March 30, 2009: A message from the editor of the Detroit Free Press:
The new Free Press starts today
By PAUL ANGER
Today marks the start of a new era for delivering news to our readers.
We’re still printing newspapers every day, we’re putting replicas of Free Press pages online at digitalfreepress.com — and we’re putting more emphasis on digital ways of getting information to you, including right here at freep.com.
That means freep.com has more updates than ever, and we’re working to make response times faster. It means you can view more videos from our Emmy-award winning staff, get more news on your mobile device at m.freep.com, sign up for E-Newsletters, follow us at twitter.com/freep or twitter.com/freepautos or twitter.com/freepsports, visit our Facebook page, join the conversations at momslikeme.com, make plans for food and fun at Detroit.metromix.com, find a job or a car or a better buy at our careerbuilder.com, cars.com or shoplocal.com.
Thanks for visiting freep.com – and for taking this journey with us.
____________________________________________________
March 30, 2009: An excerpt from a message to readers in The Detroit News:
New era begins in the way you receive — and read — your newspaper
Today marks the beginning of a new era in Metro Detroit that touches on both business and pleasure.
For The Detroit News, its foray into limited home delivery is looked upon as a way to stabilize a business ravaged by the recession and the splintering of its news audience to Internet sources.
“We’re beginning a new era Monday with the first of our express editions and I hope readers across the region will give the paper a good look,” said Jonathan Wolman, editor and publisher of The News.
To kick off the new plan, 550,000 copies of The News and Free Press will be handed out for free today. After that, newsstand editions of the papers will be available at more than 18,000 locations, including 200 senior centers, said David Hunke, CEO of the Detroit Media Partnership.
A number of News employees will be handing out copies of the paper today throughout the region.
The News will publish six days a week and home delivery will be available on Thursday and Friday; the Free Press will also be available Sunday, when The News does not publish.
____________________________________________________
March 27, 2009: Two Page One messages from the last daily print edition of The Christian Science Monitor:
The New Monitor
This issue of The Christian Science Monitor represents a significant moment in our 100-year history. As of today, the daily Monitor makes its transition from print to online. Follow us 24/7 at CSMonitor.com and subscribe to our new print weekly. The Monitor move, which was announced last fall, is being watched by other news organizations, many of which are weighing changes of their own.
Editor’s Message
John Yemma explains how our new formats — Web, weekly print, e-mail — will make Monitor journalism more relevant.
____________________________________________________
March 26, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Raleigh News & Observer:
Franklin was a creator of black history
By JANE STANCILL
John Hope Franklin crafted the foundation of African-American history. He lived it, too.
Franklin, 94, who died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at Duke Hospital, was one of the 20th century’s most influential historians and found himself at the forefront of some of the nation’s key civil-rights struggles.
His book “From Slavery to Freedom,” first published in 1947, was a seminal work and has sold 3.5 million copies. Over a lifetime of scholarship, the professor helped ensure that no American history book could be complete without the story of African-Americans, and that America could not be whole until it confronted its past of slavery and segregation.
Franklin helped NAACP lawyers with research for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case in 1953. He joined historians who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery in 1965. And five decades after his masterpiece was published, Franklin was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1997 to lead a national initiative on race.
____________________________________________________
March 25, 2009: An online story from the Aberdeen, South Dakota newspaper, the American News :
Westport: Officials calling for voluntary evacuation
By EMILY ARTHUR-RICHARDT
Brown County emergency management officials are calling for a voluntary evacuation of the town of Westport.
Water levels continue to rise at the Elm River, said Scott Meints, Brown County emergency management director.
Sandbagging isn’t helping, he said.
The Red Cross is helping anyone who needs a place to stay, Meints said.
Check back online for more updates throughout the day.
____________________________________________________
March 24, 2009: An excerpt from a story on The Baltimore Sun Web site:
Analysis: Geithner scores points, faces more risks
By The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The White House says it does not live or die by the ups and downs of the stock market. But others do. And on Monday, that was good for Timothy Geithner.
