Do you have the right to dry? The Seattle Times says only 19 states around the country have passed legislation outlawing bans on clotheslines. In the other 31 “clothesline crusaders” are subjected to bans by housing developments, condominium boards and local municipalities who see the age-old energy saver as unsightly. Washington state is not a right-to-dry state (neither is New York) though energy activists say they are now actively pursuing the status.

Alcohol doesn’t come with an expiration date, but does that mean it’s okay to consume really old booze? The Chicago Sun-Times says while “old liquor won’t kill you, it probably won’t thrill you either.” Anything that’s over 80-proof will keep forever as long as the bottle’s seal isn’t broken. The taste, however, won’t improve and if you see anything floating in the bottle or any discoloration, you’re better off dumping it down the drain.

The Food and Drug Administration wants to make sure popular sleep aids not only help you get to bed, but also allow you to safely function in the morning.  The New York Times says FDA is asking sleep drug manufacturers to conduct more extensive driving tests for all new sleep drugs.  But experts say it’s not easy to test how sleep aids affect driving.  One issue is that sleep aids affect everyone differently.

Due to a clerical error, female officers in Detroit have had a little more personal information shared with their colleagues than they would’ve preferred, says the Free Press.  In addition to their height and weight, female officers’ bra cup sizes were included in a department-wide memo about ordering bulletproof vests. A spokesman for the department says it was an honest mistake but was “unfortunate and embarrassing” nonetheless.

Maybe Michael Scott was on to something.  The Wall Street Journal details the secrets of effective office humor. People will like you better and think you’re smarter if you’re funny.  Office comedians need to work on their timing, their confidence and they need the ability to bounce back from a bad joke.  Reading your co-workers’ moods and attitudes can help you avoid making jokes at an inopportune time.

A group of New Jersey lottery winners are on the front page of the Newark Star Ledger this morning after winning $3.8 million each. Some of them had homes damaged by Superstorm Sandy. Dubbed “Ocean’s 16,” after their long-time place of employment, the colleagues came out to meet the media yesterday and talk about plans for their $448 million Powerball win.

Are you a chewer or a smoosher? The Wall Street Journal says the food industry is hyper-aware of our texture preferences. Most of us are chewers (43 percent) and enjoy the sensation of working away at a soft cookie over anything else. (Midwesterners prefer soft cookies while Northeasterners prefer hard ones.) Thirty-three percent identify as crunchers, 18 percent are smooshers and favor the smooth and creamy flavor of yogurt. The remaining eight percent are suckers—literally, they like to savor a long-lasting piece of candy.

Billionaire Elon Musk unveiled his plan to fix California’s mass transit system yesterday says the San Jose Mercury News. Dubbed the Hyperloop, the solar-powered capsule would propel people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes. Musk’s plan, which calls for a high-speed transit system that operates between 580 and 760 miles per hour, only exists on paper thus far. But he says it’s much cheaper than the bullet train California is now trying to to develop. VIDEO

We can all pretty much agree that polar ice is melting and sea levels are rising. The real question for scientists: how fast? The New York Times cites one recently published paper, which estimates that given the pace we’re currently moving at, sea levels will rise by 23 feet by 2100.  Those levels could be limited to seven feet if we enacted aggressive emissions standards immediately.

Not everyone is born with the gift of gab, says the Wall Street Journal. But the art of chit-chat is an essential skill, albeit a dying one in the age of texts and video games. Experts say there’s no need to worry though—learning how to be a good conversationalist just takes practice. The most important thing to remember is to focus on the other person. Most conversations can be broken into five parts: starting off with a common observation—Hot enough for you?—is a good way to dive in.

Despite the “hook-up culture” they live in, a new study has found that college kids aren’t having any more sex than previous generations. What has changed, says the LA Times, is whom they’re having sex with. According to researchers, students these days are much more likely to report having sex with a friend or a casual date than college students two decades were.

The New York Daily News details a tragic end for the Love Boat in today’s paper. The cruise liner used in the popular ABC series was being dismantled in Turkey for parts when two workers were killed after inhaling noxious gas in the engine room. The former Pacific Princess had experienced significant flooding as it sailed from Italy to Turkey, and it was while workers tried to fix some of the damage that the accident took place. VIDEO

Forget boudoir shots—these days it’s all about dudeoir pics says the New York Post. Yes, that’s right. Men are lining up to get sexy pictures taken of themselves, says the paper. And it’s not just the super fit ones who are willing to go bare it all—photographers say “dozens of average Joes have also stepped up to the plate.” Photo packages aren’t cheap, however, so expect to shell out anywhere from $500 to $1200 for your own dudeoir shots—or try convincing your significant other to spring for them.

