scholarly journals D.C. District Court Enters Over $300 Million Default Judgment Award Against Syria for the Death of Marie Colvin

2019 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 619-624

On February 1, 2019, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted a motion for default judgment and entered a $302,511,836.00 award against the Syrian Arab Republic (“Syria”). The court found the Syrian government liable for the death of Marie Colvin, who died in an artillery shelling on February 22, 2012, at a media center in the city of Homs. Colvin was a heralded war correspondent who had previously “cover[ed] conflict zones in Iraq, Chechnya, the Balkans, East Timor, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, and Libya.” Colvin's heirs brought suit, claiming that because Syria had been designated a “state sponsor of terrorism,” it could be held liable for an extrajudicial killing of a U.S. national under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). Judge Amy Berman Jackson concluded that the plaintiffs met the evidentiary burden required to support their claim after finding personal and subject matter jurisdiction.

1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 153-161
Author(s):  
C F Guarino ◽  
S Townsend

A review of legislation and implementing regulations pertaining to disposal of sludge at sea in the United States was performed. The experiences under the law of two major municipalities that have employed diposal at sea were studied and compared. Major changes are shown to have taken place in the Federal approach to regulating ocean disposal. Ocean dumping regulations are shown to have produced very different current situations for two major municipalities. The City of Philadelphia, operating under rigid federal policies, successfully ended ocean disposal over a year before the statutory deadline by implementing carefully managed, but costly, land-based sludge disposal alternatives. The City of New York, in contrast, still uses the ocean for sludge disposal and has recently won a ruling in Federal District Court which may allow continued ocean disposal for many years beyond the December 31, 1981 end-date proscribed by the law. †This paper should be included in Theme 1A - Legislation.


1983 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen F Guarino ◽  
Steve Townsend

A review of Philadelphia's Ocean Disposal Experience and studies and a review of legislation and implementing regulations pertaining to disposal of sludge at sea in the United States was performed. The experiences under the law of two major municipalities that have employed disposal at sea were studied and compared. Major changes are shown to have taken place in the Federal approach to regulating ocean disposal. Ocean dumping regulations are shown to have produced very different current situations for two major municipalities. The City of Philadelphia, operating under rigid federal policies, successfully ended ocean disposal over a year before the statutory deadline by implementing carefully managed, but costly, land-based sludge disposal alternatives. The City of New York, in contrast, still uses the ocean for sludge disposal and has recently won a ruling in Federal District Court which may allow continued ocean disposal for many years beyond the December 31, 1981 end-date proscribed by the law.


Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Sloan

Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid Aztec-European heritage. Death is their intimate friend; death is mocked and accepted with irony and fatalistic abandon. The commonplace nature of death desensitizes Mexicans to suffering. Death, simply put, defines Mexico. There must have been historical actors who looked away from human misery, but to essentialize a diverse group of people as possessing a unique death cult delights those who want to see the exotic in Mexico or distinguish that society from its peers. Examining tragic and untimely death—namely self-annihilation—reveals a counter narrative. What could be more chilling than suicide, especially the violent death of the young? What desperation or madness pushed the victim to raise the gun to the temple or slip the noose around the neck? A close examination of a wide range of twentieth-century historical documents proves that Mexicans did not accept death with a cavalier chuckle nor develop a unique death cult, for that matter. Quite the reverse, Mexicans behaved just as their contemporaries did in Austria, France, England, and the United States. They devoted scientific inquiry to the malady and mourned the loss of each life to suicide.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.


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