Last year, one of them – with a dozen drugs in his system – flew his plane into a mountain.

Now one of them drowned in his home pool. He couldn’t swim.

Atherton police on Sunday said they are waiting for an autopsy before investigating the apparent accidental drowning death of Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford professor who inspired the co-founders of Google and influenced a generation of computer scientists.

“We’re kind of in limbo,” Atherton police Sgt. Tim Lynch said. “It could have been a simple accident or many other things.”

One of Motwani’s friends said the professor held a party at his home Thursday night with Stanford colleagues and students to celebrate the end of the school year. He had gone outside after the guests left to wind down and enjoy a cigar. The family’s nanny found Motwani the next morning apparently drowned in the pool, said Vish Mishra, a friend and colleague of Motwani’s…

… about ethics pledges and MBA programs and, in altering its headline, made it far more interesting.

The original headline:

A PROMISE TO BE ETHICAL IN AN ERA OF IMMORALITY

The ProJo headline:

IN AN ERA OF IMMORTALITY, MBAS PRESS FOR CODE OF CONDUCT

ProJo’s focus on eternal life puts the question of how graduates of MBA programs conduct their business in sharp relief.  If you live forever, do you have a special obligation to be ethical?  Or, knowing that whatever you do, you will continue to exist, do you not really care whether you are good or bad?  Or again, are we to understand immortality here as eternal life in the Lord after physical death?  If so, should MBAs be ethical in order to protect their eternal souls?  In an era of secularism, are religious warrants sufficient to restrain unethical behavior?

… has apparently been found, so far off course that analysts speculate it might have been trying to return to Brazil.

… beware the B-School boys.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a civil lawsuit against two people, including a Texas A&M University professor, and two companies in an alleged multimillion-dollar foreign-exchange fraud scheme starting in 2006.

U.S. District Court Judge Sim Lake froze the defendants’ assets and allowed the commodities trading regulator to seize records.

Charged was Robert D. Watson, an executive professor in the Finance Department, Houston lawyer and accountant Daniel J. Petroski and two companies, PrivateFX Global One Ltd. and 36 Holdings Ltd. The CFTC accused the two men of urging potential investors to purchase shares in PrivateFX Global One by touting their supposed quarterly trading returns of 6% to 10% from January 2000 through June 30, 2006.

About 60 investors purchased $19.5 million in Global One shares since it began operations in 2006, according to the CFTC. The defendants reported returns of 1.5% to 3% a month and claimed to never have had a losing month, the agency noted.

A university spokesman couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

According to the complaint, the defendants provided the CFTC with falsified account statements showing alleged profitable trades at an international brokerage firm from the start of this year through April totaling $7.5 million in the trading account of 36 Holdings, of which $2.1 million was allocated as Global One profit. The defendants also allegedly provided the CFTC with false Swiss bank statements for 36 Holdings…

The university might not be ready to comment, but it seems already to have air-brushed Watson from all finance department webpages. UD can’t find him anywhere.

From the New York Times:

Born in the Bronx on June 23, 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 8. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary.

Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and became an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office before entering private practice.

But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the “Perry Mason” series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush, making good on a longstanding promise to appoint a Hispanic judge in New York.

Update on Ezra Merkin:

[Merkin] stepped down Wednesday night as an officer of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, a wealthy congregation founded 50 years ago by his father, and whose members included some of Mr. Merkin’s largest individual investment-losers.

Mr. Merkin disclosed his unexpected decision in a speech at the synagogue’s annual membership meeting, in which he declined the nomination to become chairman of the synagogue’s board of trustees.

Ira Rennert, a tax cheat, remains Chairman.

… in the Harvard murder case. Why was a non-student inside a dorm? Was he a drug dealer, and did a Harvard client buzz him in?

A man’s been arrested for his murder — also a non-student, also inside the dorm.

Cosby was shot inside the J-entry way of Kirkland House around 5 p.m. After being shot he ran up Dunster street to Mt. Auburn street where he collapsed. He died Tuesday morning in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Copney [the man charged with the murder] is not a Harvard University student, but investigators were probing whether Cosby was selling marijuana to Harvard students as they sought his killer. Copney [who lives not in Cambridge, but in New York] is charged with murder, accessory after the fact to murder, and unlawful possession of a firearm.

