Nora Ephron dies

Nora Ephron dies

NEW YORK

Nora Ephron, the essayist, author and filmmaker who challenged and thrived in the male-dominated worlds of movies and journalism and was loved, respected and feared for her wit, died Tuesday of leukemia. She was 71.

Her book publisher Alfred A. Knopf confirmed her death in a statement.

Born into a family of screenwriters, Ephron was a top journalist in her 20s and 30s, then a best-selling author and successful director. She wrote and directed such favorites as “Julie & Julia” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” and her books included the novel “Heartburn,” a brutal roman a clef about her marriage to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein.

Ephron was married three times: to Dan Greenburg, Bernstein and Nicholas Pileggi, who survives her. She had two sons.

Debby weakens to tropical depression

ST. GEORGE ISLAND, Fla.

Debby, the guest that wouldn’t leave, is ruining things for a lot of other visitors despite weakening to a tropical depression and leaving Florida’s Gulf Coast behind.

The National Hurricane Center said early Tuesday evening that the storm had been downgraded to a tropical depression with maximum sustained winds of 35 mph as it slogged across northern Florida toward the Atlantic coast.

Debby has dumped as much as 26 inches of rain in some spots.

Obama, Biden strike at Romney

MIAMI BEACH, Fla.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden unleashed a back-to-back assault Tuesday on Republican challenger Mitt Romney, re-emphasizing Democratic assertions that Romney as a venture capitalist sent U.S. jobs overseas and paid no heed to the impact on American workers.

“You’ve got to give Mitt Romney credit,” Biden said while campaigning in Iowa. “He’s a job creator in Singapore, China, India.”

Obama, who was having fundraisers in Atlanta and Miami, cast his Republican rival as the type of wealthy investor whose only goal was making money no matter the cost.

Koreas suffer worst drought in century

KOHYON-RI, North Korea

North Korea dispatched soldiers to pour buckets of water on parched fields, and South Korean officials scrambled to save a rare mollusk threatened by the heat as the worst dry spell in a century gripped the Korean Peninsula.

Parts of both countries are experiencing the most severe drought since record-keeping began nearly 105 years ago, meteorological officials in Pyongyang and Seoul said Tuesday.

Associated Press