NEWS OF THE DAY
From Across the Nation
1 Trump responds: Donald Trump, saying it is not his job to defend President Obama, on Saturday defended his decision not to correct a man who said Obama is Muslim. “Am I morally obligated to defend the president every time somebody says something bad or controversial about him? I don’t think so!” Trump wrote on Twitter. Trump added that if he had challenged the man, the media would have “accused me of interfering with that man’s right of free speech.” Trump let slide comments made Thursday by a man in a Trump T-shirt who stood up at a town-hall meeting in Rochester, N.H., and said Muslims are a problem in this country and that “our current president is one.” “This is the first time in my life that I have caused controversy by NOT saying something,” Trump wrote Saturday.
2 Toddler’s death: The father of a 2-yearold girl identified almost three months after her remains were found in a trash bag that washed up on a Boston-area beach says he doesn’t believe the toddler’s mother caused her death. Joseph Amoroso said in interviews with WHDH-TV and the Boston Herald that Rachelle Bond told him her boyfriend, Michael McCarthy, fatally injured Bella Bond. Amoroso said he believes Rachelle Bond. McCarthy, 35, is charged with murder and Bond, 40, as an accessory after the fact. They are to be arraigned Monday.
3 Fab find: A New York auction house says it has sold the first recording contract signed by the Beatles for more than $90,000. Heritage Auctions says the 1961 contract was for a recording of a rock ’n’ roll version of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” The single from the recording session in Hamburg was released only in Germany, but it led to the Beatles being discovered by manager Brian Epstein. The contract was sold Saturday by the estate of German Beatles collector Uwe Blaschke. Heritage Auctions did not identify the buyer who paid for $93,750.
4 Controversial art: A graduate student at the State University of New York at Buffalo hung “black only” and “white only” signs around campus this week as part of an art project, which she said was intended to provoke a searing conversation. The art student, Ashley Powell, began posting the signs shortly before noon Wednesday, she said, hanging 17 of them in several buildings on campus, next to elevators, water fountains, benches and bathrooms. Within about an hour, university police began receiving phone calls from alarmed students. At a meeting of the Black Student Union on Wednesday night, Powell, who is black, announced that she was responsible for them. She described her project as an effort “to expose white privilege.”