World/Nation Briefs July 6, 2012
<p>A dock extends into a dry cove at Morse Reservoir in Noblesville, Ind., Thursday. The reservoir is down 3.5 feet from normal levels. Oppressive heat is slamming the middle of the country with record temperatures that aren?t going away after the sun goes down. Temperatures exceeded 100 degrees in Central Indiana.</p>
<p>President Barack Obama wipes sweat from his eye after a speech at Washington Park in Sandusky, Ohio, Thursday. Obama is on a two-day bus trip through Ohio and Pennsylvania.</p>
Obama sweats job numbers on Ohio bus trip
SANDUSKY, Ohio - Campaigning by bus through swing state Ohio, President Barack Obama cast his re-election bid as a bet on the American worker Thursday, even as he braced for today's unemployment report that will help set battle lines for the hot summer to come.
The monthly unemployment numbers could alter or harden voters' views of Obama's core re-election argument that he pulled the U.S. back from recession while Republican Mitt Romney embraces policies that led to an economic near-collapse. A weak report could undermine Obama's position, while improvement could help the president - though concerns about jobs are sure to a major issue through Election Day.
Obama tellingly chose to start his summer of on-the-road campaigning in two political battleground states that have a rosier economic outlook than some parts of the nation. Both Ohio and Pennsylvania had unemployment rates of 7.3 percent in May, well below the national average of 8.2 percent.
Ex-dictators found guilty of having babies stolen
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla was convicted and sentenced to 50 years Thursday for a systematic program to steal babies from prisoners who were kidnapped, tortured and killed during the military junta's war on leftist dissidents three decades ago.
Argentina's last dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, also was convicted and got 15 years. Both men already were in prison for other human rights abuses.
The baby thefts set Argentina's 1976-1983 regime apart from all the other juntas that ruled in Latin America at the time. Videla, other military and police officials were determined to remove any trace of the armed leftist guerrilla movement they said threatened the country's future.
The "dirty war" eventually claimed 13,000 victims according to official records. Many were pregnant women who "disappeared" shortly after giving birth in clandestine maternity wards.
Faulty data, pilot error, caused '09 crash in Atlantic
LE BOURGET, France - A pilot facing faulty data and deafening alarms in an oversea thunderstorm pitched his plane sharply up instead of down as it stalled, then lost control, sending the Air France jet and all 228 people aboard to their deaths in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
The fatal move was part of a chain of events outlined in a report by French investigators Thursday that could have legal consequences for plane-maker Airbus and airline Air France - and could change the way pilots around the world are trained to handle planes manually.
"I don't have control of the plane at all," the pilot said, a minute before it crashed, according to a particularly gripping passage in the 224-page report.
House panel calls for bigger food stamp cuts
WASHINGTON - The House Agriculture Committee on Thursday unveiled its approach for a long-term farm and food bill that would reduce spending by $3.5 billion a year, almost half of that coming from cuts in the federal food stamp program.
The legislative draft envisions reducing current food stamp spending projections by $1.6 billion a year, four times the amount of cuts incorporated in the five-year, half-trillion-dollar farm bill passed by the Senate last month.
Food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, look to be the most contentious issue when the Agriculture Committee begins voting on the bill Wednesday and when the full House begins debating it in the future.
- The Associated Press