Fireworks: Hurricane Arthur battered the North Carolina coast overnight before moving back north over the Atlantic. Damage is believed to be minimal. Arthur has dropped to a Category 1 with winds up to 90 mph. Heavy rain is expected up the coast. Cape Cod and Nantucket could get up to six inches as the storm fizzles and heads to the Canadian Maritimes. Boston held its fireworks display and Boston Pops concert last night, 24 hours early, to dodge the storm.

Money: The Dow Jones closed above 17,000 for the first time in history yesterday, with investors optimistic about the world economy. But the market is also pumped up on the steroids of low interest rates. The Dow moved up 92 points to finish at 17,068. The bull market has run for more than five years now.

No Accident: The case of a Georgia man accused of letting his infant son cook to death in his parked car is shaping up to be the latest tabloid news drama. Justin Harris told police he forgot to drop his son at daycare on June 18^th. But after damning testimony that Harris had researched infant deaths in cars and was sexting with six women, including a 17-year-old, while his son was dying, a judge in Marietta denied bail. The prosecution theory is that Harris wanted to escape a troubled marriage and the burden of parenthood.

Fracked: Researchers say a swarm of earthquakes in Oklahoma is caused by high-pressure waste disposal wells used in “fracking,” the process of fracturing the earth’s crust to extract natural gas. The waste product of fracking is large amounts of water contaminated with chemicals.

The finding is significant because the drilling industry has denied any connection between fracking and small earthquakes. The researchers from Cornell and the University of Colorado attribute the quake swarm to the 4 million barrels of wastewater from fracking that are forced under high pressure down the disposal wells every month.

Collapse: Two people were killed and 19 injured in Brazil when a highway overpass under construction collapsed on a bus and truck. It happened in Belo Horizonte, one of the host cities for the World Cup. Many of the transportation projects to move the Cup crowds were not finished when the tournament began.

The Obit Page: Louis Zamperini, the cheerful former distance runner and WWII POW whose life was the basis for the bestseller “Unbroken,” has died of pneumonia at age 97. Zamperini finished 8^th in the 5,000 meters at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and had a personal meeting with an impressed Adolph Hitler. He held the college record for the mile for 15 years.

During the war his bomber crashed into the Pacific and he spent 47 days on a life raft before he was captured and spent 2 ½ years in a Japanese prison camp. He regained his health, but never enough strength to return to being a world-class runner. Drinking and suffering from his war experience, Zamperini became a born-again Christian and spent his life preaching love and forgiveness, even to the Japanese prison guards who had tortured him. Hence the name, “Unbroken.”

>Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking fortune and a funder of conservative causes, has died at age 82. Scaife spent millions supporting Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and conservative think tanks. It was the reclusive Scaife who paid for investigations of Bill and Hillary Clinton while they were in the White House.

Born in the USA: Earlier this week a woman who was among protesters stopping detained immigrants from being bused into Murrieta, CA. carried a sign that said, “U.S. citizens don’t get free pass Y should ileagels.” Apparently she’s afraid of immigrants dumbing down the culture.

-30-