With credit markets frozen, a public in high dudgeon and a Congress on a populist crusade, President Barack Obama’s Treasury secretary needed a bit of an uptick. He got it Monday when the Dow Jones industrial average shot up nearly 500 points after he unveiled his private-public partnership to help relieve banks of the toxic assets that have plunged the financial system into its crisis.
But Geithner still has lots to prove — to financial markets, to Congress and to Americans seething over executive bonuses and diminished 401k retirement accounts.
____________________________________________________
March 23, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Billings Gazette:
14 to 17 killed in Butte plane crash
Children on ski trip believed to be aboard
By The Associated Press
BUTTE — A small plane – possibly carrying children on a ski trip – crashed Sunday as it approached the Butte airport, killing 14 to 17 people aboard, a federal official said. The single engine turboprop nose-dived into a cemetery 500 feet from its destination.
The aircraft crashed and burned while attempting to land, said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike Fergus. The plane crashed in Holy Cross Cemetery.
An investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board offered few details at a press conference in Butte Sunday night. No cause of the crash was given.
____________________________________________________
March 19, 2009: An excerpt from a story in The San Diego Union-Tribune:
Union-Tribune sold to Platinum Equity
By THOMAS KUPPER
SAN DIEGO — The parent company of The San Diego Union-Tribune announced Wednesday that it has reached an agreement to sell the newspaper to a Beverly Hills investment firm for an undisclosed price.
The buyer, Platinum Equity, specializes in acquiring businesses in difficult circumstances and turning them around. Since its founding in 1995, the firm has completed more than 100 acquisitions in a range of industries.
Louis Samson, the Platinum Equity principal leading the Union-Tribune acquisition, called the newspaper “a good fit.”
“We have a long history of creating value by helping established companies navigate difficult market transitions,” Samson said in a written statement. “The Union-Tribune is more than a business. It’s an institution in San Diego.”
La Jolla-based The Copley Press Inc. had been seeking a buyer since July, when it hired investment bankers to explore “strategic options” amid a nationwide decline in newspaper advertising and circulation.
____________________________________________________
March 17, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the final print edition of the Seattle P-I:
The pioneering P-I slips into the past
Over 146 years, we grew up with Seattle
By CAROL SMITH
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the region’s pioneer newspaper and the city’s oldest continually operating business, a newspaper that both shaped and was shaped by the community it covered, prints its last edition Tuesday — nearly a century and a half after its forebear first rolled off a hand-cranked Ramage press promising to be “the best and cheapest promulgator of all sorts of useful information.”
The print P-I was irreverent and unpredictable, a long-shot survivor from the start. It persisted through 11 moves, and more than 17 owners. It didn’t miss an edition when its building burned to the ground along with its press in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. It outlived some 20 scrappy competitors before the turn of the 20th century, an era described by Clarence Bagley, one of its 19th century owners, as a time when newspapers “lived hard and died easy.”
….The P-I has been a common denominator not just in our lives, but in hundreds of thousands of others for more than a century.
Print is what we posted on refrigerator doors, and hung on walls — tangible documents of our rites and passages, of what entertains, informs or outrages us. Clippings of births and deaths — and the deeds and misdeeds in between — fill thousands of family scrapbooks.
Now, like Polaroids and slide projectors, Kodachrome and coin phones, we slip into that foggy part of memory reserved for things whose absence we haven’t really registered yet.
The print newspaper is going away and with it, its varied afterlife. You can’t sop up your basement with your computer, or wrap a fish. And what is the paper mache — that miracle sculpting media that must have launched a million budding elementary school artists — without newspaper?
Beyond the actual, physical newspaper, however is the newspaper as an institution, or more precisely, as the people who put it out. This newspaper was still the place many people contacted when they didn’t know where else to call — to right a wrong, to find a phone number, to get someone to listen to their stories.
