Monday, October 12, 1998
		Clinton commentary UGA law professor Ron Carlson was among several legal experts asked by USA Today to analyze President Clinton’s grand jury testimony. On the subject of the president’s claimed memory lapses, Carlson noted that this would be difficult to disprove. “When trying to avoid perjury charges, a witness often takes refuge in ‘I can’t recall,’ and it works,” he said. Carlson added that, in his opinion, nothing in the videotape of the president’s grand jury testimony amounted to a legal death blow. “I’m not saying it was a Mark McGwire tape-measure homerun for the president,” Carlson said. “But it did not create the damage to the president that we were led to believe.” Was it sexual harassment? Susette Talarico, political science, argues that a basic point is overlooked by those who believe that the Clinton-Lewinsky affair should be viewed as a private matter because it was consensual. “Many universities, corporations and public agencies have expended considerable effort drafting sexual harassment policies,” she writes in an op-ed piece that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor. “Many of these policies clearly prohibit sexual relations between superior and subordinate. The obvious and immutable power differential in such associations is automatically assumed to make consent by the subordinate all but impossible.” Talarico’s piece was one of seven excerpted by the Monitor from among a “remarkable number” of submissions inspired by the Clinton controversy. Birds and bees do it An Associated Press report out of Washington notes that only about 10 percent of birds and mammals that seem to mate for life are actually faithful to their partners. Citing studies on evolutionary behavior, AP reports that while social monogamy is relatively common, genetic monogamy is the exception rather than the rule. AP notes that “bluebirds have a sex life that rivals a television soap opera,” basing that observation on research by UGA behavioral ecologist Patricia Adair Gowaty. Gowaty has found that 15 percent to 20 percent of chicks cared for by a bonded pair of bluebirds were not fathered by the male. She reports that of 180 socially monogamous species, only about 10 percent are sexually faithful. Biotech war on pests Genetically engineered crops can be endowed with a potent insecticide or with special genes that make them resistant to commercial herbicides, allowing farmers to spray them with weedkillers that previously would have wiped out the crops as well. But recent research suggests that the biotech war on pests is far from won, according to the Washington Post. At issue: whether genetically modified plants could pass traits to enemy weeds or kill helpful insects. The question has touched off a war of words between opponents and advocates of agricultural biotechnology, says the Post. But no one has definitive answers. The Post quotes John Ruberson, a UGA entomologist in Tifton, on the matter. “We’re really flying by the seat of our pants right now,” says Ruberson. “Ask the question in four or five years and we’ll all be experts.”
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