Pardoning Power of Article II of the Constitution, The

Following President Gerald Ford\u27s unconditional pardon of former President Richard Nixon on September 8, 1974, claims were made that the pardon was invalid because it came before indictment and conviction. Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski was urged to test its validity in court. Indeed, one federal judge expressed in open court the view that the public interest required the pardon\u27s validity to be tested. The Special Prosecutor\u27s decision not to proceed appears well founded when a review is made of the history of the President\u27s pardoning power

Smoothing finite group actions on three-manifolds

We show that every continuous action of a finite group on a smooth three-manifold is a uniform limit of smooth actions.Comment: Final version to appear in Duke Math Journal, 34 pages, 2 figure

The Hilbert--Smith conjecture for three-manifolds

We show that every locally compact group which acts faithfully on a connected three-manifold is a Lie group. By known reductions, it suffices to show that there is no faithful action of $\mathbb Z_p$ (the $p$-adic integers) on a connected three-manifold. If $\mathbb Z_p$ acts faithfully on $M^3$, we find an interesting $\mathbb Z_p$-invariant open set $U\subseteq M$ with $H_2(U)=\mathbb Z$ and analyze the incompressible surfaces in $U$ representing a generator of $H_2(U)$. It turns out that there must be one such incompressible surface, say $F$, whose isotopy class is fixed by $\mathbb Z_p$. An analysis of the resulting homomorphism $\mathbb Z_p\to\operatorname{MCG}(F)$ gives the desired contradiction. The approach is local on $M$.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure; to appear in Journal of the AM

Central limit theorems for random polygons in an arbitrary convex set

We study the probability distribution of the area and the number of vertices of random polygons in a convex set $K\subset\mathbb{R}^2$. The novel aspect of our approach is that it yields uniform estimates for all convex sets $K\subset\mathbb{R}^2$ without imposing any regularity conditions on the boundary $\partial K$. Our main result is a central limit theorem for both the area and the number of vertices, settling a well-known conjecture in the field. We also obtain asymptotic results relating the growth of the expectation and variance of these two functionals.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOP568 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Gradients in abundance and diversity of ground-dwelling arthropods in temperate silvoarable fields

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Temperate agroforestry: yield of five key arable crops near tree rows of Populus X Canadensis

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El indulto como excepción. Análisis de los indultos concedidos por el gobierno español durante 2012

This article focuses on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the pardons awarded by the Spanish Government in 2012. The first aim of this article is to know the Spanish Government's policy on pardons. The second one is to approach the legal and political nature of this figure. The act of pardon is a characteristic of sovereign power. Historically, pardon is an expression of the sovereign right of pardon, of his clemency power, forgiveness, in other words, its reserve exercise of power over the lives of the subjects. However, the evolution of the State model and the political and legal structures has made the pardon to be in a border situation: condemning the judiciary and the executive pardoning. Given this unique situation, it is interesting to analyze the uses of pardon and try to explain some reasons behind these uses. Key words: Pardon, Executive Government, Judicial System, Torture, Responsibilit

Algebraic varieties with semialgebraic universal cover

We study projective varieties whose universal cover is biholomorphic to a semialgebraic open subset of a projective variety