Recent expansions of federal and state law enforcement databanks to include DNA samples and profiles of innocent persons threaten individual privacy, impose unjustifiable costs on society, and may undermine our pursuit of justice. The move to permanently retain DNA from arrestees and proposals for a universal database should be vigorously opposed on matters of principle, legality, and practicality.

Recent expansions of federal and state law enforcement databanks to include DNA samples and profiles of innocent persons threaten individual privacy, impose unjustifiable costs on society, and may undermine our pursuit of justice. The move to permanently retain DNA from arrestees and proposals for a universal database should be vigorously opposed on matters of principle, legality, and practicality.

If cultures are always in the making, this book catches one kind of culture on the make. Academics will be familiar with audit in the form of research and teaching assessments - they may not be aware how pervasive practices of 'accountability' are or of the diversity of political regimes under which they flourish. Twelve social anthropologists from across Europe and the Commonwealth chart an influential and controversial cultural phenomenon.

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word—"horrorism"—to capture the experience of violence. Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the (...) perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the _Iliad_, in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty. In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality. (shrink)

Her shape and his hand -- Distractions -- The other door, it's floods of tears with consolation enclosed -- Not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there -- There are crossroads.

In the spring of 2005, the Portuguese government passed legislation paving the way for all residents to contribute their DNA to a national database to be used for medical and forensic purposes. There was no significant opposition. In sharp contrast, the United States will experience a contentious debate with strong opposition from many groups if and when such a law is proposed. Some of the reasons have to do with a history of sharply different experiences with, and trust of, the (...) criminal justice system. (shrink)