Hasta La Gadget!

A Long Island data storage company has agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle federal investigations into claims its employees bribed executives at JPMorgan Chase in exchange for licensing contracts. The company, FalconStor, will admit to wrongdoing as part of the terms of the agreement, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

FalconStor employees reportedly gave more than $300,000 in bribes to executives at JPMorgan’s Global Technology Infrastructure division, in exchange for $12.2 million in contracts. FalconStor didn’t just hand over boring cash money, either: The JPMorgan honchos got restricted stock shares, gambling vouchers and golf memberships for their pains, Dow Jones reports.

Bloomberg reports that JPMorgan was not accused of wrongdoing in the case, despite the fact that the bank executives reportedly accepted the bribes and held up their end of the deal.

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We’ve heard previous reports that North Korea was building their own PCs, but a more recent report out of the South Korean Dong-a Ilbo newspaper suggests that a tablet may also be in the works.

It’s unclear whether or not the tablet was made in North Korea or in China, though previous reports of a North Korean tablet demoed at the Pyongyang International Trade Fair were said to be developed at the Korea Computer Center. Then again, the national media has also said their computers were “designed and developed purely using [their] own expertise,” though a little digging proved otherwise.

There is said to be no camera on the device, and it has no access to the Internet. There is, however, an encyclopedia, games, eBooks and a map service.

They call it the Samjiyeon, which is a district in the Ryanggang province of North Korea that has its own airport, named after a group of three lakes. So essentially, it’s a tablet named after a location named after a lake trio. Very meta.

The translation gets difficult regarding price (any Korean speakers out there, a little help would be very appreciated), but we expect that this tablet, if real, will only get in the hands of an elite few.

To the surprise of nearly everyone, the Supreme Court has upheld the individual mandate and saved the skin of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the national health insurance reform that President Obama and his congressional allies crafted and passed in 2009. It is a creaky, complicated contraption that could have collapsed had the supporting structure of the individual mandate been pulled out, but somehow it passed muster with the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, perhaps in recognition that it was an idea originally generated by the Heritage Foundation to protect and preserve the role of private insurers in health reform and to nix the logical alternative of a single-payer system. What happens now? Is it full steam ahead or will there continue to be difficult passages? We posit five distinct possibilities below.

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Eric Holder testified that his Justice Department will only undertake enforcement action against medical marijuana organizations operating “out of conformity with state law.”
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Her risky writing liberated me, made me feel that it was alright not to aspire to be a war correspondent, but to dream of artfully capturing the life in front of me.
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