Texas executes inmate convicted in 1990 murder and rape

By Corrie MacLaggan

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Texas executed a convicted murderer on Tuesday by lethal injection for killing a man then raping the victim's fianc?e, even as he maintained to the end that he was "not a killer," according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Eleven other convicts are scheduled to be executed before the end of July in Texas, which has put to death more people than any other U.S. state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Last year, it executed 15 people.

Rickey Lewis was convicted of shooting to death George Newman, 45, in 1990 while burglarizing Newman's home in East Texas.

After the shooting, Lewis, then 28, raped Newman's fianc?e and stole her vehicle, according to the criminal justice department. The fianc?e later climbed out of a bathroom window and drove to a store to call police, the department said.

In his last statement, Lewis said he was sorry for what happened to the woman, but then said, "If I hadn't raped you then you wouldn't have lived." He denied killing Newman and robbing the house.

"When I saw you in the truck driving away, I could have killed you but I didn't," said Lewis, according to a statement provided by prison officials. "I'm not a killer."

DNA analysis showed that Lewis' blood and semen matched traces found at the scene, according to an account of the case from the state attorney general's office.

Lewis already had a long criminal record, including a conviction for assaulting an 18-year-old woman who had gotten in the way of his attempt to burglarize her family's vehicles.

Lewis had said that he had mental disabilities, and those claims delayed a 2003 execution date, but his execution was later rescheduled.

His death marks the second execution this year in Texas and the sixth in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

(Reporting by Corrie MacLaggan and Mary Wisniewski; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/texas-executes-inmate-convicted-1990-murder-rape-001205154.html

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VIDEO: Meet the Women of 'Defiance'

On an barely recognizable Earth in the not-too-distant future, survivors of a massive war between humans and several alien races struggle to coexist on the new Syfy series Defiance. They do so, relatively peaceably, in the titular frontier town (you might notice it’s built upon the ruins of St. Louis).

Source: http://www.ivillage.com/video-meet-women-defiance/1-a-532832?dst=iv%3AiVillage%3Avideo-meet-women-defiance-532832

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Gillmor Gang: It's Alright, Bob

The Gillmor Gang ? Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor ? convened with Gillmor in Boston and the Gang in California. We took another cut at the Google Reader damage, with @dannysullivan hating on notifications and @scobleizer hating on Android's notifications. Did I say I told him so? Yes I did. But the mere fact we spent so much time on the stream's destruction of Windows and RSS proved the point all along (for me since 2009). Namely, that the new platform is the stream, and the resulting multiplexed meritocracy of the combined social and messaging networks is where the developers will go. As Dylan said, "even the president must stand naked."

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/dcdcJEv_wAs/

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Wash. weighs abortion insurance mandate

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) ? In 1970, Washington became the first ? and remains the only ? state in the country to legalize elective abortions by a popular vote.

A generation later, and 40 years removed from the landmark United States Supreme Court Roe v. Wade ruling that extended abortion access nationwide, Washington is once again poised to stand out.

With 21 states having adopted bans or severe restrictions on insurance companies from paying for abortions, Washington is alone in seriously considering legislation mandating the opposite.

The Reproductive Parity Act, as supporters call it, would require insurers in Washington state who cover maternity care ? which all insurers must do ? to also pay for abortions.

The bill passed the state House earlier this month by a vote of 53-43, though it faces an uncertain future in the Senate. A similar bill in the New York state Assembly has been introduced each session for over a decade but has never received a public hearing.

"This is a core value for Washingtonians," said Melanie Smith, a lobbyist for NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. "We should protect it while we still have it and not leave access to basic health care up to an insurance company."

The proximate cause of Washington state's measure is the federal Affordable Care Act. Thanks to language placed in it to assuage anti-abortion congressional Democrats, insurers selling their plans on the state exchanges taking effect next year will have to segregate the premiums they collect for abortion coverage.

In addition to that built-in disincentive to insuring abortion, the law also invites states to enact stricter rules of their own. Thus far, 16 states have followed suit, barring or restricting insurance companies on their exchanges from covering the procedure. Three of those states are joining the five that have barred or limited all insurers from covering abortions since the early 1980's.

Supporters of Washington state's proposed abortion insurance mandate are careful to stress that it wouldn't lead to a dramatic uptick in abortions or require carriers with a religious bent to cover the procedure. They also note that a pair of federal plans that will be sold on all 50 state exchanges will be barred from covering elective abortions.

"It's not expanding abortion coverage," said Democratic Rep. Eileen Cody of West Seattle, the bill's primary sponsor. "It's ensuring the rights of women to get what they're paying for now and to continue their freedom of choice."

Opponents counter that the measure would require businesses and individuals to pay for abortion coverage they'd rather not have.

"Washington state would be the only state in the country that would force employers to pay for abortion," said Peggy O'Ban, spokeswoman for Human Life of Washington.

If passed, she said, it would amount to "the first conscience coercion act in American history."

Its passage, however, is not assured.

Proponents of the measure say they have the votes they need in the state Senate, but it's not clear that Senate leaders will allow it to get to the floor. It is scheduled to receive a public hearing in the Senate Health Care Committee on April 1.

Ironically, the man bill supporters will likely blame if it fails to get a Senate vote counts himself as a proud backer of the measure.

