New VP will scrutinize Harvard’s investments

$30.7b endowment has faced calls to use its clout to do good

By Todd Wallack
The Boston Globe
Originally published February 19, 2013

Harvard University, which often faces pressure from students and alumni to shed controversial investments, has agreed to create a senior position at its investment management arm to consider the environmental, social, and corporate governance aspects of its holdings.

Harvard Management Co. recently began searching for a vice president for “sustainable investing,” a relatively novel position in the world of university endowments.

“We think this is a positive step,” said Harvard College senior Michael Danto, one of the leaders of Responsible Investment at Harvard, which has pushed Harvard to adopt policies to ensure its investments are consistent with the university’s values.

The entire story is here.

Colo. man plotted to kill children, president

By 9News
Originally published November 14, 2012


9Wants to Know has learned a Colorado man is in federal custody after plotting to kill President Barack Obama and kill children on Halloween night in Westminster.

Sources tell 9Wants to Know Mitchell Kusick's plan involved stealing a family member's shotgun and using it to shoot children on Halloween and assassinate the president in Colorado.

Officials do not know when he wanted to kill the president.

The restraining order filed in Jefferson county court says Kusick "stole a shotgun from his aunt's house, hid the weapon, attempted to purchase ammunition for the gun" and then told his therapist about his plan.




The entire story is here.

Campus Threat-Assessment Teams Face Complex Task of Judging Risk

By Beth Mole
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published August 10, 2012

In science-fiction movies like Minority Report,psychics could identify future murderers before they ever picked up a weapon. But the task of predicting the future and thwarting violence by identifying students who are likely to do harm is, in reality, complex, difficult, and full of pitfalls.

Many American colleges set up teams after the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech to monitor campus incidents and, they hope, intervene before a potentially violent member of the community snaps. But those entities - which go by such names as threat-assessment teams, behavioral-intervention teams, or caring teams - face many challenges. Mental-health disorders often develop among young people in the traditional college-age years, but it can be difficult if not impossible to assess the extent of a person's illness early on.

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Many campuses lack ready access to mental-health experts who can authoritatively assess the risk of violence, and some experts say the assessment teams rely too little on those authorities.

At the University of Colorado at Denver, a threat-assessment team reportedly was alerted to a university psychiatrist's concerns about James E. Holmes, a former graduate student there. Mr. Holmes, who withdrew in June from a Ph.D. program in neurosciences at the university's medical campus, in neighboring Aurora, is accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others in a movie theater there last month.

News reports have said that the threat-assessment team did not meet to discuss Mr. Holmes because he had announced his intent to withdraw from the university.

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.

Doctors target gun violence as a social disease

By Marilynn Marchione
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Originally published on August 13, 2012

Is a gun like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol? Yes say public health experts, who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a social disease.

What we need, they say, is a public health approach to the problem, like the highway safety measures, product changes and driving laws that slashed deaths from car crashes decades ago, even as the number of vehicles on the road rose.

One example: Guardrails are now curved to the ground instead of having sharp metal ends that stick out and pose a hazard in a crash.

"People used to spear themselves and we blamed the drivers for that," said Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine professor who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.

It wasn't enough back then to curb deaths just by trying to make people better drivers, and it isn't enough now to tackle gun violence by focusing solely on the people doing the shooting, he and other doctors say.

They want a science-based, pragmatic approach based on the reality of a society saturated with guns and seek better ways of preventing harm from them.

The entire story is here.