November 29, 2000

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Fourth Amendment, Rejects Roadblocks
United States Demands U.N. Relief
Will the Sun Please Sign the Kyoto Protocol?

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Fourth Amendment, Rejects Roadblocks

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday declared unconstitutional police roadblocks set up to catch drug offenders, ruling they violate privacy rights of innocent motorists, according to The Washington Post. The 6-to-3 decision rejected the tactics of Indianapolis law officers who set up checkpoints to cut narcotics traffic in high-crime neighborhoods.

Law and precedent hold that police must have reasonable suspicion before they can stop and search a person or a car. If the Indiana roadblocks were permitted, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority in Indianapolis v. Edmond, "there would be little check on the authorities' ability to construct roadblocks for almost any conceivable law enforcement purpose."

In "In Defense of the Exclusionary Rule," Director of the Project on Criminal Justice Timothy Lynch warns that "like other guarantees in the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment cannot enforce itself." He recommends that "when agents of the executive branch (the police) disregard the terms of search warrants, or attempt to bypass the warrant-issuing process altogether, the judicial branch can and should respond by 'checking' such misbehavior."

United States Demands U.N. Relief

Concerned about the diplomatic impact of the U.S. presidential elections, two senators went to the United Nations yesterday to make clear that the United States will demand a reduction in its U.N. bills no matter who heads the next administration, according to the Associated Press.

Republican Sens. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Gordon Smith, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, drove home that message to about a dozen ambassadors, arguing that they should approve the reduction now so the United Nations can get a chunk of the money the United States owes.

Washington owes an estimated $1.8 billion to the United Nations in back dues that was tied up because of congressional demands that the organization streamline its bloated bureaucracy.

The United Nations is a miasma of corruption beset by inefficiency, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and misconceived programs. The Cato Handbook for Congress recommends that the United States withhold all payments to the United Nations until it undergoes a comprehensive audit, eliminates all programs and agencies that do not meet stringent criteria for mission, organization, and performance, and Congress passes legislation that prohibits U.S. troop involvement in U.N. military operations.

Will the Sun Please Sign the Kyoto Protocol?

Scientists at Armagh Observatory claim a unique weather record could show that the sun has been the main contributor to global warming over the past two centuries, according to the BBC. The weather observations, made almost daily since 1795, comprise the longest climate archive available for a single site in Ireland.

Dr. John Butler, the astronomer in charge of the project, told BBC News Online: "We can see global warming taking place over the past two centuries that suggests that changes in the sun are at least partially responsible."

"I suspect that the greenhouse lobby have under-estimated the role of solar variability in climate change," he added. "However I am not in favor of polluting the atmosphere, for whatever reason."

In a Cato Institute book, "The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air About Global Warming," Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling Jr. explain why global warming is vastly overrated as an environmental threat. The book marshals an array of scientific data, studies and analyses to argue that initial forecasts of rapid global warming were simply wrong. Perhaps more important, the book points out that attempts to "fix" the forecast by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are even more misguided than the original projections.

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