Aftermath of Flight 1549
The Middle Seat Terminal - is reporting today that more than a dozen passengers from the flight have contacted a well-known aviation accident law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, to “learn more about their rights after the accident.” Andrew Maloney, a lawyer at the firm said the firm wasn't necessarily filing a suit. "Right now we're trying to do the responsible thing and investigate the incident," Maloney said. "And that's what we've told people who've contacted us." US Airways has ponied up a little already. The airline sent passengers $5,000 checks--plus reimbursing airfare--the weekend after the accident. The carrier also upgraded all passengers on board to "Chairman's Preferred" status, entitling them to automatic upgrades, exemptions from baggage fees and bonus miles for a year.
See a recent story in the National Law Journal. Several top schools are retooling their grading policies, moving away from letter grades or, short of that, allowing professors to give out more grades at the top end of the curve. Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School, for example, are switching from the traditional grade and letter policies to pass/fail systems. At the same time, New York University School of Law now allows professors to give more A's.
According to this LA Times story, it's the latest example of how prosecutors and police around the country are rethinking their strategies in the age-old battle against prostitution. The class offers first-time offenders leniency in exchange for a promise that they will change their ways.
Federal authorities in Boston have accused Forest Laboratories of improperly marketing its antidepressant drugs Celexa and Lexapro for use in children, and of paying kickbacks to encourage doctors to prescribe the drugs for such use. The government's civil complaint, originated by whistleblowing former company officials as a false-claims or “qui tam” action, was unsealed February 25. The suit alleges that Forest failed to disclose a medical study that determined the company's antidepressant drugs were ineffective for pediatric use. That study also found that the drugs could cause suicidal thoughts in children. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the NYT's; click here for the complaint. WSJ Law Blog February 26, 2009

Featured American poet: Marcus Jackson of Toledo, graduate of Start High School, University of Toledo and New York University (MFA)
http://www.bloodlotus.org/marcusjackson.htm
http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/marcusjackson.html
I learned of Marcus one night after meeting his sister, Jessica, at Calvino’s in Toledo.

Criminals plotted to steal Abraham Lincoln’s remains from his tomb in Springfield, Ill., in 1876, 11 years after he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. The plan, hatched in a Chicago bar at 294 West Madison Street called The Hub, was to take the coffin from the tomb, put it in a wagon, haul it 200 miles north to the Indiana Dunes and hold it until the state of Illinois paid $200,000 ransom to get it back. There was no night watchman, and the custodian of the tomb lived two or three miles away, The only security was a single padlock. As for Lincoln's body, it was above ground, inside a sarcophagus sealed, not with cement, but plaster of Paris. When the robbers broke into the tomb and opened the sarcophagus, the Secret Service moved in. The crooks got away and were picked up a couple days later.
None of this made much of a splash because it took place on the night voters cast their ballots in the presidential race between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden--a hotly contested race that wasn't decided until the next year. Lincoln’s body was moved seventeen times between the warm May afternoon in 1865 when it was first placed in the temporary receiving vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery and the day it reached its current resting place in 1901. http://www.libertycountybodyshops.com/ http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1982/3/1982_3_76.shtml

From the Article:
What’s Wikileaks, the net’s foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list email addresses of the site’s confidential donors as a leaked document? That’s exactly the conundrum Wikileaks faced after someone from the controversial whistle-blowing site sent an emergency fund-raising appeal to previous donors. But instead of hiding email addresses from the recipients by using the bcc field, the sender put 58 addresses into the cc field, revealing all the addresses to all the recipients.

"Pleonasm," which stems via Late Latin from the Greek verb "pleonazein" ("to be excessive"), is a fancy word for "redundancy." It's related to our words "plus" and "plenty," and ultimately it goes back to the Greek word for "more," which is "pleōn." Pleonasm is commonly considered a fault of style, but it can also serve a useful function. "Extra" words can sometimes be helpful to a speaker or writer in getting a message across, adding emphasis, or simply adding an appealing sound and rhythm to a phrase--as, for example, with the pleonasm "I saw it with my own eyes!" M-W Word of the Day