Welcome to First Look, our daily roundup of early-bird news: • An Alaska woman has been charged with child abuse for forcing her adopted son to eat hot sauce on national TV. (AP) • Many building in the small town of Mineral, Virginia are severely damaged and not covered by quake insurance. (New York Times) • The Washington
Continue reading …Searching for a sign that the troubled housing market is starting to perk up? Keep looking. New home sales dropped in July to 298,000–a decline of 0.7 percent since June, the government said. The figure for June was revised down to 300,000. Analysts had been expecting July’s number to rise to 310,000. New home inventory
Continue reading …Yesterday’s earthquake offered a reminder of something we really should have learned by now: You can’t take everything on the internet at face value. Not long after the quake, Tim Carney of the conservative Washington Examiner joked in a tweet that liberal New York Times political columnist Paul Krugman thought it hadn’t been big enough
Continue reading …A small school district in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is losing $2 million in state support this year after the state legislature made some of the largest education cuts in decades. But one school has come up with a creative way to take small bite out of that deficit. Tucked into a very informative article at Stateline about
Continue reading …A body pulled from the Mississippi River in New Orleans yesterday has been identified as that of Michael Showers, who had a minor recurring role on HBO’s Treme . The 45-year-old, who played New Orleans Police Capt. John Guidry on the show, was found floating in the water yesterday morning by…
Continue reading …The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss reports that the Obama administration tried several times to meet with actor Matt Damon before he was scheduled to speak at a rally last month held to protest the federal focus on test scores. “[Education Secretary Arne] Duncan was willing to meet Damon at the airport when he flew into
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