If you’re racking your brain for a suitable name for your baby boy, you might want to consider John, David or Steve says the Daily Mail. According to a new study, men with those names tend to be more successful in business than men by any other names. Men named Rick, on the other hand, are most likely to have lost money on a business venture. Some other fortuitous options: Pauls, Alans and Richards are more likely to strike it rich and Freds, Brians and Bens are most likely to “hit the big time.”

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em seems to be the new slogan over at Ticketmaster. The Wall Street Journal says a new micro-site called TM+ allows scalpers to list their tickets on Ticketmaster’s primary ticketing site so customers can sort through everything that’s available. The Journal says for years, the company has wanted to get into the $4-billion-a-year ticket resale marketplace, and TM+ marks its first step. The article notes that now Ticketmaster can collect three sets of fees on a single ticket.

Al Jazeera America is slated to launch later this month, and in anticipation of the channel’s stateside debut, USA Today asks if the country is ready for what it has to offer. The paper says one goal the network has is to “eviscerate” to misconception that Al Jazeera is anti-U.S. in any way. The station has staffed up with 850 new hires and 12 bureaus around the country and has hired talent from rival stations—my former on-air partner at CNNfn Ali Velshi is hosting their flagship business show. Though executives say they don’t expect to beat rivals in the ratings right out of the gate, Al Jazeera is betting that by steering clear of the partisan politics that have become de rigeur on other cable news channels, they can become a major player.

The Denver Post has some good advice on how to stay sane and save some money while undertaking one of life’s least pleasant tasks: moving. One thing you can do is prep as much as possible—remove table legs, dismantle bed frames—so that when the movers come you won’t be paying for as much time. Another piece of advice: create an emergency moving kit so you can say, cook meals while your cutlery is still buried at the bottom of a box.

Blame it on Snooki and crew, but the Jersey Shore isn’t exactly a place that screams decorum. The city of Wildwood is trying to change that, says the Philadelphia Inquirer, by installing a dress code on its boardwalk famous for “bobbling bellies, deep cleavage, and large acres of exposed flesh.” The new ordinance, which went into effect in early July, requires anyone over 12 to wear shoes and a shirt while strolling the boardwalk, and forbids swim trunks that sag more than three inches.

“Fifty Shades of Gray” may be a steamy beach read but according to a new study, it promotes emotional and physical violence against women. The Detroit Free-Press says the study was the work of a Michigan State University professor who says many of the themes in the erotic bestseller—stalking, intimidation, threats, isolation and humiliation — are “consistent with intimate partner abuse as defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.” Professor Amy Bonomi says her goal is not to get the book banned but simply to highlight the fact that the main relationship is not a healthy one and shouldn’t be emulated.

The New York Post poured over the fat September issues delivered by fashion magazines this morning and rated each against the competition. Most fell between a four-star review (buy a subscription) to a two-star one (read at a nail salon), though Elle, InStyle and Harpers got high marks—the latter despite an essay penned by Huma Abedin, obviously written days before her husband’s latest sex scandal. Stalwart Vogue gets taken to the cleaners for not focusing enough on fashion content, as does W for an article on wearing clothes backwards and sideways.

Your cute animal photo of the day comes from the San Diego Union-Tribune this morning. That’s Xiao Liwu celebrating his first birthday at the San Diego Zoo with a 200-pound cake. While most toddlers would probably insist on icing, Liwu’s cake is frosted with carrots and sweet potatoes and made out of ice. He still looks pretty happy with it.

We’re right in the middle of summer swimming season, which prompts the Washington Post to ask a question that’s on many a beachgoers mind: what are your chances of getting attacked by a shark? The answer, not totally comforting: they are “extraordinarily low — though not nonexistent.” Last year, for example, there were 80 unprovoked shark attacks around the world, 7 of which led to death. Fifty-three of them took place in US waters and nearly half of them took place off the coast of Florida.

