Good day!
Here's a roundup of events from The Associated Press:
Weather
The heat is on today, with a high in the mid 90s, but there's a 30 percent chance or rain. See the National Weather Service forecast.
Sports
The Colorado Rockies routed the Atlanta Braves Tuesday, 12-3. Rookie righty Brandon Beachy (3-2) couldn't find the necessary sink on his pitches to succeed at Coors Field. He allowed six earned runs and nine hits while struggling through 4 2-3 innings.
Crime
ATLANTA - Andrew Grant DeYoung, a death row inmate convicted of the 1993 slayings of his parents and his 14-year-old sister in suburban Atlanta, is set to be executed at 7 tonight. Prosecutors say DeYoung planned the killings so he could inherit his parents' estate and start a business. But DeYoung's 16-year-old brother escaped and went to a neighbor's house for help, and saw DeYoung in the shadows. He would be the second inmate executed in Georgia since the state changed execution drugs. The state was forced to switch after it surrendered its supply of sodium thiopental amid an investigation into how the drug was obtained. DeYoung's lawyers say that pentobarbital would cause needless suffering, but state attorneys deny the claims.
Economy
WASHINGTON - Defying a veto threat, the Republican-controlled House voted Tuesday night to slice federal spending by $6 trillion and require a constitutional balanced budget amendment to be sent to the states in exchange for averting a threatened Aug. 2 government default.
The 234-190 vote marked the power of deeply conservative first-term Republicans, and it stood in contrast to calls at the White House and in the Senate for a late stab at bipartisanship to solve the nation's looming debt crisis.
President Barack Obama and a startling number of Republican senators lauded a deficit-reduction plan put forward earlier in the day by a bipartisan "Gang of Six" lawmakers that calls for $1 trillion in what sponsors delicately called "additional revenue" and some critics swiftly labeled as higher taxes.
The president said he hoped congressional leaders would "start talking turkey" on a deal to reduce deficits and raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit as soon as Wednesday, using that plan as a roadmap.
Wall Street cheered the news of possible compromise as well. The Dow Jones industrials average soared 202 points, the biggest one-day leap this year.
Treasury officials say that without an increase in U.S. borrowing authority by Aug. 2, the government will not be able to pay all its bills, and default could result in severe consequences for the economy.
Health
PARIS - Scientists are closing in on a long-sought goal: A blood test to screen people for Alzheimer's disease.
An experimental test did a good job of indicating how much of the telltale Alzheimer's plaque lurks in people's brains, Australian researchers reported Wednesday. If the test proves accurate in larger studies, it could offer a way to check people having memory problems to see who needs more definitive testing for the disease.
Many blood tests are being developed and a few are used in research settings now, but only the Australian one has been validated against brain scans and other accepted diagnostic tests with good accuracy in large groups of people, said Maria Carrillo, senior director of medical and scientific relations for the Alzheimer's Association.
The results, reported Wednesday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in France, "give us hope that we may be able to use a blood test in the near future," although that doesn't mean next year, she said.
More than 5.4 million Americans and 35 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's, the most common form of dementia. It has no cure and drugs only temporarily ease symptoms. Finding it early allows patients and their families to prepare, and ruling it out could lead to diagnosing a more treatable cause of symptoms, such as sleep problems.
Offbeat
MOUNTAIN CREEK, Ala. - The last of the more than 60,000 Confederate veterans who came home to Alabama after the Civil War died generations ago, yet residents are still paying a tax that supported the neediest among them.
Despite fire-and-brimstone opposition to taxes among many in a state that still has "Heart of Dixie" on its license plates, officials never stopped collecting a property tax that once funded the Alabama Confederate Soldiers' Home, which closed 72 years ago. The tax now pays for Confederate Memorial Park, which sits on the same 102-acre tract where elderly veterans used to stroll.
These days, 150 years after the Civil War started, officials say the old tax typically brings in more than $400,000 annually for the park, where Confederate flags flapped on a recent steamy afternoon. That's not much compared to Alabama's total operating budget of $1.8 billion, but it's sufficient to give the park plenty of money to operate and even enough for investments, all at a time when other historic sites are struggling just to keep the grass cut for lack of state funding.
