NUTTY PROFESSOR: U.S. NOBEL GENETICIST SAYS BLACKS DUMBER THAN WHITES
James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has provoked outrage with his comments, made ahead of his arrival in Britain today.The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” [via THE TIMES OF LONDON]
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TICK TICK BOOM: THE SANDS SET TO BE BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS TONIGHT
ATLANTIC CITY – It may once have been among the runts of Atlantic City’s casinos, but the fabled Sands Casino Hotel will be going out with a big bang Thursday. The 21-story casino — once home to the smallest gaming floor in town and the famed Copa Room, where Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack often performed — is to be imploded at 9:30 p.m. in what promises to be a giant party. Las Vegas-based Pinnacle Entertainment Inc. will redevelop the Sands site at Indiana and Pacific Avenues with a $1.5 billion mega-casino resort scheduled to open by 2012. The Sands, which was called the Brighton for its first year in honor of the historic hotel that was torn down at the site, was the place where Sinatra used to hang his hat when he was in town. The rest of his Rat Pack cronies also routinely hung out and performed there during the casino’s heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. It closed in November. [via the INQUIRER]
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NRA PREZ TO PHILLY: ‘From My Cold Dead Hands, Yo!’
The day after crime victims marched in Philadelphia to demand stronger gun-control laws, the president of the NRA spoke to law students in Wilmington tonight and denounced efforts to combat crime by restricting gun ownership. “Philadelphia doesn’t need any new anti-gun laws to combat the lawless,” said John C. Sigler, a Delaware lawyer who was appointed president of the firearm-advocacy organization this year. “They simply need to enforce the laws they already have.” Speaking to students at the Widener University School of Law, Sigler, a former Dover police captain and Navy submarine veteran, delivered a hard-line argument: He said gun-control laws don’t work and are not the solution to violent crime. “I don’t see any evidence that the NRA has made us safer,” said Alan Garfield, a professor. [via the INQUIRER]