Tony Snow to depart
White House press secretary Tony Snow (above) said Friday he’ll leave sometime before the end of the Bush presidency because of financial pressures. He declined to say when he would depart. “I’m going to stay as long as I can,” he said. The 52-year-old Snow, the father of three children, earns $168,000 as an assistant to the president but made considerably more as a conservative pundit and syndicated talk-show host on Fox News Radio.
4 killed in copter crash
A U.S. Marine Corps search-and-rescue helicopter crashed during a training flight over southwest Arizona, killing four people on board, officials said Friday. One person survived. The HH-1N Huey crashed about 20 miles north of Yuma on Thursday. The wreckage was discovered early Friday, said a spokesman for the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma. The aircraft was flying on a routine training mission.
Mobs loot market after earthquake
Earthquake survivors desperate for food and water ransacked a public market, while other mobs looted a refrigerated trailer and blocked aid trucks on the Pan-American highway, prompting Peru’s president to appeal for calm Friday. At least 510 people were killed in the quake and 1,500 were injured. Food, water, tents and blankets finally were arriving, and with Peruvian soldiers distributing silver caskets, the first mass funerals were being held.
Cars pulled off roads
In a dry run for next year’s Olympics, Beijing kept hundreds of thousands of private cars off city streets Friday to ease the chronic gridlock and polluted skies that threaten to mar the games. The four-day test poses a challenge for the Chinese government’s relationship with a rising middle class that has fallen in love with private car ownership. Beijing has been adding cars at the rate of about 1,000 per day.
AND FINALLY …
D’oh! Pirated ‘Simpsons’ movie tracked
The first known pirated copy of “The Simpsons Movie” to make it onto the Internet was tracked to a home raided by Australian police Friday, authorities said. Police ordered a 21-year-old Sydney man to appear in court in October, the Australian Federal Police said. The federation said the illegal “Simpsons” copy was the first on the Internet and was recorded by a cell phone in a Sydney cinema on July 26 — hours before its release in most of the world.
