New first puppy joins the family
Washington The White House got a new resident Thursday with the arrival of Miss Beazley, the first lady’s Scottish terrier puppy.
President Bush gave the dog to his wife for her 58th birthday in November, but the 10-week-old puppy had to wait to move into the White House.
Although Scottish terriers are often aggressive with other dogs, there appeared to be no animosity between Miss Beazley and the older first dog, Barney, as the Bushes showed the puppy off to TV cameras on the South Lawn.
The two dogs are related – Barney’s half brother is Miss Beazley’s father.
Barney gave his younger companion a few good sniffs, but they mostly roamed the grass and ignored each other – and the first lady’s calls for them to come.
“Behaves like Barney,” the president said of the new pooch.
Barney often ignores commands from the president to come and has to be chased down and carried. The Bushes’ other longtime pet, an English springer spaniel named Spot who died last year, was the more obedient dog.
Reagan’s personal papers open to public
Simi Valley, Calif. Nearly 25,000 pages of Ronald Reagan’s personal papers, including speeches, radio scripts and articles he wrote in the 1960s and 1970s, are now available to the public at his presidential library.
“My husband was eager to get all of his documents open to the public as early as possible,” former first lady Nancy Reagan said in a statement Thursday.
Reagan died last June and is buried on the library’s grounds.
The documents include Reagan’s handwritten drafts of the scripts for his national syndicated radio commentary program “Viewpoint,” which aired from 1975 until 1979.
“President Reagan has long been known for writing his speeches and articles in longhand on legal pads,” library executive director R. Duke Blackwood said. “The Reagan Library is extremely pleased to be able to share these exceptional documents with the general public.”
Anyone interested in seeing the documents must make an appointment with the research library.
Asian quake affected well in Virginia
Richmond, Va. The South Asian earthquake that spawned deadly tsunami waves also shifted water levels by at least 3 feet in a geologically sensitive Virginia well some 9,600 miles away from the epicenter, researchers say.
The well near Christiansburg, which started oscillating about an hour after the magnitude 9 quake near Sumatra on Dec. 26, is particularly sensitive to movements in the Earth and is monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey.
David Nelms, a groundwater specialist with the USGS in Richmond, saw the changes from his computer.
“It just shot up and then it went down below where it originally was,” Nelms told the Richmond Times-Dispatch for Saturday’s editions, adding that it took about five hours for the water to stop fluctuating.
The USGS tracks water levels around the country, and has monitors at 21 wells across Virginia, primarily for drought.
The Christiansburg well, in the western part of the state, also shows regular, but small, changes caused by tides.