We know because we picked up the phone.
And when our lives changed overnight — when President Kennedy was slain, or the Twin Towers fell, or President Obama was elected — it was the next day’s newspaper that people thought of saving.
____________________________________________________
March 16, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Calcutta, India newspaper, The Telegraph:
Rebellion rattles Zardari
By NASIR JAFFRY and Agencies
The Pakistan government is said to be preparing to reinstate former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, the main demand of Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif who is leading rebellious caravans of supporters towards Islamabad.
“Revolution” on lips, Sharif today smashed through barbed barricades in his home and headed to Islamabad on a so-called “Long March”, the complexion of the protest changing with many law-enforcement officials inexplicably disappearing from the streets of Lahore.
Two hours past midnight, Geo TV reported that Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, who had a meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari and army chief Parvez Kayani, would address the country “in a little while”.
The channel quoted sources as saying Gilani would announce the reinstatement of Chaudhry, who was sacked as chief justice by Pervez Musharraf.
____________________________________________________
March 12, 2009: An excerpt from a story in Newsday:
Bernard Madoff pleads guilty in Ponzi scheme
By JAMES BERNSTEIN and ANTHONY M. DESTEFANO
It’s official. Bernard Madoff is guilty of pulling off the biggest Ponzi scheme in American history.
Madoff stood up at the defense table in the U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan and answered a series of questions put to him by the judge in the case before entering a plea of guilty to all 11 fraud charges against him.
Madoff’s voice was so low that District Judge Denny Chen interrupted.
“Try to keep your voice up so I can hear you,” Chen said.
Madoff then coughed slightly.
“Are you feeling all right under the circumstances?” Chen asked.
“Yes I am,” Madoff said.
Chen then proceeded to ask Madoff if he understood that he was waiving his right to a trial in taking the guilty plea.
____________________________________________________
March 11, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Alabama newspaper, the Dothan Eagle:
Spree began in Kinston, officials say
By JIM COOK
The gunman, identified by eyewitnesses and a former high school classmate as Michael McLendon, 27, began his mad, violent rampage in Kinston, where one victim was found dead in a burned house, according to authorities.
McLendon then went to Samson where he rampaged through a neighborhood.
Coffee County Coroner Robert Preachers said the gunman’s mother was found dead inside her burning house in Kinston, according to the Associated Press.
He then went to Samson where he shot and killed five people — four adults and a child — in one home. Then he killed one person each in two other homes. The identities of all the victims were unknown, but Preachers said they included other members of the shooter’s family.
____________________________________________________
March 10, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Toronto, Canada newspaper, the National Post:
William Shakespeare, age 46 (we’re 90% sure of it, anyway)
By BRAD FRENETTE
Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters.
— from Macbeth by William Shakespeare
After years of scientific analysis and infrared, experts have agreed that the painting below is likely the only surviving portrait of one Mr. William Shakespeare. Of it, Professor Stanley Wells, chair of the Shakespeare Birth Trust remarked: “My first impression was scepticism – I am a scholar. But my excitement has grown with the amount of evidence about the painting. I am willing to go 90 per cent of the way to declaring my confirmation that this is the only life time portrait of Shakespeare. It marks a major development in the history of Shakespearian portraiture.”
____________________________________________________
March 9, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Cork, Ireland newspaper, the Irish Examiner:
Real IRA attack was an attempt at ‘mass murder’
By PAUL O’BRIEN, DERIC HENDERSON and DAVID YOUNG
The attack on an army base in Co Antrim in which two British soldiers were shot dead was an attempt at “mass murder” by the dissident republican group, the Real IRA, police in the North said last night.
In a call to the Sunday Tribune newspaper, the organisation, which killed 29 people in the Omagh bomb massacre in August 1998, claimed responsibility for the gun attack on Saturday night at the Massereene Barracks in Antrim.
The attack left two other soldiers badly wounded, and two delivery men were also hit, one critically.
