Headlines @ U.Va.

College ties bring Moreno to the Hill
Why was a bioethicist testifying about illegal music downloads before a Senate subcommittee? Jonathan Moreno, director of U.Va.’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, was invited to appear Sept. 30 by a Hofstra University buddy, Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. While acknowledging that file-sharing is morally wrong, Moreno’s testimony was somewhat sympathetic to downloaders. Moreno was quoted in several news reports but was clearly overshadowed by two fellow witnesses, rappers LL Cool J and Chuck D. “It was great, compared to the life and death stuff I normally do,” he said. “It was relatively undemanding. The issues are not very hard.”

Getting a jump on jobs
There will always be slackers who don’t get around to composing résumés until May, but more fourth-year students appear to be launching job searches early this year, perhaps sobered by the collective plight of last year’s grads. The Washington Post reported that one early-season career session at U.Va. drew twice the expected crowd. “This class seems to be more career-minded early on than students in the past,” said Ladd Flock, director of the Career Services Center in the College of Arts & Sciences. They “just want to have a game plan.”
— Washington Post, Oct. 2

From the frying pan into the fire?
John Allen Muhammad’s lawyers may soon regret their decision to seek a change of venue for the upcoming trial of the accused “Beltway sniper,” says law professor Anne Coughlin. Originally scheduled for Prince William County in relatively liberal Northern Virginia, the trial is now set for Virginia Beach, where juries are notoriously hard on criminals. “One assumes that the defense attorneys were weighing all these factors at the time they asked to move the trial,” Coughlin said. “But in this case, you are moving to a community with very different attitudes. You fight to move it and — whoa! — it is suddenly your worst nightmare.” The judge, not the lawyers, chose the new location.
— Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Sept. 30

Supreme Court again getting involved in electoral politics
The Supreme Court recently agreed to take a case that will revisit the standards of political gerrymandering in Congressional redistricting. The outcome could determine the balance of power in the House of Representatives for at least the next decade. Recent redistricting battles in Texas and Colorado may have caught the justices’ attention, said law professor Daniel Ortiz, who said the case has “huge potential significance. … The fact that they are interested in it means they want to look over whether the original standards need to be toughened. The fight in Colorado and Texas could not have come at a better time.”
— The Hill, Sept. 24

Michaels: Trees ‘leaf’ us powerless
Hurricane Isabel was not that big a deal, meteorologically speaking, Patrick J. Michaels wrote in a recent Washington Post commentary. So why the widespread power outages? Don’t blame the power companies, he wrote. Our love for trees, he argued, has led us to plant more, grow them bigger and refuse to trim or remove the ones that have passed their prime. Photos taken in 1900 show most trees “about one-third the size of today’s,” he noted. “Left untended and allowed to remain standing far longer than they probably should have been, many of the same trees from those old photos have become tattered wrecks, with diseased branches vulnerable to every passing ice storm and decaying hurricane.” His suggestion: Bury more power lines.
— Washington Post, Sept. 28