Lawsuit seeks damages for '30s study subjects

Lawsuit seeks damagesfor '30s study subjects
IOWA CITY, Iowa -- The Iowa Supreme Court kept alive Friday a lawsuit filed by orphans who claimed lifelong psychological suffering after unwittingly becoming subjects of a University of Iowa stuttering experiment in the 1930s. Ruling 4-3, the justices agreed with a lower court in rejecting the state's claim of immunity and petition for dismissal. The attorney general's office was deciding whether to ask the court to reconsider, spokesman Bob Brammer said. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for emotional and psychological damage caused by what came to be known as the "Monster Study." The suit was brought by three former test subjects and by representatives of three others who have died. The children, taken from a state orphanage, were badgered and harangued by researchers in an attempt to make them stutter. Some became chronic stutterers; others had other lingering psychological effects. Only in recent years, when a former researcher revealed details of the study, did the orphans -- now elderly adults -- learn of their role in the experiment. They sued in 2003. The study was coordinated by pioneering speech pathologist Wendell Johnson, who theorized that stuttering was not an inborn condition but something children learned from parents who seized on minor speech imperfections, making the children self-conscious when they spoke.
Man gets life sentencein brutal murder of worker
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- In a case that shocked South Africa for its brutality, a white farmer was sentenced to life in prison Friday for the murder of one of his black workers, who was attacked with machetes, tied up and thrown into a lion enclosure, where he was devoured. The trial brought impassioned protests from demonstrators who saw the killing as another racial attack in a country still grappling with its apartheid past. Many in the courtroom in the northern town of Phalaborwa whistled and cheered in approval when Mark Scott-Crossley, 37, was led out after the sentencing. Human rights advocates said the killing also highlighted the plight of farm workers in a country with a culture of violence and a history of racial hatred and mistrust. South Africa's Human Rights Commission said in a 2003 report that attacks on farm workers were common. Most are black or mixed race, and their bosses are white. Scott-Crossley's employee and co-defendant, Simon Mathebula, was sentenced to 15 years. The pair were convicted in April.
At least 8 die in sinkingof Amazon River ship
SAO PAULO, Brazil -- An Amazon River passenger ship crashed into two barges and sank, leaving at least eight people dead and a dozen missing, Brazilian authorities said Friday. The wooden ship was traveling on a remote stretch of the Amazon late Thursday night when it collided with the barges carrying commercial trucks, said Capt. Edlander Santos of the Brazilian navy. The ship was en route to the jungle city of Manaus, 1,700 miles northwest of Sao Paulo. Santos declined to comment on how the collision happened, but said the navy will investigate the cause. Eight people were found dead and 12 were still missing by Friday afternoon. Forty people were rescued and eight suffered serious injuries. People on other riverboats and crew members from the boat pushing the barges rescued some of the 40 survivors.
Habitual liars have morewhite matter, study finds
In the lexicon of lying, there are white lies and bare-faced lies. Facts can be fudged, forged or shaded. There are fibbers, fabricators and feckless fabulists. By whatever clinical term, the truth simply is not in some people. Now scientists have an anatomical inkling why. A new study from the University of Southern California, published in the October issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that the talent for compulsive deception is embedded in the structure of the brain itself. People who habitually lie and cheat -- pathological liars -- appear to have much more white matter, which speeds communication between neurons, in the prefrontal cortex than normal people, the researchers found. They also have fewer actual neurons. To seek a liar's neural signature, the researchers recruited 108 volunteers, then sorted them into groups based on a battery of psychological tests designed to determine how often they lied, used aliases, cheated, conned people, malingered or gave false reports to police. The screening tests had been developed by clinical psychologists to diagnose a variety of antisocial personality disorders and assess levels of deceitfulness. The volunteers were then scanned using magnetic structural imaging to obtain detailed anatomical images of their brain tissue. The group of compulsive liars had 25.7 percent more white matter in the prefrontal cortex and 14.2 percent less gray matter than the normal control group.
Associated Press