____________________________________________________
March 6, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Montana newspaper, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle:
Blast zone
By JODI HAUSEN
One woman is missing after a natural-gas explosion on East Main Street shook downtown Bozeman Thursday morning, leaving several historic buildings demolished.
No other casualties or injuries were reported, although local historians said the destruction was the largest from a single incident in Bozeman in a century.
The explosion was still under investigation late Thursday, and authorities speculated it would be days before they would be able to pinpoint a cause.
“My heart goes out to the missing person and their family,” Bozeman Mayor Kaaren Jacobson said Thursday night. “We need to divert our thoughts and prayers toward them and also to the property owners who have suffered a tremendous loss today.”
____________________________________________________
March 5, 2009: Page One from the Chinese newspaper, The Beijing News
____________________________________________________
March 3, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the St. Petersburg Times:
As three friends slipped away, Nick Schuyler clung to an overturned boat in the Gulf of Mexico
By LANE DeGREGORY
They were anchored about 38 miles offshore Saturday afternoon when high waves flipped their small boat.
The four football players, who had been fishing for amberjack, were thrown into the frothy Gulf of Mexico. Frigid, 6-foot seas crashed over their heads.
Struggling in their life jackets, they somehow managed to make it back to the boat. But the 21-foot Everglades fishing craft was upside-down. And though the men were in their 20s and strong — two played for the NFL and the others had played for USF — they couldn’t right the boat.
So the four friends clung to the slick, white hull.
____________________________________________________
March 3, 2009: An excerpt from a story in The Tampa Tribune:
1 Boater Rescued, 3 Still Missing
By NEIL JOHNSON, STEPHEN THOMPSON and KEITH MORELLI
TAMPA — The odds were low, almost nonexistent, and Marcia Schuyler knew it. Her son had been missing for two days in the open Gulf, and though the Coast Guard was continuing its search, his chance of survival dropped with the passing of each chilly, windy hour.
Finally, a phone call. The Coast Guard had found her son sitting on the hull of the upside-down boat about 40 miles southwest of Clearwater. He was dehydrated, scraped and bruised and his body temperature was dangerously low, but he was alive.
“I passed out,” she said. “I went down.”
Nick Schuyler, a former University of South Florida football player, was taken to Tampa General Hospital, where he was admitted about 1:15 p.m. in serious but stable condition, more than 48 hours after he and three friends went out on what was supposed to be a fun fishing trip.
____________________________________________________
March 2, 2009: An excerpt from a story in Newsday:
Rare snow covers South
By the Associated Press
A potent March snowstorm blanketed much of the Southeast with snow Sunday before barreling toward the Northeast, where officials prepared snowplows and road-salt for a wintery assault.
The icy blast threatened to drop up to a foot of snow in the Philadelphia area, 13 inches in New York and 15 inches across southern New England late Sunday.
____________________________________________________
February 27, 2009: Page One from the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News:
FINAL EDITION
Goodbye, Colorado
It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to you today. Our time chronicling the life of Denver and Colorado, the nation and the world, is over. Thousands of men and women have worked at this newspaper since William Byers produced its first edition on the banks of Cherry Creek on April 23, 1859. We speak, we believe, for all of them, when we say that it has been an honor to serve you. To have reached this day, the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News, just 55 days shy of its 150th birthday is painful. We will scatter. And all that will be left are the stories we have told, captured on microfilm or in digital archives, devices unimaginable in those first days. But what was present in the paper then and has remained to this day is a belief in this community and the people who make it what it has become and what it will be. We part in sorrow because we know so much lies ahead that will be worth telling, and we will not be there to do so. We have celebrated life in Colorado, praising its ways, but we have warned, too, against steps we thought were mistaken. We have always been a part of this special place, striving to reflect it accurately and with compassion. We hope Coloradans will remember this newspaper fondly from generation to generation, a reminder of Denver’s history — the ambitions, foibles and virtues of its settlers and those who followed. We are confident that you will build on their dreams and find new ways to tell your story. Farewell — and thank you for so many memorable years together.
