Personal Prescription and Medical Data Widely Sold and Distributed
New York Times, And You Thought a Prescription Was Private : "...in fact, prescriptions, and all the information on them — including not only the name and dosage of the drug and the name and address of the doctor, but also the patient’s address and Social Security number — are a commodity bought and sold in a murky marketplace, often without the patients’ knowledge or permission...
See also CDT's Health Privacy Project which states that the organization "will take on key policy questions, including: the proper role of notice and consent, the right of patients to access their own health records in electronic formats, identification and authentication, secondary uses, and enforcement mechanisms. It will address both the traditional exchange of records among providers and payers, as well as new consumer access services and Personal Health Records."

New online database detailing land and property values in the U.S.
News release: "Filling a major gap in the availability of residential property data, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the Wisconsin School of Business announced a new online database detailing land and property values in the United States. Located in the Resources and Tools section of www.lincolninst.edu, Land and Property Values in the U.S. provides separate price indices for land and structures, in addition to the more common price indices for property -- land and structures combined. Information on the values and rents of residential properties in the U.S. cover three dimensions:
• Rent-Price Ratio: The ratio of rents to prices for the stock of all owner-occupied housing
• Aggregate U.S. Land Prices: Values and price indexes for all land, structures, and housing in residential use
• Metro Area Land Prices: Values and price indexes for land, structures, and housing for single-family owner-occupied housing units in 46 major U.S. metropolitan areas."
Dina Gottlebova Babbitt (1928-2009)
While a prisoner in Auschwitz in 1944, Dina Gottlebova, then 19, was ordered by the war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele to paint portraits of Gypsies upon whom he was conducting experiments. Because they needed her to paint, the Nazis spared Dina's life. She later immigrated to the United States, where she worked in Hollywood's animation industry, drawing such beloved cartoon characters as Wily E. Coyote, Daffy Duck, and Tweety Bird. In the 1970s, seven of the Gypsy portraits resurfaced and were acquired by the Polish government-sponsored Auschwitz State Museum, but the museum refused to return any of the paintings to Dina.
The Adams-Medoff comic strip about Mrs. Babbitt (with additional art by Joe Kubert and a foreword by longtime Marvel Comics publisher Stan Lee), titled "The Last Outrage," was published recently by Marvel Comics and=2 0turned into a motion comic by the Walt Disney Company, which included in its re-release of the DVDs of "Anne Frank," "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," and "A Beautiful Life." In recent years, the Wyman Institute, together with comic art publisher J. David Spurlock of Vanguard Productions, organized a series of petitions to the Auschwitz Museum in support of Mrs. Babbitt, including one by 450 comic book artists and writers from around the world; one by 50 prominent attorneys emphasizing Mrs. Babbitt's legal right to the paintings; and one by prominent museum officials, curators, and painters. http://www.impactwire.com/mbarticle.asp?id=417

Featured author: Cormac McCarthy, born Charles McCarthy,[1] (born July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island), is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist who has authored ten novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He has also written plays and screenplays. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and sometimes to Herman Melville.
In college, McCarthy won the Ingram-Merrill award in 1959 and 1960.
The Orchard Keeper was awarded the Faulkner prize for a first novel.[3]
He won a Traveling Fellowship award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1969, McCarthy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing.
In 1981, McCarthy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.[2]
In 1992, McCarthy was awarded the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses.
In 2007, McCarthy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for "The Road."
In 2007, McCarthy was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, one of Britain's oldest literary honors.
http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy
http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/Biography.htm

Words Cormac McCarthy uses in his novels:
http://www.johnsepich.com/words_cormac_mccarthy_uses_in_his_novels.pdf

The Cormac McCarthy Journal
http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/journal/Default.htm

On August 11, 1596 William Shakespeare (books by this author) and Anne Hathaway buried their only son, Hamnet, who died at the age of 11 of unknown causes. Hamnet was named after Shakespeare's close friend, a baker, Hamlet Sadler. ("Hamnet" and "Hamlet" were virtually interchangeable names.) Hamnet had a twin sister Judith, named after the baker Hamlet's wife, Judith.
James Joyce (books by this author) was fascinated with Shakespeare, and in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sits in the National Library and envisions a scene in which the living Shakespeare performs a role in a play that he has written.
"The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied HAMLET all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words …:
HAMLET, I AM THY FATHER'S SPIRIT, bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever."
Edith Wharton (books by this author) died on August 11, 1937 at the age of 75, at her 18th-century house in Île-de-France, on the outskirts of Paris. The Writer’s Almanac