Auction house: Rare 1943 bronze Lincoln penny sells for over $200,000
Beer company lists water, barley, rice and hops as its 4 top ingredients
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican launched an official track team Thursday with the aim of competing in international competitions as part of an agreement signed with the Italian Olympic Committee.
About 60 Holy See runners — Swiss Guards, priests, nuns, pharmacists and even a 62-yearold professor who works in the Vatican’s Apostolic Library — are the first accredited members of Vatican Athletics. It’s the latest iteration of the Holy See’s long-standing promotion of sport as an instrument of dialogue, peace and solidarity.
Because of the agreement with CONI, the team is now a part of the Italian track association and is looking to join the International Association of Athletics Federations. It is hoping to compete in international competitions, including the Games of the Small States of Europe — open to states with fewer than 1 million people — and the Mediterranean Games.
“The dream that we have often had is to see the Holy See flag among the delegations at the opening of the Olympic Games,” said Monsignor Melchor Jose Sanchez de Toca y Alameda, team president and the head of the Vatican’s sports department in the culture ministry.
But he said that was neither a short-term nor medium-term goal, and that for now the Vatican was looking to participate in competitions that had cultural or symbolic value.
“We might even podium,” he noted.
Vatican pharmacist-runner Michela Ciprietti told a Vatican press conference the aim of the team isn’t exclusively competitive, but rather to “promote culture and running and launch the message of solidarity and the fight against racism and violence of all types.”
Team members wearing matching navy warmup suits bearing the Holy See’s crossed keys seal attended the launch. Also on hand were two honorary members of the team, migrants who don’t work for the Vatican but are training and competing with the team, as well as a handful of disabled athletes. The Vatican aims to sign similar agreements with the Italian Paralympic committee.
CONI president Giovanni Malago welcomed the birth of the Vatican team, even though he acknowledged that it might one day deprive Italy of a medal.
“Just don’t get too big,” he told Vatican officials at the launch, recalling how an athlete from another tiny country — Majlinda Kelmendi — won Kosovo’s first Olympic medal when she defeated Italian rival Odette Giuffrida in the final of the women’s 52-kilogram judo event at the Rio de Janeiro Games.
In recent years, the Vatican has fielded unofficial soccer teams and a cricket team that has helped forge relations with the Anglican church through annual tours in Britain. The track team, however, is the first one to have a legal status in Vatican City and to be an official part of the Italian sporting umbrella, able to compete in nationally and internationally sanctioned events and take advantage of the Italian national coaching, scientific and medical resources.
While St. John Paul II was known for his athleticism — he was an avid skier — Pope Francis is more of a fan, a longtime supporter of his beloved San Lorezo soccer team in Argentina.
Vatican Athletics’ first official outing is the Jan. 20 “La Corsa di Miguel” (Miguel’s Race), a 10-kilometer race in Rome honoring Miguel Sanchez, an Argentine distance runner who was one of the thousands of young people who “disappeared” during the country’s Dirty War.
The choice is significant: Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was a young Jesuit superior in Argentina during the military dictatorship’s crackdown on alleged leftist dissidents.
DETROIT — Beer drinkers can’t claim blissful ignorance for much longer.
Starting next month, packages of Bud Light will have prominent labels showing the beer’s calories and ingredients as well as the amount of fat, carbohydrates and protein in a serving.
Bud Light is likely the first of many to make the move. The labels aren’t legally required, but major beer makers agreed in 2016 to voluntarily disclose nutrition facts on their products by 2020.
Many brands, including Corona Light, Guinness, Heineken and Coors Light, already have calories and other nutrition information on their bottles or packaging. But it’s in small type, or hidden on the bottom of the six-pack, and ingredients aren’t listed.
Bud Light went with a big, black-and-white label, similar to the ones required by the U.S. Food and Drug
ORLANDO, Fla. — A rare 1943 bronze Lincoln penny has sold for more than $200,000 at a Florida auction.
Heritage Auctions says more than 30 people bid on the rare coin Thursday Administration on packaged foods. At the top, Bud Light lists its four ingredients: water, barley, rice and hops. Below that, it shows the calories in a 12-ounce bottle or can (110) and other facts. Bud Light contains 2 percent of the recommended daily amount of carbohydrates, for example.
“We want to be transparent and give people the thing they are used to seeing,” said Andy Goeler, vice president of marketing for Bud Light.
Individual bottles and cans of Bud Light won’t have the full labels, but they’ll continue to have some nutrition information printed in small type.
Goeler said the brand’s research shows younger drinkers, in particular, want to know what’s in their beer. night. Only 10 to 15 of these pennies, mistakenly minted in bronze instead of steel, are believed to exist. They were made at a time when bronze and copper were being saved to fill metal shortages during World War II.
The auction house says
“They have grown up really in tune to ingredients,” he said.
Goeler said he didn’t know when other brands owned by Bud Light parent Anheuser-Busch — including Michelob and Stella Artois — would adopt bigger nutrition labels.
But the question is: Will such labels make a difference in the choices consumers make? At least one study suggests they won’t.
Researchers at Cornell University and Louisiana State University tracked what happened when diners were given menus with calorie counts. It found that diners who knew the calorie counts ordered lowercalorie appetizers and entrees, but the calorie counts had little impact on orders for drinks and desserts.
John Cawley, an economics Don Lutes found the penny in his pocket as a teenager in 1947 after getting some change at his high school cafeteria, and held onto it ever since. professor at Cornell and one of the authors of the study, said diners seemed to respond most to information they didn’t already know. They were probably surprised by the calories in some appetizers, for example, but already knew the general range for a glass of beer or wine.
Cawley said it’s telling that a light beer would be the most forthcoming about its ingredients and nutrition information. Bud Light’s sibling, Budweiser, has 35 more calories and four additional grams of carbohydrates, according to the brand’s web site.
Ultimately, the biggest changes may come from manufacturers themselves, not consumers, Cawley said. Since nutrition labels were first required in the early 1990s, companies have competed to look healthier or remove objectionable ingredients like trans fats.
“That is actually the biggest public health victory of all,” Cawley said.
Lutes died in September. He directed all proceeds from the sale to be donated to the Berkshire Athenaeum at the public library in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.