In brief: ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Bob Simon dies in car crash
NEW YORK – Longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Bob Simon, who covered riots, Academy Award-nominated movies and wars and was held captive for more than a month in Iraq two decades ago, was killed in a car crash on Wednesday. He was 73.
A town car in which Simon was a passenger hit another car in Manhattan, police said. Simon and the town car’s driver were taken to a hospital, where Simon was pronounced dead.
Simon was among a handful of elite journalists to cover most major overseas conflicts and news stories since the late 1960s, CBS said. He covered stories including the Vietnam War and the Oscar-nominated movie “Selma” in a career spanning five decades. He had been contributing to “60 Minutes” on a regular basis since 1996.
Simon joined CBS News in 1967 as a reporter and assignment editor, covering campus unrest and inner-city riots, CBS said. He also worked in CBS’ Tel Aviv bureau from 1977 to 1981 and in Washington, D.C., as its U.S. Department of State correspondent.
Simon’s career in war reporting began in Vietnam, and he was on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon when the U.S. withdrew in 1975. At the outset of the Gulf War in January 1991, Simon was captured by Iraqi forces near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. CBS said he and the other three members of CBS News’ coverage team spent 40 days in Iraqi prisons, an experience Simon wrote about in his book “Forty Days.”
Confusion reigns over Alabama marriages
CLANTON, Ala. – Confusion reigns in Alabama over gay marriage, days after the first same-sex wedding licenses were issued in the Deep South state. Probate judges say it’s been a bewildering week of conflicting signals whether to issue those licenses or not.
Probate judges in at least 22 of the 67 counties are issuing the licenses but others are not – either denying licenses to gay couples or shutting down marriage license operations altogether because the probate judges aren’t sure what to do.
Chilton County Probate Judge Bobby Martin, in the small town of Clanton halfway between the cities of Birmingham and Montgomery, is a case in point.
He issued a wedding license to a gay couple first thing Monday after a federal judge ruled the state’s gay marriage ban was unconstitutional. But Martin stopped after learning of a warning from Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, a conservative supporter of the state’s gay marriage ban, who wrote the probate judges that such unions were still illegal in the state.
Moore sent a directive to probate judges Sunday instructing them to refuse the licenses – one day before an order by U.S. District Judge Callie Granade allowing gay marriage was to take effect. Moore argued the probate judges weren’t defendants in the lawsuit that prompted Granade’s decision and didn’t have to abide by the order.
Juggling the sides, Martin said he decided a federal court order would override a “memorandum” from Moore. So the probate office, in the rural Alabama county, sold its second marriage license to a gay couple Wednesday.
Meanwhile, gay couples wanting to marry are hoping probate judges statewide will receive clear direction to issue the licenses after a federal court hearing before Granade this afternoon.
Wolf killed was same from rare sighting
SALT LAKE CITY – A gray wolf that was shot by a hunter in Utah was the same one spotted in the Grand Canyon area last year, wildlife officials said Wednesday.
The 3-year-old female wolf, “Echo,” captured the attention of wildlife advocates across the county because she was the first wolf seen there in 70 years.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did DNA tests to confirm the wolf killed in late December by a hunter, who said he thought he was shooting a coyote, was the same one seen roaming near the Grand Canyon, said agency spokesman Steve Segin.
University of Idaho geneticists compared DNA taken from the northern gray wolf killed in Utah with scat samples from the wolf seen near the canyon last fall.