There’s a rare example of cooperation between Cuba and the United States in the New York Times this morning. When lives are on the line it seems that political disputes with Cuba are set aside.  Cuba has really good hurricane forecasters.  The Times says there is routine and unrestricted cooperation between Cuban forecasters and US forecasters but that’s where it stops. The countries’ respective disaster management agencies, for example, don’t communicate at all.

What if there was an app that knew what you were going to ask before you asked it? That day is already here, says the New York Times this morning. The buzz word in Silicon Valley these days is predictive search and companies big and small are hard at work to make your phone or your laptop into “robotic personal assistants.” Imagine your phone telling you to leave early for a meeting so you can beat the traffic even though you never told the phone you had a meeting or how you’d be getting there. A new generation of apps knows to scan your calendar, read your email, track your location and parse traffic patterns to offer up a new level of customized information.

Even though Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” is everywhere this summer, the album is only being released this week.  Jim Farber takes on the criticism that the song has received recently in today’s New York Daily News. He says instead of “kind of rapey” as the song has been called for the lyric that goes “I know you want it,” the song is “kinda flirty — especially since the lyrics make clear the woman in question grabbed Thicke with gusto well before he offered his own, rather warmly delivered sexual comeback.”

To many Vatican insiders, it looks like Pope Francis has softened his stance on gays. Yesterday he said he “won’t judge gay priests,” a sign many took to mean that an ” opening for a more conciliatory attitude toward gay members of the church” may be around the corner. Though the church is already open to gay members, some advocates felt heartened at the Pope’s openness to discuss the issue.

Forget the Cracker Jacks. The San Francisco Chronicle says come next season, you’ll be munching on homegrown kale at AT&T Park. The Giants announced plans for a huge 3,000-square-foot organic garden that is to be planted right behind the center-field wall, making it the first such garden at a professional sporting facility in the US. The plan is that one day the garden will supply produce for the park’s concession area and also double as an open-air classroom.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram chronicles the love story of Helen and Les Brown in today’s paper. The California couple celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary earlier this year. They were both born on December 31, 1918, and eloped in high school. And last week, they died a day apart, Helen on July 16 and Less the next day.

Movie theaters will be forced to convert to digital next year but USA Today says many small theaters have no idea how they’ll afford to make the switch. For independent theaters with only one screen investing in a slew of new technology can be prohibitively expense and may force many of them to shut their doors. Converting one screen in a historic theater, for example, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The New York Daily News says got its hands on some never-before-seen footage of JFK at Cape Cod the summer before his death in 1963. The 15-minute silent film was released by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and shows the 35th president sunbathing, playing golf and cuddling with his daughter Caroline. VIDEO

Is it good for wood or not? Anyone who’s ever been confused by the claims on a package of Krazy Glue can now rest a little easier. The Detroit Free-Press says the company is being sued for falsely advertising their product by claiming it’s good for wood on the front of the package and then claiming the opposite on the back. The class action lawsuit is the brainchild of a retired teacher, who says she’s doing it for the principal not for the money.

There’s an obituary for Gary Davis in today’s New York Times. Davis, who died last week at the age of 91, was the first and most vocal member of the One World movement. In 1948 he renounced his US citizenship at the American Embassy in Paris and spent the next six decades “expelled from and frequently arrested in a spate of countries and carrying a passport of his own devising.” Davis’s aim wasn’t to stir trouble—he believed if there were no states, there would be no wars.

There’s a crazy aerial photo on the front page of the LA Times this morning. Pope Francis ended his visit to Brazil in Rio de Janeiro with a mass over the weekend and let’s just say the turnout was pretty good. Over three million people, including heads of state from Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, showed up on Copacabana beach to listen to the Pope, who called on his massive audience to take up the mantle of social justice.

So a bear walks into a bar…No, that’s not the start of a bad joke—it’s actually what happened in Colorado last week, reports the Denver Post. The large bear ambled into Lonigans Saloon Nightclub and checked out the joint for a while before sauntering out. And if that weren’t odd enough, the paper says the funny thing is that no one really seemed to notice. If it weren’t for the eagle eyes of a passing pedestrian who snapped some photos as evidence, no one would have ever known.

