interesting things
Friends said Colin Devlin, whose Williamsburg dining places included DuMont and Dressler, had taken the stresses of the business hard.
via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/nyregion/brooklyn-restaurateur-dies-apparently-a-suicide.html
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), says Abedin and the State Department are stonewalling his inquiry into her arrangement working part time for her longtime boss, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while also working for New York-based strategic advisory group, Teneo Holdings.
via NYDN Rss Article only http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/senator-huma-abedin-impeding-moonlighting-inquiry-article-1.1409428?localLinksEnabled=false
Zynga’s new CEO is not a gambling man.
Don Mattrick, the former Microsoft Xbox executive who replaced founder Mark Pincus this month, said the maker of “Farmville†and “Zynga Poker†would ditch its pursuit of real-money gambling in the US.
Some investors were hoping that a real betting business…
via NY Post: Business http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/zynga_craps_out_lkZ4pvch1BwrJTzbj1M0cM?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=
Remarks on national security by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey included a disparaging allusion to Senator Rand Paul, starting a pointed exchange between the camps of two likely Republican rivals for 2016.
via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/us/politics/christie-cites-9-11-in-assailing-libertarian-trend-in-gop.html
Silda Spitzer is privately telling friends she plans to divorce her hooker-loving husband, Eliot Spitzer, Page Six can exclusively reveal.
Multiple sources tell us long-suffering…
via NY Post: Page Six http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/fed_up_silda_plans_divorce_Zk6nRhJI8V1JSzZk65vPAK?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Page
WASHINGTON (AP) — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she’s not surprised that Southern states have pushed ahead with tough voter identification laws and other measures since the Supreme Court freed them from strict federal oversight of their elections.
via Yahoo! News – Latest News & Headlines http://news.yahoo.com/ginsburg-says-push-voter-id-laws-predictable-070702489.html
WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s the stuff of spy novels: The hunted-down protagonist wins in the end because he’s got damaging documents squirreled away, a bargaining chip against the bureaucrats who want to silence him.
via Yahoo! News – Latest News & Headlines http://news.yahoo.com/snowdens-remaining-docs-unlikely-tie-us-hands-070641562.html
The company says it will use its stores as a “gateway” to uninsured Americans.
via POLITICO – TOP Stories http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/cvs-caremark-will-help-promote-obamacare-94771.html
When the Supreme Court recently gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it did so under the theory that there was little evidence of continuing racial discrimination in the states that were required to get preclearance before changing their voting laws. Congress had rather pointedly disagreed when it renewed the VRA in 2006, but no matter. The Supreme Court knew better.
So how has that theory worked out? Normally we’d have to wait a while to find out. Even Citizens United, which gutted campaign financing law, took a few years before its full effect was obvious. But in this case, a few weeks has been enough. A couple of days ago, the North Carolina Senate voted to approve a draconian set of changes to its voting laws, and there’s not much question that final passage will come shortly. Check out this astonishing list of changes in the bill:
In the past, all of this would have required preclearance from the Justice Department, and it almost certainly would have been dead on arrival. But with the end of Section 5 there was nothing left to stop them, so the bill turned into a feeding frenzy of provisions designed to suppress voting among blacks, Hispanics, the poor, and the young. “What’s happening in North Carolina,” said Ed Kilgore, “is the product of a gang of ideologues led and funded by gazillionaire Art Pope who stormed the ramparts of a once-progressive state.”
There is, needless to say, virtually no justification for any of this. “Election integrity” is the stated reason, but examples of voter fraud are vanishingly rare and no one in North Carolina has even bothered to pretend otherwise. They just want to reduce voting among any group that happens to support Democrats. If that means reducing the black and Hispanic vote—something that North Carolina’s own Secretary of State has confirmed will happen—well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, can you?
So is there any hope of overturning this law? There’s not much in North Carolina itself. But on Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would file a suit to halt a new voter ID law in Texas. “My colleagues and I are determined to use every tool at our disposal to stand against such discrimination wherever it is found,” he told an audience in Philadelphia, and a suit to stop North Carolina’s law is likely too. So this is where the fight is headed. Section 5 is dead, and despite some early noises from congressional Republicans about passing a new version, there was never any serious chance of that happening. What’s happening in North Carolina, after all, is part of broad push by the Republican Party itself throughout the country. So now it’s up to the Justice Department to go in after the fact and take these laws to court one by one. The Supreme Court seemed to think this was a perfectly adequate subsititute for preclearance. We’ll soon find out if they were serious when once of these challenges eventually wends its way onto their docket.
via Kevin Drum Feed | Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/07/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-north-carolina
In a move that sounds like a plot point from Inception, scientists say they can artificially implant a memory in a living brain… belonging to a mouse.
In a paper published this week, MIT scientists report on an amazing experiment in mind control: They’ve been able to implant the false memory of electric shocks in a mouse, so convincingly that the creatures react in fear as if the experience really happened.
The trick is actually very specific, and uses a technique that you may not expect: genetics. By activating special brain cells with gene therapy, targeting cells that react to light, scientists were able to make the mouse believe it remembered receiving an electric shock. The memories were triggered by shining a laser into the optically sensitive parts of the mouse brain via a fiber optic. The engineered mice reacted by freezing in fear because they remembered receiving a shock in this environment before–even through it hadn’t actually happened.
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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3014895/tech-forecast/artificial-mouse-memories-implanted-by-mit-scientists
