On April 25, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reinstituted a class-action against a group of banks that require their credit card customers to settle their disputes in arbitration rather than litigation. (Here’s the Reuters report.) The cardholders “alleged that the banks illegally colluded to force the cardholders to accept mandatory arbitration clauses in their cardholder agreements,” according to the ruling, violating antitrust laws. Opinion here:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/ross.pdf?mod=djemWLB&reflink=djemWLB

E-mail management a mighty struggle for U.S. agencies
A report issued on April 23 the Government Accountability Office said that while of the four agencies it reviewed e-mail policies generally contained required elements, but about half of the senior officials were not following these policies and were instead maintaining their e-mail messages within their e-mail accounts, where records cannot be efficiently searched, are not accessible to others who might need the information in the records, and are at increased risk of loss. Instead, e-mail messages, including records, were generally being retained in e-mail systems that lacked recordkeeping capabilities, which is contrary to regulation.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27181

Corporate Foundation Giving Reaches an Estimated $4.4 BillionSource: Foundation Center
Giving by corporate foundations increased 6.6 percent in 2007 to an estimated $4.4 billion, according to Key Facts on Corporate Foundations, a new summary report released by the Foundation Center. Looking ahead, slightly more than half of corporate foundations surveyed (54 percent) expect their giving to increase in 2008.
+ Full Report (PDF; 781 KB)
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According to Will Hopkins, a former partner in the Washington office of Ross, Dixon & Bell, tens of thousands of songwriters submitted their original songs in March to American Idol, twenty finalists were selected in early April, and on April 23, the voting for the songwriting contest closed. Hopkins said: “I got wrapped up in writing songs in law school, but I had always written and composed full-scale works of music in my head. I could hear the full orchestration, chord changes and bass notes, and I could make up the melody. But I had no training in music and didn’t play an instrument, or come from a family of musicians. But, all the time Id walk down the street and I’d be singing a tune out loud. So with my first paycheck from Ross Dixon I bought a synthesizer and started taking piano lessons from a friend of mine in DC.”
WSJ Law Blog April 23, 2008

Tune in May 20 and 21 to find out the winner and hear it performed.
http://songwriter.americanidol.com/

Use Google as a dictionary (define ________)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&defl=en&q=define:Axon&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title
When reading a book, I note words I am unfamiliar with and then look them up. When I typed define axon last weekend, I found definitions plus interesting Web sites, such as medicinenet, mercksource, and more than one link to NIH (National Institutes of Health).

Rome’s greatest libraries If ‘your library is your portrait’, as Victorian journalist Holbrook Jackson once wrote, then Rome’s three great libraries – the Angelica Library, the Casanatense Library, the Collegio Romano’s Crociera – certainly offer an impressive likeness to their setting.
http://www.theromanforum.com/articolo.asp?ID=728

In December, 2005, The Mount, Edith Wharton's Landmark Estate, Purchased the Author's Prized Library from Rare Book Dealer in England
http://www.edithwharton.org/about/4.php?record=23
See description of the 2,600 volume library at above link. Also, see “Restoration Drama,” in the April 28, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.
Edith Wharton's library at The Mount
http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2008/02/edith_wharton_cliffhanger_no_m.html
Berkshire Bank has extended until May 31 a $3 million fundraising deadline for Edith Wharton Restoration Inc., and The Mount will open May 9 for the season while the nonprofit seeks to restructure its debt with key creditors, according to an announcement on April 23.
http://edithwharton.blogspot.com/

April 28 is the birthday of (Nelle) Harper Lee, (books by this author) the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), born in Monroeville, Alabama (1926), the daughter of a local newspaper editor and lawyer. She was a friend from childhood of Truman Capote, and she later traveled to Kansas with him to help with the research of his work for In Cold Blood (1966). In college, she worked on the humor magazine Ramma-Jamma. She attended law school at the University of Alabama, but dropped out before earning a degree, moving to New York to pursue a writing career. She later said that her years in law school were "good training for a writer."
Lee wrote very slowly, extensively revising for two and a half years on the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird (which she had called at different times "Go Set a Watchman" and "Atticus"). She called herself "more a rewriter than writer," and on a winter night in 1958, she was so frustrated with the progress of her novel and its many drafts that she threw the manuscripts out the window of her New York apartment into the deep snow below. She called her editor to tell him, and he convinced her to go outside and collect the papers.
The Writer’s Almanac