A skydiver unwittingly ended the season for a 20-year-old shortstop when he parachuted onto the field in Hannibal, Missouri, kicking Mattingly Romanin in the face as he did so.  The second of three parachuters organized as part of the pre-game entertainment, he lost control before landed squarely on the young shortstop.  (Romanin’s response:  “Wow, really? That just happened?)  Romanin, who is part of a summer league organized to woo college scouts, took the bizarre accident in stride, says the Kansas City Star. He stood up and played all nine innings before realizing he had a serious concussion. VIDEO

A high-speed train was going more than twice the speed limit when it derailed and crashed in Spain yesterday, reports the New York Times this morning. There were about 200 people on board and authorities say at least 60 are dead. Reports say the train was traveling at about 110 mph at the time of the accident though the speed limit on that stretch of track was about 50 mph. The impact was so forceful that one of the train’s car shot up 15 feet in the air. VIDEO

There’s a nice photo of former President George H.W. Bush in the Houston Chronicle this morning. The elder Bush is sporting a shaved head, a coif he adopted in solidarity with the members of his Secret Service detail to show support for the 2-year-old son of one of the members who is being treated for leukemia and has started losing his hair.

All hail George VII. Kate and William finally announced the name of their new baby yesterday and the Daily Mail says the full name—George Alexander Louis—offers hints about what the royal couple was thinking. Though Alexander and Louis are more uncommon, there’s little confusion about where George came from: “George V, founder of the House of Windsor, was the Queen’s adored ‘Grandpa England’. George VI was the beloved father in whose image she has shaped so much of her reign.”

I know they look killer with your outfit, but maybe don’t wear your shoes with tiny fake guns as the heels to the airport. The New York Post says TSA agents at LaGuardia tweeted a photo of the gun shoes, which had been confiscated from a passenger, as a cautionary tale about what not to wear. The TSA also tweeted out a photo featuring a black belt adorned with silver bullets as example No. 2 of what not to wear through security.

What’s summer without ice cream? And really, what’s ice cream if you can’t eat it with your hands? The Star Tribune has a great DIY ice cream sandwich guide in today’s paper that any ice cream lover will want to check out. The whole process is relatively simple—the trick is to get the ice cream wedged between your wafers before it becomes a melted pile. After much testing, the key seems to be strategic planning so that everything comes together at the right time.

Both the New York Daily News and the New York Times both say Anthony Weiner needs to resign. This comes a day after it was revealed that the mayoral hopeful was still sending explicit messages in 2012, a year after he left the House to deal with his…issues. Despite the revelation, Weiner says he will continue his run. The Times says “to those who know his arrogance and have grown tired of the tawdry saga he has dragged the city into, this is not surprising.” The Daily News is more blunt: “Weiner must also see that, having built his campaign on deception, he has badly damaged the process of selecting the city’s next chief executive.”

If you want your kids to be good drivers you better start looking at your own behavior. A new study about texting while driving has found that teens are often just mimicking the behavior of their parents. While about two-thirds of teen drivers say they’re guilty of texting while driving, the percentage of parents who admit to doing so isn’t far off. Other bad behavior that is passed on? Making calls at red lights and fiddling with the radio station while driving.

Snack toys aren’t toys you can eat—they’re toys intended to give kids a short burst of distraction. While many parents hand over their smartphones to distract kids in the few minutes before soccer practice or until dessert arrives, toy makers are increasingly trying to fill that gap with new toys for tight schedules reports the Wall Street Journal. Think Monopoly without the jail or timed Scrabble with only three-, four-, and five-letter words.

Comparing the hospital exits of Diana and Kate, USA Today checks out how the 1982 and 2013 royal births were different and what seemed familiar. In 1982, Charles walked out of the hospital with baby William and then handed him off to Diana. Yesterday, Kate and William did the opposite. For all the other differences—car seat versus none; tweets versus none—some things looked the same. Kate, for example, chose a polka-dotted dress that echoed Diana’s 1982 choice.

The Wall Street Journal’s Katie Boehret reviews a cool new product in today’s paper—a controller that replaces a traditional mouse with one that gets its cues when you wave your hands in the air.The Leap Motion Controller plugs into your computer’s USB port and sits next to the computer. Boehret says it was difficult to figure out how to incorporate into your daily computer routine, and though painting apps and games take on a new dimension, she says after about 10 minutes her hands got tired.

Does a lap dance count as theater? That’s what the lawyers for three “gentleman’s clubs” are claiming, says the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a way to get around a new city law that would tax the income earned from lap dances. Philly businesses are exempt from paying the “amusement tax” if they offer “legitimate contemporary American theater.” To prove their point, the lawyers hired a Yale-educated expert to argue that the women she saw at Club Risque, Cheerleaders, and Delilah’s were “dancers creating characters, displaying technical virtuosity…much like a ballet dancer on point shoes.”

