FRESH AIR During the first few months of his presidency, Bill Clinton asked his longtime friend and journalist Taylor Branch to assume the role of an in-house historian who would amass material for Clinton’s post-presidential memoir. Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, modified the assignment, suggesting instead a series of recorded interviews in which Clinton could talk about the issues of the day. What followed were 79 confidential conversations between the president and the author. After each session, Branch habitually recorded of his own impressions of the interview, eventually bringing together his observations in the new book The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling […]

ASSOCIATED PRESS: The Philadelphia archdiocese on Monday announced the allegation against Msgr. Michael Flood [NOT PICTURED, LEFT], who denies wrongdoing. The archdiocese says the alleged victim filed a civil lawsuit last week in Delaware. The plaintiff is not identified by name; he is described as a student at St. John Neumann High School in Philadelphia, where Flood taught in the late 1970s. Church officials say they cannot begin their own investigation because the plaintiff is unnamed. They say the 71-year-old priest will continue serving as pastor at St. Luke the Evangelist parish in Glenside. MORE RELATED: One in every 33 […]

INQUIRER: Saturday evening, following a tip, Pennsylvania SPCA law enforcement officers arrested James Davis, 19, of the 2100 block of 22d Street in North Philadelphia, according to the Pennsylvania SPCA. If convicted, Davis faces up to two years in prison and a fine of at least $1,000, the PSPCA said. Davis admitted to impulsively taping up the cat after seeing it in the yard of the home where he lives with his parents, Bengal said. Davis left the cat in his yard for a couple of hours, then, because the animal kept screaming, tossed it into a neighbor’s yard, where […]

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday. The tapes turned over by the FBI came from security cameras various companies had mounted outside office buildings near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. They are blank at points before 9:02 a.m., when a truck bomb carrying a 4,000 pound fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bomb detonated in front of the building, Trentadue said. “Four cameras in four different locations going blank […]

[H/t to Camille]

[Photo by CORY.COUSINS] REUTERS: The Group of 20 is set to become the premier coordinating body on global economic issues, reflecting a new world economic order in which emerging market countries like China are much more relevant, according to a draft communique. Leaders of the G20 developed and developing nations also agreed to make the International Monetary Fund more representative by increasing the voting power of countries that have long been under-represented in the world financial body, said the draft G20 communique obtained by Reuters. MORE TIME: The anarchist march had started at 2:30 p.m. in a park in the […]

BY DAN BUSKIRK It seems slightly improbable that Sonny Rollins would be around making music in the year of 2009.  Not that there aren’t other musicians around at the age of 79, it’s just that all of the jazz men of Rollins’ elevated stature have long ago passed away, most of them decades ago.  Rollins exploded on the New York jazz scene straight out of high school and by the early fifties his dazzling intelligence and sheer athleticism on the tenor sax left many to dub him as “The New Bird” in tribute to bebop pioneer Charlie Parker. Rollins played […]

LOS ANGELES TIMES: Two men who professed devotion to Al Qaeda — one a convert to Islam, the other a Jordanian native — were charged Thursday with plotting to blow up buildings in Illinois and Texas. In both cases, the men thought they were working with Al Qaeda operatives when they were really working with undercover federal agents. One man, according to authorities, planted what he thought was an explosive outside a Dallas skyscraper, while the other parked a van, supposedly armed with a bomb, outside a federal courthouse in Springfield, Ill. The devices were fakes. Neither case is related […]