Thursday Morning Notes, News, Views, Links, Whatever; Dish Wins In Court Over ABC -- This Is Simply Huge

I'm way behind this morning.

WJS Links

Blackberry to reduce workforce by up to 40%. Wow.

Google may stop tracking with cookies. Could be a very interesting alternative that would be a serious game changer. I hope they do it.

Starbucks: leave your gun behind. Posted earlier.

Big insurers are skipping health exchanges. One can see where this is headed. Trainwreck.

Priceline stock becomes the first company listed in the S&P 500 to trade at $1,000 in the index's history.

This is huge: Dish Network won a legal victory Wednesday as a federal judge denied broadcaster ABC's request to shut down features of its "Hopper" digital-video recorder.

BMW is testing new ways to build electric cars. BMW is launching the first large-scale test of whether building cars out of carbon fiber and plastic instead of steel can overcome the obstacles to adoption of electric cars.

Health care costs will rise about 6x the rise in inflation: National health spending will jump 6.1% next year when key provisions of the federal health-overhaul law take effect, a slower growth pace than previously expected, federal number-crunchers projected Wednesday.

White House signals Ms Yellen (emphasis on the "Ms") will be Fed chief nominee.

Detroit residents will get their chance to tell the judge about their concerns with cuts in pension.

Op-ed: I never read Karl Rove's op-eds, but I agree with the headline of his op-ed today -- defunding ObamaCare is not the way to go. But the tea leaves suggest to me the Tea Party knows what it is doing. They are taking a page from John Kerry's playbook.

Los Angeles Times

I talked about this earlier. The US, which can't even get weekly unemployment reports right, was demanding that Syria, with a one week deadline, must account for its chemical weapons which it has been stockpiling for 50 years, and which grew during the US-Iraq scuffle. The US is now backing off. I didn't bother to read any more than the headline, so I don't know if a new deadline has yet been put in place.

Hmmmmmm....our granddaughters and I were discussing earthquakes this morning -- while watching Bill Nye the Science Guy on her laptop before heading to school... and now there's a report there were a flurry of <4 .0="" angeles="" downtown="" earlier="" earthquakes="" east="" los="" of="" p="" today.="">
Ooohhh -- Ms Hillary Rodham Clinton will accept an honor from my alma mater, USC, in November. Whoo-ah! Maybe an honorary doctorate degree in political science. I assume Benghazi won't be mentioned. That, of course, forever ruined her chances for a Nobel Peace Prize. Or not.

Scientists discover a legless lizard near LAX. In other news, police report a man with broken kneecaps in Chicago.

The National Books Awards announces it 2013 fiction long list. 

The Boston Globe

Massachusetts has a new computer for tabulating unemployment insurance claims: it came in over budget and two years later. Unemployment remains at 7.2% in this state. Otherwise it's all sports and politics.

The New York Times

Top story above the fold, with a photo: Iraq becoming undone; more sectarian violence; worse than "before," whatever "before" was.

A must-read story: mystery solved over identity of author of "slave's biography." An incredible story. 

In 2002, a novel thought to be the first written by an African-American woman became a best seller, praised for its dramatic depiction of Southern life in the mid-1850s through the observant eyes of a refined and literate house servant. 

But one part of the story remained a tantalizing secret: the author’s identity.

That literary mystery may have been solved by a professor of English in South Carolina, who said this week that after years of research, he has discovered the novelist’s name: Hannah Bond, a slave on a North Carolina plantation owned by John Hill Wheeler, is the actual writer of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” the book signed by Hannah Crafts.

Beyond simply identifying the author, the professor’s research offers insight into one of the central mysteries of the novel, believed to be semi-autobiographical: how a house slave with limited access to education and books was heavily influenced by the great literature of her time, like “Bleak House” and “Jane Eyre,” and how she managed to pull off a daring escape from servitude, disguised as a man. 

I will have to read the book. Thank you NY Times.