“A Birth, A Boy, A Prince, A King” is the headline on the front page of the Guardian this morning. That about sums it up. After weeks of anticipation, the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a healthy baby boy yesterday around 4:24 p.m., a child destined to be the 43rd monarch of England. The royal couple waited about 4 hours before making their announcement, which they did by placing a note on an easel positioned outside Buckingham Palace. The Daily Mail says Prince William stayed the night with his wife and new son and will take two weeks paternity leave, which includes a government stipend of £136.78 per week. The paper also says at 8lb 6oz, the future king is the heaviest in 100 years.

Saying it’s the first in the industry to do so, Taco Bell announced yesterday that it will drop its kids’ menu to focus on Millennials. The change will happen sometime in 2014. The move has been interpreted as a proactive one to appease parents and health experts who worry that luring kids into a high-fat, high-calorie meal with the promise of a toy is dangerous. But only about one percent of Taco Bell’s sales come from kids’ meals, says USA Today, making the elimination more of a savvy business move than an altruistic one.

Milwaukee reacts to the news that the Brewers leftfielder Ryan Braun accepted an MLB suspension yesterday for violating the league’s drug policy. Braun is the first player to get a doping-related suspension. Journal-Sentinel columnist Michael Hunt says it’s clear that “Braun is just like a lot of us, a flawed human being who made bad decisions that finally caught up to him.”  Hunt says the people of Milwaukee will forgive him, but he must apologize to the fans “who, until Monday, had been saying, ‘Say it ain’t so, Ryan.’”

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a pill you could take instead of schlepping to the gym? The New York Times says the idea of exercise in pill form is the subject of two recent studies. The most encouraging of the two tracked the progress of obese mice, who, when injected with certain compound lost weight (even on a high-fat diet) and started to use more oxygen, even though they appeared “more physically lazy and inactive than they had been before the injections.” In other words, the mice were getting a workout without doing anything.

The LA Times says in the wake of a Texas woman’s death last weekend, amusement parks around the country are trying to figure out how to deal with a growing problem: one-size-fits-all seats. Theme park operators say the nation’s obesity problem plus the increased mobility of people with missing limbs has made designing safe seating a serious issue. The bar that many roller coasters rely on to hold people in place doesn’t work properly when a seat is occupied by an extra-large rider or someone without two legs.

South Korea is trying to tackle the problem of smartphone addiction among its teens, says the Wall Street Journal this morning. The government defines smartphone addiction as “spending more than seven hours a day using the phone and experiencing symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia and depression when cut off from the device.” They estimate about one in five South Korean teens is an addict. To combat the issue a nation-wide counseling program is being launched this year as well as a training program for teachers.

Is Jon Hamm to sexy to win an Emmy? That’s the question New York Post is mulling over this morning. Hamm has been nominated six times for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series but has never taken home a statue, a situation that some insiders say smacks of “Slap the Stud’ syndrome. For the uninitiated, STS syndrome is the based on the idea that “Hollywood is run by a bunch of old geezer guys who say to these handsome leading men, ‘You have good looks, money, the babes, the whole world at your feet. Here’s the one thing you can’t have.’ ” George Clooney, David Duchovny and Rob Lowe have suffered similar fates because of their sexy genes.

As the world waits to see whether Princess Kate’s baby will be a boy or a girl, the Daily Mail introduces us to the two doctors who will bring the child into this world. Drs Marcus Setchell and Alan Farthing have been attending to the Duchess throughout her pregnancy and have several decades between them of treating the royal family. The Daily Mail says the other question on everyone’s mind is whether the future monarch will be a Leo or a Cancer, and what the baby’s sign could say, personality-wise. The cut off is around 5:00 p.m. (Noon EST) today—if Kate goes delivers before then, she’ll have a Cancer, anything after and she’ll have a little Leo.

“Don’t-hold-back Phil didn’t hold back,” writes the LA Times’ Bill Dwyre this morning. He’s talking about Phil Mickelson’s big win at the British Open yesterday, in which he ended up with a final-round 66, on a “course that seldom allows those.” And he birdied four of his last six holes, also unheard of. As Dwyre says: “It was masterful, storybook stuff. The greatest players in the world dream about days like this and seldom get one.”