(See Also: Page One Today / Final Edition: Rocky Mountain News)
____________________________________________________
February 25, 2009: An excerpt from a story in The Washington Post:
‘Day of Reckoning’
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and ANNE E. KORNBLUT
President Obama offered a grim portrait of America’s plight in an address to a joint session of Congress last night, but he promised to lead an economic renewal that would lift the country out of its current crisis without bankrupting its future.
Striking an optimistic tone that has been absent from his speeches in recent weeks, the president said his stimulus plan, bank bailout proposal, housing programs and health-care overhaul would work in concert to turn around the nation’s struggling economy. And while he bluntly described a country beset by historic economic challenges and continued threats abroad, he said the solution lies in directly confronting — not ignoring — those problems.
____________________________________________________
February 24, 2009
Page One from the Czech Republic newspaper, Hospodarske Noviny
____________________________________________________
February 23, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Los Angeles Times:
‘Slumdog’ strikes it rich with 8 Oscar wins
By JOHN HORN
“Slumdog Millionaire” — a love story that combines artistic ambition with broad commercial appeal — won a leading eight Oscars on Sunday night, including the best picture trophy.
While the film’s triumphs at the 81st annual Academy Awards marked an amazing outcome for a movie filled with subtitles, scenes of torture and a Bollywood dance sequence, the wins also cemented the reputation of distributor Fox Searchlight, which has become Hollywood’s top advocate of the kind of daring works that movie studios have all but abandoned.
____________________________________________________
February 20, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Ottawa Citizen:
Obama, Harper talk war and trade in friendly visit
By MIKE BLANCHFIELD
OTTAWA — As they affirmed a friendship steeped in history, Barack Obama and Stephen Harper presented a sweeping agenda to tackle climate change, right the world economy and fight shoulder to shoulder — at least until 2011 — in Afghanistan.
“I love this country,” the U.S. president said on his first foreign trip, and thousands of onlookers who tried to catch a glimpse of him returned the adoration.
Harper also briefly surfed the wave of emotion as the prime minister gave an impassioned defence of Canada’s long, undefended border with the U.S. — a message aimed squarely at those Americans who still think Canadians are soft on security.
____________________________________________________
February 19, 2009: An excerpt from a story in The Arizona Republic:
Obama unveils housing plan in Mesa
By DAN NOWICKI
President Barack Obama delivered hope Wednesday to millions of uneasy homeowners in Arizona and around the country by promising relief from paralyzing mortgages, looming foreclosures and freefalling property values.
Obama hopes to instill confidence in economically anxious Americans under a sweeping $75 billion plan that would let those struggling with monthly mortgage payments refinance at lower rates and help keep folks who lose their jobs from losing their homes, too. The plan would help up to 9 million homeowners nationwide.
“This plan will not save every home, but it will give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild,” Obama told the more than 1,000 people crowded into Dobson High School’s gymnasium in Mesa.
____________________________________________________
February 18, 2009: An excerpt from a story in The Denver Post:
Obama signs stimulus bill
Denver ceremony sets in motion $787 billion in stimulus aid for Americans
By KAREN E. CRUMMY and ALLISON SHERRY
President Barack Obama signed into law Tuesday a $787 billion economic stimulus package, a historic, multifaceted rescue plan aimed at creating millions of jobs, sparking consumer spending and stopping the country from sliding into what he has called an economic “catastrophe.”
Characterizing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as the “most sweeping economic recovery package in our history,” Obama said the bill’s mix of tax cuts, infrastructure projects, energy and education investments, and aid to the unemployed and poor would create or save 3.5 million jobs over the next two years, including roughly 60,000 in Colorado.
“We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive in our time,” Obama said just before signing the bill at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in front of about 250 people.
