Possibly The Best Governmental Office Building In The World

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Lawrence O’Donnell talks with Michael Griffin, a teacher fired after planning to marry his partner. That partner, Vincent Giannetto, also joins them.

Meanwhile, In Bitcoin…

Just last week we noted that the cryptocurrency was quietly surging towards record highsonce again…

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Lazard has announced principal offering

Lazard has announced that one of its subsidiaries Lazard Group LLC, also known simply as the Lazard Group, is commencing principal offer of senior notes due in 2020. The offer will be worth $500 million and the notes will be issued by Lazard Group. They will be offered pursuant to an effective shelf registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, they will be senior unsecured obligations of Lazard Group. In addition to the notes offering the Lazard is starting a cash tender offer. This offer will be for all its outstanding 7.125% of senior notes due May 15th, 2015. With these existing notes, Lazard Group expects to exercise its right to redeem all existing notes not purchased in the tender off at a make-whole price. The group intends to use the profits from the notees offering along with cash to purchase or redeem all of its outstanding existing 2015 notes and to pay fees and expenses related. There are a number of groups acting as dealer managers for the tender offer, they include: Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Lazard Frères & Co. LLC.

Washington State tears off GMO label bill

Washington state experienced an expensive fight over the labeling of genetically modified foods or GMOs. The bill in question would have mandated that all foods containing GMOs are labeled clearly for consumers, including cereals, soft drinks chips and many other items. The bill was ultimately voted down by Washington voters by a 10 point margin.

The for labeling campaign calling for greater consumer transparency through labels of all products containing GMOs. The against labeling side claimed that labeling GMO foods would create an increased cost to consumers. The opposing side had a lot of large financial backers including the Grocery Manufacturers Association which represents big food corporations such as Campbell Foods, General Mills, Hillshire Brands, and PepsiCo. Together they raised contributed $1 million dollars to oppose the bill. Other donations against the bill came from big agricultural companies such as DuPont, Monsanto and Bayer CropScience. Their contributions totaled around $11 million. So now that the bill didn't pass and GMOs are not labeled we should ask ourselves, how much of our food is GMO and does this make a difference? If we look at the GMOs crops grown today, around 95% of U.S. commodity crops are GMO. This includes 94$ of sugar beets, 90% of soybeans, and 88% of cotton and feed corn. Papaya are an interesting case that demonstrates the benefits of GMOs. In the 1980s basically all papaya was wiped out of Hawaii due to a ringspot virus. Today papaya's grow again on the islands due to virus resistant GMO crops. In the actual stores GMO foods include basically any processed foods with sugar. For the most part non-processed foods are not GMO, for example tomatoes, potatoes, wheat and rice are not GMO in the U.S. Now there is a lot of talk about GMO foods being unhealthy. This for all intents and purposes is not true. If we look at sugar as a general example, by the time it is processed and put into your food the sugar has no chemical difference between non-GMO sugar. There are also claims that crops that are genetically modified with other animals DNA are some how bad for us. The idea that DNA is somehow owned by one animal or another is also absurd. DNA and RNA create the language or code that define life. Essentially all living things have this code and share similar parts of it. Taking code from a fish to create corn with protein may sound weird but it is just a length of code. Humans may share 99% of our DNA with apes but we also share 30% of our DNA with a potatoes. I think GMOs are a amazing step forward for science, being able to make crops resist viruses and grow more effectively with less water has huge agricultural advantages.

How advertisers became the NSA’s best friend

This week, new documents from NSA leaker Edward Snowden arrived with some troubling revelations: the NSA has been piggybacking on Google’s network, using the company’s “preferences” cookie to follow users from site to site, proving their identity before targeting them with malware. It means the agency has tapped into one of the most popular features on the web and the core of Google’s multibillion-dollar ad-targeting empire. Instead of just targeting ads and saving preferences, the infrastructure is being used to find people the NSA is interested in and silently infect their devices with malware. 

These two are now available as prints at: www.redbubble.com/people/simonstalenhag