15 Years Later: Biggie Smalls Autopsy Report

CNN
The Los Angeles County Coroner's Office released the autopsy report on Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, on Friday, more than 15 years after the rapper was shot to death. Wallace, 24, was shot and killed early on March 9, 1997, as he was leaving a music industry party. He was riding in the front passenger seat of a Chevrolet Suburban when another vehicle pulled up beside his and someone opened fire. Wallace was shot four times, according to the autopsy report.
     The fatal bullet entered his right hip and ripped through several organs, including his liver, heart and lung. The other bullets struck Wallace in his left forearm, his back and his left thigh. He was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he arrived in full cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead shortly after 1 a.m.
     At the time of his death, he had no drugs or alcohol in his system. Wallace was 6 feet, 2 inches tall, weighed 395 pounds and had a tattoo on his right forearm that read: "The Lord is My Light and my Salvation ..."
     Los Angeles police and the FBI both looked into the case but made no arrests.
     Wallace was killed just six months after his former friend and rap rival Tupac Shakur was gunned down in Las Vegas, leading some to believe both shootings were tied to a so-called rap war between East Coast and West Coast hip-hop artists and their record companies. Shakur's killing is also unsolved.   READ FULL ARTICLE

The Bad News Behind the Good Jobs Numbers

TIME
While most of us were bracing for a poor jobs report due to the disruptive effects of Hurricane Sandy, the headline numbers of 146,000 jobs added in November and a four-year-low unemployment rate of 7.7% sent stocks higher in the minutes after the reports’ release. The Labor Department claimed that the effect of Sandy on the report was minimal, saying in a statement, “Our analysis suggests that Hurricane Sandy did not substantively impact the national employment and unemployment estimates for November.”
     In other words, we should not look at this report as surprisingly good given the effect of the super storm. Rather, the Labor Department claims that the jobs numbers should be analyzed without taking the storm into account at all. And by that standard, not only were the job numbers themselves fairly modest, but there are some worrying details in the report that should give one pause before celebrating these numbers too enthusiastically.
     Each month, the Labor Department issues its estimate for the previous month’s job growth, but it also issues revisions for the two months prior to that as well. And this report showed a net downward revision of 49,000 jobs. So really this report gave us a net job gain of 97,000 — a much less impressive figure than the headline 146,000.  READ FULL ARTICLE