____________________________________________________
February 16, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Twin Falls, Idaho newspaper, the Times-News:
One fades to black
KMVT, sole M.V. station, to stop analog broadcasts this week
By NATE POPPINO
The federal government has delayed the date that broadcast television stations switch from analog to digital broadcasting from Tuesday to June 12. But Twin Falls’ CBS affiliate, KMVT-TV, plans to shut off its analog signal anyway.
That means that anyone relying on over-the-air antennas to receive the station needs to have a digital converter box or a digital-ready TV after about 1 a.m. Tuesday or they won’t pick up the signal. The station already broadcasts in digital, and is holding to the original analog deadline because of aging equipment and the fact that most people expected the change this week, station manager Lee Wagner said.
“We have had a few (viewers) upset because they’re not ready yet or haven’t gotten ready. That’s to be expected,” Wagner said on Friday. “I don’t think it’d be any different in June.”
____________________________________________________
February 12, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Springfield, Illinois newspaper, The State Journal Register:
Obama’s words suggest he’s thought a lot about Lincoln
By Staff Report
(GateHouse News Service)
“I’m left then with Lincoln, who like no man before or since understood both the deliberative function of our democracy and the limits of such deliberation.” Barack Obama, in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope
Much already has been said and written about President Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln.
It’s not all Obama’s fault. Being the first black president made the discussion inevitable. But it is also one Obama has more than encouraged.
Two major campaign events at the site of Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech. Being sworn in as president with his hand on Lincoln’s Bible. The inaugural train ride. The “New Birth of Freedom” inaugural theme, a phrase straight from the Gettysburg Address.
____________________________________________________
February 11, 2009: The Tel-Aviv newspaper, Maariv, reports on Israel’s election gridlock. Here is an excerpt from a story on the BBC News Web site:
Israel’s horse-trading begins
By PAUL WOOD
At both the Kadima and Likud election centres, the party workers had the same chant: “Here comes the next prime minister.”
The Israeli electoral system has thrown up a most confusing “split” result.
Centre-left Kadima is projected to be in first place but the right-wing parties together get the biggest bloc of seats in the Knesset.
Tzipi Livni and Benjamin Netanyahu may both end up inviting each other to join governments they would respectively head. It would be comic if it were not so serious.
____________________________________________________
February 10, 2009: An excerpt from a story in Newsday:
A-Rod admits using steroids
By KEN DAVIDOFF
He came off as partly combative, partly confused and partly contrite. But the style didn’t matter Monday for Alex Rodriguez anywhere as much as the substance.
A-Rod, regarded as one of the best players in baseball history, is now on record that he used illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
In an interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, the Yankees’ third baseman essentially confirmed Saturday’s SI.com story that he tested positive for two illegal PEDs in 2003. Rodriguez indicated that he used illegal PEDs during the entirety of his time with the Texas Rangers, from 2001 through 2003 – and not before, 1995-2000 with the Seattle Mariners, and not since, from 2004 through now, with the Yankees.
(See also:
Page One Today / Mitchell Report on Steroids
Dec. 14, 2007)
____________________________________________________
February 9, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Albury-Wodonga, Australia newspaper, The Border Mail:
Roar of wall of flames
By BRAD WORRALL
Survivors of the fatal firestorm that ripped through Barwidgee on Saturday night, yesterday fought back tears as news two of their neighbours had been killed defending their home, spread through the community.
Many of the residents of the small district on the outskirts of Myrtleford had stayed to defend their homes, as they did in the 2003 and 2006 fires.
None knew of the fury that was about to be unleashed on them.
____________________________________________________
February 6, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Knoxville, Tennessee newspaper, the News Sentinel:
Adams: Contract adds to new riches for Summitt
By JOHN ADAMS
The game ended, and the show began at Thompson-Boling Arena on Thursday night.
First came the photographers, who raced across the floor so fast you might have wondered if they had been tipped that Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt was planning a sudden getaway after winning her 1,000th game. Then came the confetti.
