Gov. Pat Quinn of the state of Illinois will sign an amendment to the state’s Vehicle Code this week, making Illinois the 17th state in the US to have a ban on texting (text messaging) while driving.
The bill does have the exception however if the driver pulls over to park, or puts the car in neutral while stopped in traffic.
Since last year, 16 states have banned texting while driving including Oregon, New Hampshire, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Washington DC.
There are currently senators planning to push a bill that would make it federally illegal to text while driving. Recent studies have shown increased accident rates caused in part thanks to texting and show that texters are at substantially increased risk of getting into accidents.
“With drunk driving it was important to pass tough laws, but the laws won’t really have any effect unless they’re enforced and the public knows about it and it’s properly adjudicated,” says Barbara Harsha of the Governor’s Highway Safety Association. “So passing a law isn’t the solution, it’s only part of it.”
Result for: washington dc
Earlier this week US President Elect Barrack Obama announced his selections for some key positions at the Department of Justice. One of the names on his list drew a lot of attention among people who have been watching the RIAA’s lawsuit campaign against file sharers.That’s because his choice for Associate Attorney General happens to be a long time RIAA lawyer who has worked on some of their highest profile P2P lawsuits.
Tom Perrelli has been working with the RIAA as far back as the Napster lawsuit. He was involved in the landmark 2002 case in which the RIAA attempted to write their own subpoenas without any judicial oversight. He’s also done work for SoundExchange, and seems to have been instrumental in pushing through draconian internet radio royalties.
It’s entirely possible that the appointment has nothing to do with Perrelli’s work for the recording industry. He was already a well respected Washington DC lawyer before he began working on RIAA cases and even worked in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration.
However it’s also worth noting that Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden, is on the record in favor of involving the Attorney General in file sharing cases.
In any case it seems somewhat ironic that Perrelli’s responsibilities will include being the top civil rights official in the US.
Result for: washington dc
The Bodleian Library in Oxford and Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC have announced plans to reproduce all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays printed before 1641, online.
“There are no surviving manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays in his handwriting so the quartos are the closest we can get to what Shakespeare really wanted,” said Bodleian spokeswoman Oana Romocea.
“Some quartos do, however, have his annotations around the printed text.”
Many of the quartos are currently only available to scholars and the project is aimed to make the prints more accessible to the general public. The libraries say the downloading of the quartos will begin in April and take about a year to complete.
“We (at the Bodleian) have about 55 copies, although some of them are duplicates,” said Romocea.
“Each quarto is different, so it’s very interesting from a research perspective to compare the quartos.
“For example, some of the famous lines in ‘Hamlet’ exist in one quarto and in another they don’t, or they are very different.”