Sen. Rodney Tom of Medina, a fiscal conservative and social moderate, and one other like-minded Democrat crossed party lines to caucus with Republicans in December, handing a one-vote majority to the GOP. Seizing power for the first time in nearly a decade, elated Senate Republicans reciprocated by installing Tom as Majority Leader.

Last month, Tom addressed about 250 advocates rallying for the measure's passage on the state Capitol steps.

"I'm down here making sure that my 17-year-old daughter has the kind of protections that we need in Washington state and that all of our kids have those same kinds of protections," Tom said to cheers.

Moments later, Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat and fellow bill supporter, delivered a not-so-subtle challenge to Tom's political will.

Washington state "deserves a vote in the state Senate on the Reproductive Parity Act," Inslee said. "We are going to insist that we are not going to let anybody close the door to democracy in this state."

Another irony: though the bill has proved to be among the most hotly contested of the session, its broader impact if passed may be less than sweeping.

For one thing, most abortions are paid for out-of-pocket. According to the Guttmacher Institute, only 12 percent of abortions nationwide are paid for by private insurers, with 20 percent footed by Medicaid.

For another, because most abortions cost less than a live birth ? the procedure typically runs about $500, though late-term abortions are far more expensive ? insurers may be disinclined to stop covering them.

At present, all major insurers in Washington state cover abortions, and Cody, the bill's sponsor, said she knows of no carrier with plans to change. Insurers new to Washington state on its exchange may be tempted to adopt different policies, she said.

No matter its immediate impact, said Elizabeth Nash, states issues manager with the Guttmacher Institute, the bill's passage would be a watershed event.

"It would be a model for other states to follow," she said.

___

Follow AP Writer Jonathan Kaminsky at http://www.twitter.com/jekaminsky

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wash-weighs-1st-abortion-insurance-mandate-us-140125495.html

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Spatial memory: Mapping blank spots in the cheeseboard maze

Mar. 21, 2013 ? IST Austria Professor Jozsef Csicsvari together with collaborators has succeeded in uncovering processes in which the formation of spatial memory is manifested in a map representation.

During learning, novel information is transformed into memory through the processing and encoding of information in neural circuits. In a recent publication in Neuron, IST Austria Professor Jozsef Csicsvari, together with his collaborator David Dupret at the University of Oxford, and Joseph O'Neill, postdoc in Csicsvari's group, uncovered a novel role for inhibitory interneurons in the rat hippocampus during the formation of spatial memory.

During spatial learning, space is represented in the hippocampus through plastic changes in the connections between neurons. Jozsef Csicsvari and his collaborators investigate spatial learning in rats using the cheeseboard maze apparatus. This apparatus contains many holes, some of which are selected to hide food in order to test spatial memory. During learning trials, animals learn where the rewards are located, and after a period sleep, the researchers test whether the animal can recall these reward locations. In previous work, they and others have shown that memory of space is encoded in the hippocampus through changes in the firing of excitatory pyramidal cells, the so-called "place cells."

A place cell fires when the animal arrives at a particular location. Normally, place cells always fire at the same place in an environment; however, during spatial learning the place of their firing can change to encode where the reward is found, forming memory maps.

In their new publication, the researchers investigated the timescale of map formation, showing that during spatial learning, pyramidal neuron maps representing previous and new reward locations "flicker," with both firing patterns occurring. At first, old maps and new maps fluctuate, as the animal is unsure whether the location change is transient or long-lasting. At a later stage, the new map and so the relevant new information dominates.

The scientists also investigated the contribution of inhibitory interneuron circuits to learning. They show that these interneurons, which are extensively interconnected with pyramidal cells, change their firing rates during map formation and flickering: some interneurons fire more often when the new pyramidal map fires, while others fire less often with the new map. These changes in interneuron firing were only observed during learning, not during sleep or recall. The scientists also show that the changes in firing rate are due to map-specific changes in the connections between pyramidal cells and interneurons. When a pyramidal cell is part of a new map, the strengthening of a connection with an interneuron causes an increase in the firing of this interneuron. Conversely, when a pyramidal cell is not part of a new map, the weakening of the connection with the interneuron causes a decrease in interneuron firing rate. Both, the increase and the decrease in firing rate can be beneficial for learning, allowing the regulation of plasticity between pyramidal cells and controlling the timing in their firing.

The new research therefore shows that not only excitatory neurons modify their behaviour and exhibit plastic connection changes during learning, but also the inhibitory interneuron circuits. The researchers suggest that inhibitory interneurons could be involved in map selection -- helping one map dominate and take over during learning, so that the relevant information is encoded.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. David Dupret, Joseph O?Neill, Jozsef Csicsvari. Dynamic Reconfiguration of Hippocampal Interneuron Circuits during Spatial Learning. Neuron, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2013.01.033

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/5uyDGO3mco8/130322104258.htm

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Jimmy Fallon to Take Over Tonight Show, Move It to New York?

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/03/jimmy-fallon-to-take-over-tonight-show-move-it-to-new-york/

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Finally, Someone Figured Out How To Use Vine

Will Sasso, it is said, is an actor. If you were to, say, look for all of his Vines, you would also discover that this is the only man in the entire universe to use the medium correctly and, what's more, you will laugh all day long at his tiny, tiny videos.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/LBim0BDl4F8/

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