This is a big story here today. A 17 year old boy, Parish Bennette, who was charged with the murder of his girlfriend, accepted a plea deal that sends him to prison for 18 years on a charge of first degree manslaughter. The victim's family, who was not consulted about the plea deal and found out by chance, is angry about the deal. They believe Bennette murdered their girl and should be punished for first degree murder.

The real shock in court today was the admission by the defense attorneys that the reason it took four months for Bennette to tell police where he had dumped the girl's body was that his attorneys told him to keep quiet about the location of the body.

The girl's family, and many other people, are outraged that the defense put the girl's family through those four months of agony. The family organized search parties and combed the area where the body was thought to be for that entire four months.

What I don't understand is why the defense attorneys kept that information quiet for those four months. It must be a defense strategy, but what would the goal be?

The Rapiscan scanner uses low-level X-rays to create what looks like a naked image of screened passengers to target weapons hidden under the clothes.

A second type of TSA scanner, built by L-3 Communications Holdings, uses radio waves and shows hidden objects on an avatar images on a screen -- not on an image of a passenger.

TSA gave Rapiscan until June 2013 to come up with a software upgrade to prevent the scanner from projecting the naked image. TSA officials said Rapiscan won't be able to meet that deadline.

As if more evidence was needed that Wall Street has rigged the game in its favor, the IRS is going to allow the banks that engaged in a massive nationwide program of mortgage fraud to write off their settlement:

Consumer advocates have complained that U.S. mortgage lenders are getting off easy in a deal to settle charges that they wrongfully foreclosed on many homeowners.

Now it turns out the deal is even sweeter for the lenders than it appears: Taxpayers will subsidize them for the money they're ponying up.

The Internal Revenue Service regards the lenders' compensation to homeowners as a cost incurred in the course of doing business. Result: It's fully tax-deductible. link

   A prosecutor in Lapeer, Michigan says, "No harm, no foul," after a charter school took the National Rifle Association's (NRA) advice and hired a armed security guard who promptly left his handgun unattended in a student bathroom.

    Chatfield School co-directors Matt Young and Bill Kraly announced last week that they had hired retired Lapeer County Sheriff's Dept. firearms instructor Clark Arnold as a security guard in response to the December mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

    "It's a tremendous asset to the safety of our students," Young told WNEM in a report that aired on Tuesday.

But by Wednesday, the school had admitted to The Flint Journal that the retired firearms instructor had made a "made a breach in security protocol" and left his unloaded handgun unattended in the school restroom "for a few moments."

Link

But, hey - no problem - the gun wasn't loaded...so, not only could it not have harmed a student, but it wouldn't have been much use against an armed intruder, either.

It boils down to a belief that greedy old people who don't work do not contribute to the economy.

The important thing to note about this hatred is that it's not unjustified. The haters aren't wrong. I loved both of my grandmothers, but they spent a lot of years just sitting around consuming goods and services while producing nothing of economic value. Retired people don't boost The Economy. Trimming their cost of living adjustments does. The more you trim, the more boost you get. Doing the reverse of Social Security and saying that everyone over the age of 65 has to write a check to the government or be turned into Soylent Green would boost The Economy even more.

The answer, according to Yglesias, is to make the old ones work and write checks to the government. Cut their benefits and make 'em work (who thinks they will be able to find jobs?) and we will all see a big boost to the Economy.

The Scarface team of director Brian De Palma and Al Pacino are re-teaming for Happy Valley, the working title of a film that will tell the story of Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno.

Wall Street producer Edward R. Pressman has optioned the bestselling book Paterno by Joe Posnanski. Dave McKenna (American History X and Blow) is making a deal to write the script. The Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation is backing the project.

The theatre's executive director, Anatoly Iksanov, told Russian television that Mr Filin was "uncompromising" in his management style.

"If he thought a performer was unready to play a certain role, or incapable of it, he would not let the performer do it," he said.

Tensions at the Bolshoi over its artistic programme have been widely reported in Russian media.

In 2011 two ballet stars - Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev - resigned in protest at the Bolshoi's new repertoire.