Kousser, a Caltech professor and nationally recognized expert on voting rights, predicted that Anaheim will have a difficult time defending at-large elections and will have to spend heavily to do so. A similar case in Florida a few years ago ended up costing the defendants $2 million. "Does a municipality even as large as Anaheim want to spend $2 million in these times"? he asked.
Indeed, Anaheim leaders might consider the fate of Compton. The Anaheim lawsuit closely resembles a suit filed in 2010 against Compton, where an African American leadership was resisting district voting that might create more opportunities for Latinos, now the majority in that town. Compton resisted the litigation for more than a year, then eventually agreed to a settlement that put the matter before Compton voters. In June, nearly two-thirds of Compton voters approved the districts.
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