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AbstractThe largest group of foreign students currently in the United States comes from the People's Republic of China (PRC). According to a 1993 UC Berkeley survey (Zweig and Chen 1995), 33% of the Chinese students were planning to eventually return home. However in the past decade this percentage appears to be increasing. This article uses results from surveys conducted in 2001 and 2005 of Chinese students enrolled at American universities to show that the intention to return home after graduation is indeed rising. Based on logistic regression analysis, the cause behind this rise is shown to be largely driven by the economic opportunities back home, although nationalist sentiment driven by the desire to give back to their homeland is also a prominent factor. The impact of 9/11 on US visa and employment policies was shown to have little effect on Chinese students' post-graduate plans.

The growth in the number of bounty hunters and civilian contractors accompanying the U.S. military into battle has swelled during the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Civilians have been utilized in all facets of those military campaigns, including the interrogation of suspected terrorists or insurgents. Faced with intense pressure to rapidly obtain information about terrorist operations and yet having little oversight of their interrogation activities, some of these contractors and bounty hunters have been accused of abusing detainees. This Note explores the legal avenues for addressing accusations of detainee abuse by U.S. civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq and concludes that those offenses should be prosecuted in U.S. courts to ensure swift and efficient justice and protect the rights of the accused. The Author critiques several other proposed legal avenues, including international bodies, host-country justice, and civil suits in U.S. federal courts. Finally, the Note discusses the Detainee Treatment Act and argues that it provides the most comprehensive legal solution to the detainee abuse problem by promoting clear, uniform standards of interrogation, closing loopholes in existing criminal statutes, and allowing for a reasonable person defense by the accused.

President George W. Bush signed the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 ("BCRA") into law on March 27, 2002, and when it became law on November 6, 2002, BCRA marked the first significant revision of the federal laws controlling the financing of campaigns for federal office since the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 ("FECA"). Title I of BCRA banned national parties and officeholders from raising and spending "soft money." Soft money can be defined simply as contributions that are not subject to FECA's contribution regulations while "hard money" refers to contributions that do fall under FECA's domain. FECA established a series of mandatory limits on contributions to candidates and mandatory ceilings on expenditures. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), one of the bill's co-sponsors who has fought for significant campaign finance reform for more than half a decade, hoped the law would "restore the public's faith in government." President Bush hailed BCRA by stating that "[a]ll of the American electorate will benefit from these measures to strengthen our democracy."

AbstractAfter five decades of research, there is still little consensus about the relation of religious variables to environmental attitudes. Even putting aside variations in sampling and measurement, we still have doubts about where modest consensus exists—the role of religious beliefs. Religious beliefs, such as mastery over nature, are more unstable than previously considered. Moreover, more importantly, these studies have generally failed to consider the role of secular beliefs about environmental problems and the interaction they may have with religion. Using data from a 2012 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey, we find religious variables have effects conditional on secular beliefs. Moreover, we draw upon an embedded experiment that shows instability in religious dominionism—the dominant religious effect in previous work. The results suggest previous reports of religious effects are not wrong, but overstated, and eliding secular beliefs is a serious sin of omission.