LITTLE ROCK — President Barack Obama teed off with golf champion Tiger Woods, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and supporter Jim Crane, owner of the Floridian National Golf Club, where the commander in chief is spending the Washington’s Birthday weekend, according to a White House spokesman.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, immediately froze his ice cream budget, according to his office, when he was made aware by an article in Calcalist newspaper of a $2,700 state-financed contract with his favorite Jerusalem parlor, slamming the expense as “excessive and unacceptable.”
Stanley Marsh 3, the 75-year-old Texas millionaire and artist who is facing 11 criminal child-sex charges, settled 10 civil lawsuits, along with his son, wife and an associate, filed by 10 unnamed teens who claim he paid them for sex acts.
Quintravius Flowers, a 15-year-old Memphis boy who got a broken eye socket, a fractured jaw and a gash on his nose when he was attacked by three older youths who stole his cell phone outside a high school, hugged two of the assailants outside the courtroom where they pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and told The Commercial Appeal, “I forgave them after I left the hospital. I just let go.”
Lee Kuan Yew, 89, Singapore’s first prime minister, was discharged from Singapore General Hospital after spending two days there for a condition linked to a prolonged irregular heartbeat.
Byron Lima, a Guatemalan army captain sentenced to 20 years in prison for the 1998 slaying of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, told reporters he was being taken to a dental appointment when he was arrested outside the facility where he was living in what officials say was not a jailbreak, but a violation of rules.
Rita Crundwell, 60, a former Dixon bookkeeper who pleaded guilty to wire fraud for embezzling more than $53 million from her Illinois community starting in 1991 until her arrest last April, tearfully apologized in a federal courtroom before she was sentenced to 19 years and 7 months in prison, saying: “I am truly sorry to the city of Dixon, to my family and my friends.”
Marina Silva, former Brazilian environment minister and presidential candidate, launched a new political party called Sustainability Network, which she says “calls for a new vision of the world, in which we will be participants and not just spectators.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/18/2013