LITTLE ROCK — Gov. Chris Christie
of New Jersey has signed legislation authorizing online gambling in the state, clearing the way for Internet betting to begin.
Vassilis Papageorgopoulos, the 65-year-old former mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, and two former top municipal officials were sentenced to life in prison for embezzling more than $22 million in city funds.
Carmen Blandin Tarleton, 44, a Vermont nurse who suffered burns on 80 percent of her body and was blinded when her estranged husband attacked her and doused her with lye in 2007, received a face transplant at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, after which lead surgeon Bohdan Pomahac said, “I think she looks amazing, but I’m biased.”
Ranulph Fiennes, 68, a British explorer who in 2009 became the oldest person to reach the summit of Mount Everest, was evacuated from Antarctica days after he reluctantly pulled out of a polar expedition because of severe frostbite.
Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s ousted autocratic leader, pleaded for “forgiveness of the past” in his first public speech in more than 18 months amid warnings of U.N. sanctions against him and calls for prosecution of those responsible for the deaths of protesters during the country’s 2011 uprising.
Patricia Krentcil, whom a grand jury declined to indict on accusations that she took her 5-yearold daughter into a tanning booth, said her life is “a living hell” because of the case and she plans to go to London for a year to rest while her husband and kids stay home in New Jersey.
Petra Pau, the vice president of Germany’s lower house of Parliament, has called for scientists and historians to review the 1933 fire that destroyed the Reichstag in Berlin and helped clear the way for the Nazis to rise to power after they used the blaze as a pretext to suspend civil rights.
Dennis Tito, the multimillionaire known for being the first space tourist, is funding an initiative to send a married couple on a trip around Mars and back, during which they would spend 16 months in a capsule about half the size of an RV, a trip chief technical officer Taber MacCallum called “the Lewis and Clark trip to Mars.”
President Sebastian Pinera
of Chile inaugurated a housing complex in Constitucion to replace one that collapsed in 2010 when 80 percent of the city was destroyed by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake and a tsunami.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/28/2013