The New York Times takes a look at some victims of Hurricane Sandy that have flown under the radar until now. Apparently, Manhattan’s oenophiles are in an uproar about the possibility that 27,000 cases of rare and expensive wine were ruined when a downtown storage unit was overrun with water during the super storm. Owners of the wine, many of whom housed collections worth six or seven figures, have filed a lawsuit against the owners of the storage unit demanding to know the fate of their famed bottles.

The bodies of three women wrapped in plastic were found in Cleveland this weekend. And as police combed the neighborhood for more possible victims, residents wondered why so many heinous crimes against women have been committed in their city. This weekend’s discovery was the third disturbing instance to make international headlines in just four years, says the Plain-Dealer. In 2009, police found the bodies of 11 women in the buried in the backyard of Anthony Sowell. And earlier this year, three women were freed from a Cleveland house after being kept hostage for more than a decade.

If your ambitions include climbing up the class ladder, think carefully about where to live. The New York Times says a new study has found that geography is a barrier to people in the Southeast and Midwest. Some of the highest levels of income mobility are found in the Northeast—in Boston and New York—as well as in the Great Plains and West. Researchers say the difference isn’t just apparent in areas with higher incomes, noting that there are sharp differences in mobility between cities like Atlanta and Seattle where the median income is roughly the same.

The idea is “so Portland you’d think the idea would have originated here” says the Oregonian. But it’s actually the brainchild of three London designers. So what is this idea? Using discarded newspapers to make disposable bike helmets for bike-sharing programs. One of the main criticisms of the bike-sharing programs cropping up in major cities is the lack of helmets—either you have to lug around your own or rent one. But if their idea takes off now you could pick up a recycled helmet—including a strap also made from paper pulp—the next time you go out for an impromptu ride. VIDEO

How tough is the newspaper business these days?  Consider this: The Washington Post bought a furnace-making company yesterday to diversify. The Wall Street Journal says it follows the company’s recent strategy of investing where there’s “strong earnings potential.” Last year, the Post bought into a provider of hospice and home health-care services. Some investors were unhappy with the decision, however strategic, saying the move was “well outside of their core competencies.”

Can the Brooklyn Nets buy a championship? The New York Times says the team’s owner Mikhail D. Prokhorov is spending so much money on his latest player deal that the league’s “luxury tax” on excessive spending will result in an $82 million bill.  Next season the team’s payroll will be $101 million, which prompts the Times to call Prokhorov the “Russian George Steinbrenner — only taller, richer and with a cool accent.”

Steven Rattner was the guy who got General Motors and Chrysler through their Chapter 11 filings relatively painlessly. His advice to the people who’ll do the same thing for the city of Detroit: “Good luck, pal, your job looks tougher than mine was.” In an interview with Tom Walsh of the Free-Press, Rattner said it will be much harder for the city to emerge from bankruptcy as it was for the two auto giants because of two key differences: the TARP money that allowed Chrysler and GM to keep running and the ability to bank on rising profits in the future.

In this morning’s paper, USA Today points out how dating has been irrevocably changed by the rise of text messaging. “A bunch of us are having a drink at ____” requires much less courage than calling to make a one-on-one date. Says the paper: “Not since the dawn of the automobile has a technology — the cellphone — so swiftly and radically changed the way people interact, meet and move forward (or not) in a relationship.” But that doesn’t mean there aren’t rules. Number one: never wait longer than an hour to return a text from someone you’re interested in.

The era of Internet TV has truly arrived, says the LA Times this morning. Netflix’s “House of Cards” garnered 14 Emmy nominations yesterday, making it clear that the company’s “original-content strategy has won validation from the company’s traditional-media peers.” The strategy has been paired with a decision to become more “discerning” about the shows it does air and not being afraid to drop those that aren’t performing. In addition to the “House of Cards” sweep, Jason Bateman got a nod for his role in Netflix’s re-boot of fan-favorite “Arrested Development.”

The Boston Globe is among the papers picking up on a Massachusetts state police officer’s decision to release official photos from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s arrest. Intended to combat the pretty Rolling Stone cover, the pictures show a bloodied Tsarnaev with a “police sniper’s laser-projected bead on his head.” The photos were first published on the website of Boston Magazine yesterday and have drawn criticism from legal scholars who say their release “will exacerbate what is already a major problem,” namely how to find a jury that hasn’t formed judgements on the case.