Prosecutors said in [a] statement that they learned Copney “was visiting friends at the campus. It is alleged that the defendant, along with others, confronted Cosby in a common area inside the Kirkland House. During the course of the confrontation, multiple shots were fired. One of those shots struck Cosby, resulting in his death. It is believed that the defendant and Cosby were known to one another.”

So two non-students happen to be inside the same dorm at the same time. They happen to know each other. One, “along with others,” confronts Cosby and then shoots him. Who the hell are the others? And how likely is it that two non-students who happen to know each other will be in a dorm at the same time, one of them with a gun on him?

… that Justin Crosby was probably on campus to sell marijuana to students.

Which doesn’t explain why he was shot.

… has died.

Justin Cosby was a student at Salem State College. Police aren’t clear about the motive behind the shooting.

OHSU PROVOST POISED TO

TAKE REIGNS AT PACIFIC UNIVERSITY

… who’s a recent Wesleyan grad reflects on the social networks she followed after the news of Johanna Justin-Jinich’s murder:

… [W]hen you’re part of a community, a crime produces shock, anger, a surplus of emotion, and you seek out information. This week, I learned how social networks offer a way through the clutter of “rational” reporting, sensationalism, and gossip that plague our tragedies, and are no substitutes for the proximity and empathy I was craving. These days, even after you leave a place, you get to keep your social bonds online. They lie dormant, ready to be reactivated with a few keystrokes, when you need them most.

Authorities say a body has been discovered in an area near where a University of Georgia professor’s Jeep was found.

The professor, George Zinkhan, is accused of killing his wife and two others outside a community theater last month.

The Athens-Clarke County Police Department said in a news release Saturday that the body is being taken to a state crime lab for positive identification.

—————————

Update: Cadaver dogs
found the body. Did you
know about cadaver dogs?

UD didn’t. Here’s
cadaverdog.com.
They offer a course called
Advanced Cadaver.

—————————

Another Update:

Fugitive murder suspect George Martin Zinkhan III dug his own grave and covered himself with debris before firing a single bullet into his head, investigators said Saturday.

“A person not accustomed to the woods would not have found it,” Athens-Clarke County Police Chief Jack Lumpkin said. “The body was beneath the earth… The body was purposely concealed in a manner not to be discovered.”

Searchers found two handguns in the grave.

Zinkhan’s well-hidden body was discovered Saturday by cadaver dogs — an Australian shepherd and a German shepherd — at 9:50 a.m. Saturday. The civilian Alpha Search and Rescue Team was working woods beyond the initial search area. Zinkhan’s temporary grave was in thick woods about 1,000 yards from an elementary school and about a mile from where his red Jeep Liberty was recovered more than a week ago. Zinkhan’s home in Bogart in Clarke County is not far away.

The police chief said this was the second time in his 35 years in law enforcement that he had encountered a suicide victim who buried himself first…

… Johanna Justin-Jinich.

… reports police activity, but it’s not clear whether the man they’re arresting is Johanna Justin-Jinich’s killer.

The same blog, Wesleying, features, one post down, a surveillance photo of the killer — a very angry man with a gun in his hand.

————————–

Update: The suspect has not in fact been found. Wesleying is a good place to go for the latest information on the search, and for details of daily life, at Wesleyan.

————————–

Second Update: Horrible event, getting more horrible. Wesleyan is essentially locked down as the shooter — a madman who has made threats against Wesleyan students and Jews (Johanna Justin-Jinich was Jewish) — remains at large. Again, Wesleying has details. Their blog is overwhelmed with traffic, so you may need to be patient.

————————-

Third: Bloomberg News:

Justin-Jinich filed an aggravated harassment complaint against Morgan when they were both students at New York University in Manhattan, WNBC News reported. The station said Justin-Jinich was 21 years old.

… was Johanna Justin-Jinich.
This is, I believe, her Facebook
page. This is her picture,
taken from Facebook.

——————————

A little bit more about her, if I may. Jinich is a Sephardic Jewish name; her father (if I’ve identified him correctly) was born in Mexico and grew up here. The name is pronounced HEE-nich.