Before the adoption of DNA testing around 2000, investigators routinely relied on visually matching hairs from suspects with those at crime scenes, but recent exonerations have cast doubt on the practice.

There has been a cruel and spurious notion that, no matter how much municipalities (and sovereign states) owed and how little their ability to pay, bonds from municipalities would always be sound because of their taxing power.

“The citizens of Detroit need and deserve a clear road out of the cycle of ever-decreasing services,” Snyder wrote. “The city’s creditors, as well as its many dedicated public servants, deserve to know what promises the city can and will keep. The only way to do those things is to radically restructure the city and allow it to reinvent itself without the burden of impossible obligations.”

WADA recently amended its rules on cannabis, raising the threshold for a positive test from 15 nanograms per milliliter to 150 ng/ml. In 1998 at the Nagano Games, Rebagliati recorded a level of 17.8 ng/ml, and argued the test resulted from second-hand smoke, which he still says. Ben Nichols, a spokesperson for WADA, said the raising of the threshold is meant to catch only athletes who smoke during the period of a competition.

“He insisted that things were changing, but he aced all of our tests,” said Rebecca Amariglio, a neuropsychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. But about seven years later, he began showing symptoms of dementia. Dr. Amariglio now believes he had recognized a cognitive change so subtle “he was the only one who could identify it.”

Fitch Ratings cites state government’s failure to boost funding for public employee pensions obligations and its lack of a cash reserve. The ratings agency says that signals an inability or unwillingness on the part of political leaders to make difficult fiscal decisions…

If all of those beneficiaries lived in the same place would they would comprise the state’s second largest city – trailing only Philadelphia and beating Pittsburgh by more than 80,000 residents…

So when the opportunity has come to obtain funds not only to acquire the Bulova Building and also the Brunswick, raze them, and finally, after 60 years of efforts, get Lancaster Square East ‘right’ with a upscale residential development, the City nonchalantly turns it back on the Brunswick Hotel.

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: After a bruising budget season in which the administration was unable to score any major policy wins, Steve Aichele, Gov. Corbett’s chief of staff, is stepping down, according to two people in the governor’s inner circle…

A recent photo in the Intelligencer-Journal showed two middle age police officers who looked as though they would be at risk of a heart attack if they had to run around a block.

One senator said that many of the Democrats told their counterparts in the chamber that “we’d rather fix this. We’d rather fix it without a rule change. It was fixed without a rule change in 2005 because Democrats agreed not to filibuster.” It was clear, the senator said, that “folks want their to be a resolution short of a rules change.”

FINANCIAL TIMES: US Senate Democrats are preparing to adopt what their opponents call “the nuclear option” to expedite White House appointments in a move that will poison relations with Republicans in a chamber already divided deeply along partisan lines…

WE.CONNECT.DOTS: There is no more nobler purpose than journalism. Reporters gather facts into an orderly format designed to inform readers about something they need to know.