- Just slightly more than month after Israeli commandos killed nine people trying to run a naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, Israel on Monday officially announced it would ease the tough import restrictions it's maintained on Gaza for three years. Still, the list of what's prohibited includes most of the construction materials Gaza desperately needs.
- A number of theme parks and tourist destinations have imposed dress codes that require some patrons to cover their tattoos. Some swimming pools require lifeguards to cover their tattoos as well. It's a step, the organizations say, intended to keep their businesses family friendly.
- An Obama administration push to spend $19.2 billion in federal stimulus money to help create a national electronic medical record system by 2014 will help patients, doctors and medical researchers. Many doctors and hospitals believe the potential pluses outweigh threats to privacy.
- A year of sweeping teacher layoffs at schools around the state has exposed a stark reality for California's lowest-performing schools: The schools with the lowest test scores — and traditionally the highest numbers of poor and minority students — tend to be staffed with the least experienced teachers.
- Across the country, authorities are responding to an increasing number of calls when people wander away in the fog of dementia. Their missing-person photos often end up on the evening news. In some parts of the country, including the Midwest, the alerts for missing seniors now outnumber those for missing children.
- Seventy-five years after construction started, the parkway's collective gardener, the National Park Service, struggles to keep the forest and the development beyond it from closing in. Along two-thirds of the scenic route, nothing prevents a landowner from building a house or a condominium complex or clear-cutting the trees.
- The hearings were not a hollow charade. They gave senators a chance to stage a bank-shot debate over legal and political philosophy that was, at times, downright energizing. And they held up a mirror to the state of our major political parties in this election year: the Republicans, radical, cohesive and fierce; the Democrats, scattered, diverse and only occasionally fierce.
- For centuries, a massive grapevine has grown on the northern end of Roanoke Island in North Carolina, surviving nor'easters, bugs and mildew for maybe 400 years. Then a utility contractor sprayed it with weedkiller.
- At issue, wealthy individuals who can spend huge sums of money on statewide initiative petition campaigns that public officials can't match.
- In Fresno, Calif., the parks department used to operate 15 pools. This year, it's operating four. Bakersfield, too, has been closing its full-size, high-cost pools. Replacing them: splash parks, which cost less to operate and don't require a lifeguard.
- Troopers say the motorcycle rider, later identified as 26-year-old Anchorage resident Radames Velazquez-Figueroa, was traveling about 90 mph when an officer tried to pull him over. He was on a 2006 Suzuki motorcycle, troopers say.
- Last year, with Kentucky's Republican primary election still months away, Paul pledged not to accept contributions from any senator who voted for a federal bailout of the banking industry. Then he won the primary, and on June 24 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell hosted a $1,000 a plate fundraiser in D.C. Paul's supporters are livid.
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