Week In The News: Truth Battles, Temple Shooting, Mars Landing

Truth and campaigning. A temple shooting. Cheers for a landing on Mars.

Truth and campaigning, front and center this week.  Or maybe, campaigning and lies.  Everybody’s claiming the other guy is doing it.  Americans, stuck in the middle of the mud sling.

In Oak Creek, Wisconsin, another mass murder.  At a Sikh temple.  They’ve taken it with dignity, but the pain is terrible.

On Mars, an American rover lands again.  Mission control goes nuts.  The great show goes on at the Olympics.  Usain Bolt, US women’s soccer, the sprinter on carbon fiber legs.  And the US has its hottest July ever.  Hello?

This hour, On Point:  our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.
- Tom Ashbrook

Laura Meckler, White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

Gideon Rachman, Chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Financial Times.

The Washington Post "In the ad, released Tuesday by the super PAC Priorities USA and titled'Understands,' Soptic makes his most heated claim to date, suggesting a link between his wife’s death five years ago and the Bain takeover. 'When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care, and my family lost their health care,' Soptic says in the minute-long spot. 'And a short time after that, my wife became ill . . . she passed away in 22 days.'

The New York Times "To some who track the movements of white supremacist groups, the violence was not a total surprise. Mr. Page, 40, had long been among the hundreds of names on the radar of organizations monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of his ties to the white supremacist movement and his role as the leader of a white-power band called End Apathy. The authorities have said they are treating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism."

The Los Angeles Times "Several high-resolution images from Mars were released by NASA on Wednesday. Black-and-white photos stitched together from  Curiosity’s cameras show gravelly terrain with what looks like well-cut, pyramidal mountains in the background — the kind of terrain found in the Mojave Desert. 'You’ve been hearing us saying, "Just wait till you see the good stuff." Well, this is the good stuff,' said Mike Malin, lead scientist for the rover's MARDI descent imager."