The world's leading consumer of steel has just imposed heavy tariffs (up to 55%) on cold-rolled steel imports, which it says are hurting its own domestic steel industry.
No, it's not the US ... it's China.
January 14th, 2004
This BBC article discusses a ruling in which a US judge has ruled that a woman who killed a man in a car crash must carry a photograph of her victim lying in his coffin.
Now, I don't personally have a problem with that. I think it's a good idea. But the headline barely hints at the full story ... read the article for that. This woman was driving drunk, she was gabbing on her cell phone while she was driving drunk instead of focusing what little remained of her powers of concentration on her driving, and she hit another car head-on and destroyed an entire family. She killed the husband outright, the wife is in an irreversible coma, and their child (yes, she was pregnant at the time of the accident) was delivered by C-section and is being raised by relatives.
For this, she gets away with 30 days in jail, house arrest, probation, and having to carry a photograph. They didn't even revoke her goddamn license -- hell, they didn't even SUSPEND it. This woman has conclusively proved her utter unfitness to operate a motor vehicle -- driving drunk wasn't good enough for her, gabbing on the phone instead of concentrating on her driving wasn't good enough, no, she had to do BOTH AT ONCE.
IMHO, this woman should have been charged with second-degree murder, and her driving privileges should be revoked for life just for starters. The reason people do things like this so casually is because we keep letting them off with slaps on the wrist.
MIT gurus Ron Rivest (of RSA fame) and Silvio Micali have come up with an innovative micropayment scheme that would "allow e-tailers to sell inexpensive digital items rather than physical products." The applications to pay-per-addressee schemes to make spam unprofitable are obvious.