Goldacre also came to my mind. I listened to an interview with Ben Goldacre and Robin Williams, his uncle discussing examples from his newly published book, "Bad Science" and MMR was the lead example ~ http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2008/2403358.ht...
Goldacre made the observation that while vaccination scares occurred in various countries a different layman explanation as to why it was scary occurred for each country. In the UK it was the link between MMR and Autism. In other countries it is something different. It's sad that mums are irrational on the subject of vaccination. It saves lives.
From memory the story wasn't helped by the UK PM appearing to dither vaccinating his own child, "Blair signals support for MMR" ~ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1803609.stm and "My son has had MMR jab, says Brown (in dig at Blair)" ~ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1509845/My-son-has-ha...
In the period January to September 2002, 32% of
the stories written about MMR mentioned Leo Blair,
as opposed to only 25% which mentioned Wakefield. [0]
[0] The above quote is cited in wikipedia ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#cite_no... and is from an article by Goldacre in the Guardian, "The MMR hoax" ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/aug/30/mmr.health.med... which has conveniently been pulled for copyright reasons.
What definition of "innocent" are we using?
They may not be liable, but they're not innocent.
It's been determined the East Anglia University climate researchers broke the law by obfuscating data, but the statute of limitations has run out. Let's see if any of them lose their positions.
There's no such thing as a "statute of limitations" in England and Wales, and if you're going to accuse people of criminal behaviour you'd better back it up with a reference, sonny.
"Statute of Limitations" was my wording for the following from the article "But the scientists will escape prosecution because the offences took place more than six months ago."
Excuse me if I used a technical law term incorrectly. Someone decided (outside of the law?) that more than 6 months deserves forgiveness.
There you go...gramps.
Your link says that UEA failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request within the required time limit. UEA is the body legally required to make that response, not any of its individual employees. That detail is the same in the US.
So, in short, "broke the law by obfuscating data" is an outright falsehood, for which you should now apologise.
"Scientist at the heart of the 'Climategate' email scandal broke the law when they refused to give raw data to the public, the privacy watchdog has ruled."
The first word appears to be a misprint since the ensuing sentence requires a plural subject. The same story appeared in other news sources today. Try doing a Google News search.
You can have the last word if you want. I'm done.