U.S. service sector employees who receive tips have been excluded from the latest hike in the federal minimum wage that kicked in on July 24, leaving the public to cover the cost of their healthcare, according to economists and advocates. The federal minimum wage on Friday rose to $7.25 from $6.55. But only seven states guarantee tipped workers the minimum wage, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project, a New York-based advocacy group for low-income workers. The minimum wage for so-called "tipped" workers has been frozen at $2.13 an hour since 1991, the report found. Waitresses and waiters, who comprise the majority of tip-receiving workers, have nearly three times the poverty rate of the nation's workforce, it said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE56N48E20090724

Lawyers for Fredrick Colting, who wrote a sort-of follow-up book to J.D. Salinger's seminal work “The Catcher in the Rye,” appealed a decision from earlier this month banning the publication of his book, “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.” The judge on the case, Manhattan federal judge Deborah Batts, found that the book impermissibly infringed on Salinger's copyright. Click here for that opinion; here for previous LB coverage of the case. She ruled that the novel, penned by Colting, an American living in Sweden under the pseudonym “J.D. California” did not fit into the fair use exception in copyright law. Specifically, Batts ruled that because the book did not constitute a critical parody that “transformed” the original. The book imagines a grown up Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of the original, wandering the streets of New York after having escaped from a retirement home. Not surprisingly, then, Colting's appeal to the Second Circuit (click here to read it), focuses to a large degree on this “transformation” idea, largely by highlighting the degree to which it allegedly comments on Salinger's relationship to the novel and the Holden Caulfield character itself.
“Google Books” project mostly involve copyright issues. Manhattan federal judge Denny Chin (he of the 150-year Bernie Madoff sentence) is currently reviewing a large and complex settlement agreement reached last year between Google and a handful of publishers. The publishers sued the search-engine giant in 2005, claiming the company's Google Books project--an effort to digitize huge volumes of books and ultimately make them publicly available--violated their copyrights. Judge Chin is slated to make a final determination on the proposed settlement, which allows Google ultimately to allow access to preview of books that are still under copyright but are out of print, and to sell access to them, later this year. Click here for a Washington Post article from last fall on the settlement. But regardless of what Judge Chin decides, Google is pushing ahead with the broader project. And according to a Boston Globe article out Friday, Google has already scanned some 10 million books, of which 1.5 million are now available online for free. A growing concern, according to the Globe, deals not with not copyright but antitrust: that Google will end up with monopolistic control of access to millions of scanned digital books. "Google is creating a mega bookstore the likes of which we have never seen,'' said Maura Marx, executive director of Open Knowledge Commons, a Boston nonprofit organization. WSJ Law Blog July 24, 2009

Reprint agreement will make U-M rare books widely available July 23rd, 2009
Source: University of Michigan from the news release:
The University of Michigan will make thousands of books that are no longer in copyright—including rare and one-of-a-kind titles—available as reprints on demand under a new agreement with BookSurge, part of the Amazon.com group of companies.
The agreement gives the public a unique opportunity to buy reprints of a wide range of titles in the U-M Library for as little as a few dollars. As individual copies are sold on Amazon.com, BookSurge will print and bind the books in soft-cover form.
Maria Bonn, director of the U-M Library’s scholarly publishing office, said the reprint program includes both books digitized by the U-M and those digitized through the U-M’s partnership with Google. The initial offering on Amazon will include more than 400,000 titles in more than 200 languages ranging from Acoli to Zulu.

Mick Jones, the Clash’s lead guitarist, has amassed an impressive collection of the paraphernalia of performance and marketing materials of the bands he has worked with.
The guitarist, who was a prominent figure in the punk rock movement of the seventies and eighties, opened his Rock-n-Roll Public Library in London on July 22. Based in an office near Portobello Road, west London, close to where Jones formed The Clash with Joe Stummer in 1976, the "guerrilla library" will include 10,000 items from the guitarist's private collection.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/5894780/Clash-guitarist-Mick-Jones-has-become-a-guerrilla-librarian.html

Spy Memoir Unsealed Twenty-Five Years After Author's Death July 24, 2009
The British Library made public yesterday a 30,000-word memoir in which Anthony Blunt, one of Britain’s most renowned 20th-century art historians, and curator of the Queen's art collection, described spying for the Soviet Union, beginning in the mid-1930s, as “the biggest mistake of my life.” The NY Times reports on the unsealing of the memoir after twenty five years. Blunt intended it as a testament to family and friends, and it was given to the British Library in 1984 by the executor of Blunt’s will, John Golding, on the condition that it be kept secret for 25 years.

The Sixth Borough
Hoboken, New Jersey is a city of about one square mile sandwiched between the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels. Once the butt of urban renewal jokes ("Hey, if it’s Hoboken, don’t fix it!"), the city has enjoyed a renaissance in the last quarter century as its proximity to Manhattan’s Financial District has attracted more affluent tenants, pumping money into the local economy and reviving what was once a depressed town. The town’s name, according to the Hoboken Historical Museum, is a corruption of the Dutch hoebuck, meaning "high bluff," or the Lenape Indian hopoghan hackigh, meaning, "Land of the Tobacco Pipe."
http://www.cooperator.com/articles/689/1/The-Sixth-Borough/Page1.html

New Jersey is the most crowded state with 1,165 people per square mile, and Alaska is the least crowded with 1.1 persons per square mile.
http://books.google.com/books?id=gqJRq1WGZecC&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=%22people+per+square+mile%22+%22new+Jersey%22+illinois&source=bl&ots=tAWXurlOCv&sig=DGtl9ESabhdjVeqNI-KNw7zK0k0&hl=en&ei=6g9rSvfpOIqENMmAlfkG&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

Population density, from the 2000 census with 2007 estimates figured in:
New Jersey the highest at 1,171.1 and Alaska the lowest at 1.2 persons per square mile. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density

On July 27, 1940 Bugs Bunny made his official debut in an animated film short called A Wild Hare. Even though a slightly different version of the rabbit had been around in some earlier films, A Wild Hare is considered the first official Bugs Bunny film because it's the first one that used his trademark voice and the first time he asked Elmer Fudd, "What's up, Doc?" Bugs Bunny was modeled on Groucho Marx. The Writer’s Almanac