Police question Brazil’s ex-president in corruption probe
Police question Brazil’s ex-president in corruption probe
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian police hauled former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from his home and questioned him for about four hours Friday in a sprawling corruption case involving state-run oil company Petrobras that has already ensnared some of the country’s most-powerful lawmakers and businessmen.
The once-immensely popular president, who governed from 2003 to 2010 and remains a towering figure in Brazil, angrily denounced the morning raid as part of a campaign to sully his image, that of his party and that of his hand-picked successor, President Dilma Rousseff.
Rousseff also expressed her “total inconformity” with the operation, which she called unnecessary, although she appeared to distance herself from her one-time mentor by barely mentioning Silva in an address Friday afternoon.
“I felt like a prisoner this morning,” said Silva, who has expressed interest in possibly running for president again. “I have gone through many things, and I am not one to hold a grudge, but I don’t think our country can continue this way.”
Police arrived at about 6 a.m. at Silva’s residence in greater Sao Paulo’s Sao Bernardo do Campo and spirited the 70-year-old to a federal police station at the city’s Congonhas airport. Silva was released after around four hours of questioning.
Revamped satellite data shows no pause in global warming
WASHINGTON (AP) — Climate change doubters may have lost one of their key talking points: a particular satellite temperature dataset that had seemed to show no warming for the past 18 years.
The Remote Sensing System temperature data, promoted by many who reject mainstream climate science and especially most recently by Sen. Ted Cruz, now shows a slight warming of about 0.18 degrees Fahrenheit since 1998. Ground temperature measurements, which many scientists call more accurate, all show warming in the past 18 years.
“There are people that like to claim there was no warming; they really can’t claim that anymore,” said Carl Mears, the scientist who runs the Remote Sensing System temperature data tracking.
The change resulted from an adjustment Mears made to fix a nagging discrepancy in the data from 15 satellites.
The satellites are in a polar orbit, so they are supposed to go over the same place at about the same time as they circle from north to south pole. Some of the satellites drift a bit, which changes their afternoon and evening measurements ever so slightly. Some satellites had drift that made temperatures warmer, others cooler. Three satellites had thrusters and they stayed in the proper orbit so they provided guidance for adjustments.
Think Trump was crude? The Founding Fathers were just as bad
NEW YORK (AP) — You could say politics has reached a new low with the “small hands” remarks from the Republican debate.
But the exchange over the size of Donald Trump’s, um, hands is merely the most recent vulgarity in American politics. The history of crude remarks goes back to the Founding Fathers.
In the 18th century, John Adams called Alexander Hamilton a “bastard brat” and wrote that Hamilton had “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off,” according to historian Ron Chernow.
One difference between then and now: “These were words written or spoken in private, not in public,” said Chernow, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Alexander Hamilton helped inspire the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton.” (Chernow says the comments were quoted in letters that survived the centuries.)
In the 1880s, rumors of Grover Cleveland’s out-of-wedlock child led to a song from his Republican opponents: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” When Cleveland won the presidency, the response came: “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!”
Discovery of knife is latest twist in O.J. Simpson case
LOS ANGELES (AP) — In a case that’s had more unexpected, startling and outrageous twists than television’s best crime-show writer could concoct, Los Angeles police revealed Friday they are examining a knife they were told was found at the home where O.J. Simpson was living when he was charged and later acquitted of stabbing to death his ex-wife and her friend more than 20 years ago.
The knife — believed to have been recovered by a construction worker tearing down the house and then given to an off-duty cop — surfaced just as the popular “People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” anthology is airing on the FX television channel.
A citizen supposedly found the knife and turned it over to a now-retired police motorcycle officer who was working as a security guard at a filming location, police Capt. Andy Neiman said.
It was being analyzed by an LAPD crime lab for DNA or other material that could possibly link it to the killings.
Neiman stressed that the authenticity of the story was not confirmed and investigators were looking into whether “this whole story is possibly bogus from the get-go.”