Up next: dignitaries bearing gifts.
____________________________________________________
February 4, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Aberdeen, South Dakota newspaper, the American News:
Daschle withdraws name from health post consideration
By the Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Faced with problems over back taxes and potential conflicts of interest, Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination on Tuesday to be President Barack Obama’s Health and Human Services secretary.
“Now we must move forward,” Obama said in a written statement accepting Daschle’s request to be taken out of consideration. A day earlier, Obama had said he “absolutely” stood by Daschle.
Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader and an Aberdeen native, said he would have not been able to operate “with the full faith of Congress and the American people.”
“I am not that leader, and will not be a distraction” to Obama’s agenda, he said.
His stunning statement came less than three hours after another Obama nominee also withdrew from consideration, and also over tax problems. Nancy Killefer, nominated by Obama to be the government’s first chief performance officer, said she didn’t want her bungling of payroll taxes on her household help to be a distraction.
____________________________________________________
February 3, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the London, England newspaper, The Times:
Britain to stay in grip of cold snap after heaviest snow storm for 18 years
By DAVID BROWN and JENNY BOOTH
Britain faces a week of paralysis as the heaviest snowfalls for at least 18 years led to the closure of 2,800 schools, chaos on the roads and the widespread cancellation of bus and train services.
Forecasters warned that the Arctic blizzards would return to the South tomorrow, with sleet and patches of snow continuing until at least the end of the week.
Temperatures were predicted to fall below freezing overnight, meaning conditions could become even more treacherous as the slush turns to ice.
____________________________________________________
February 2, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
They’re the Lords of the Rings
By ROBERT DVORCHAK
TAMPA, Fla. — It’s one for the other thumb.
Santonio Holmes made an acrobatic touchdown catch with 35 seconds remaining in a heart-stopping comeback, allowing the Steelers to become the first team to win six Super Bowls. It earned Holmes a ring and the trophy as the game’s MVP.
“It’s going down in history,” Holmes said after his catch gave the Steelers a dramatic 27-23 victory over the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII. “All I did was extend my arms and use my toes.”
____________________________________________________
February 2, 2009: An excerpt from a story in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
MVP Holmes comes up big on final drive
By KEVIN GORMAN
TAMPA — Santonio Holmes was surrounded by red jerseys, trapped in the back right corner of the end zone with only enough room to stand on his tiptoes and stretch out his arms.
Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s pass was thrown to a spot where only Holmes could catch it. And the third-year receiver did just that, making a grab that stood up to video review and clinched the Steelers’ sixth Super Bowl win.
“My feet never left the ground,” Holmes said. “All I did was extend my arms and use my toes as an extra extension to catch up to the ball.”
Holmes’ 6-yard score with 35 seconds left in the game earned him Most Valuable Player honors and lifted the Steelers to a 27-23 victory over the Arizona Cardinals Sunday night in Super Bowl XLIII at Raymond James Stadium.
____________________________________________________
February 2, 2009: An excerpt from a story in The Arizona Republic:
Cards fall just short in Super Bowl
By KENT SOMERS
The ball hung in the air for what seemed like 61 years, spinning with the potential to break the Cardinals’ hearts immediately and haunt their dreams forever.
And that’s exactly what it did. The pass landed in the hands of Pittsburgh receiver Santonio Holmes for a 6-yard touchdown with 35 seconds left, giving the Steelers a 27-23 victory in Super Bowl XLIII on Sunday at Raymond James Stadium.
The Cardinals, who haven’t won an NFL title since 1947, were within a fingertip, a couple of toes and a few seconds of pulling off what seemed inconceivable a month ago when they entered the playoffs.
The improbability of their postseason run makes losing no easier to take.
“It was like getting a chair pulled out from under you,” receiver Larry Fitzgerald said. “It just hurts to be able to get so close and fall short of your ultimate goal.”
