The black-and-white map created by Martin Waldseemuller, a
French cleric, was the first time the name America had appeared
on any map.

Waldseemuller was prescient enough to show the Rocky
Mountains and the Pacific Ocean at a time when no one else in
Europe thought they were there.

The map, purchased a decade ago at a cost of $10 million, is
the centerpiece of an exhibit at the Library of Congress running
through June 22 that features a collection of artifacts from
Waldseemuller and his colleagues.

It includes later maps that lose faith in Waldseemuller’s
vision of America. In a 1516 world map, the Americas are called
“Terra Ultra Incognita” – a faraway unknown country.

Still, the Library of Congress had pursued Waldseemuller’s
mammoth map for more than a century.

It shows two continents across the ocean from Europe, with a
skinny isthmus between them, an embryonic Florida peninsula, a
western mountain range on the northern continent, and on the
southern continent, a clearly lettered name: “America.”

These maps are essential for the same reason a smartphone is
better with satellite images of Earth, according to Ralph
Ehrenberg, chief of the library’s geography and map division:
people want to know where they came from.

Waldseemuller’s maps came at a time of geographic
exploration, technological advance, societal ferment and
expanding communication – a time much like our own, Ehrenberg
said in an interview.

The new way of communication in 1507 was printing with
mechanical type, he said, while “now we have Google Earth, which
is a new way of looking at the world today.”

This week, Google unveiled a map application that the search
engine giant said will customize the known world for every user.
This competes with Apple’s iMap app and possibly with Facebook,
which is creating a map app of its own, as reported by USA
Today.

“We have a universal need to know where we are on the globe
and where we are in the world; it’s one of the things that
transcends time and space,” said John Hessler, a library map
curator and Waldseemuller expert.

OUT OF THE GEOGRAPHIC COMFORT ZONE

That geographic comfort zone was unsettled in
Waldseemuller’s day. His best-known maps were made between 1492,
when Christopher Columbus arrived at what he thought was Asia,
and 1543, when astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus rocked the
Renaissance with his theory that Earth revolved around the Sun,
instead of the other way around.

Waldseemuller chose the name America to honor Florentine
navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the east coast of what
is now known as South America. Because other known continents
had feminine endings in Latin – Africa, Asia and Europa – he
feminized Amerigo to America, said John Hessler, a curator in
the library’s geography and map division.

Also on this map, six years before Vasco de Balboa
encountered it and 15 years after Columbus’ seminal voyage, is
an ocean east of Asia, now known as the Pacific.

So how did Waldseemuller know? He talked about new
Portuguese sailing charts, and according to one theory, may have
heard the Chinese claim that they had already discovered the
Americas. Hessler discounted this.

“He knows it’s a really radical geography,” Hessler said. A
map notation reassures viewers that his was an unusual and
forward-looking world view.

Mariners, clerics, scholars and noble folk were the only
map consumers in Waldseemuller’s time, and maps were rare
because they had to be laboriously printed. Waldseemuller wrote
that there were 1,000 copies of his 1507 map; the Library of
Congress has the only one known to survive.

Digital technology, satellite navigation and easy data
availability now has made maps ubiquitous, said Joseph Kerski, a
geographer at Environmental Systems Research Institute in
Broomfield, Colorado.

“We’re at a moment in time now where all of a sudden
everything we know, everything we touch is being geo-enabled,”
Kerski said by telephone. Still, the role of maps is essentially
unchanged.

While most of Earth’s terrain has already been explored,
Kerski said, mapping continues into such diverse areas as social
networks and microbial activity in soil.

“We may not be exploring new lands per se, but we’re still
exploring and maps are still powerful, just as they always have
been,” the geographer said.

(Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Christopher Wilson)

The huge Tyrannosaurus bataar’s skull was on display at a repatriation ceremony near the United Nations in New York, where officials of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and the U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) formally turned over the nearly complete skeleton to Mongolian officials.

Mongolia demanded the return of the 8-foot-tall (2.4 meter), 24-foot-long (7.3 meter), mostly reconstructed cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex last year after commercial paleontologist Eric Prokopi sold it at a Manhattan auction last spring for $1.05 million.

Prokopi, based in Gainesville, Florida, bought and sold whole and partial fossilized dinosaur skeletons.

U.S. authorities filed charges against Prokopi in October and seized the skeleton, which is comprised of fossilized bones welded to a metal frame.

“This is one of the most important repatriations of fossils in recent years,” ICE Director John Morton said in a statement. “We cannot allow the greed of a few looters and schemers to trump the cultural interests of an entire nation.”

Morton said the repatriation would “undo a great wrong by returning this priceless dinosaur skeleton to the people of Mongolia.”

Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj thanked U.S. prosecutors, judges, investigators and paleontologists in a statement: “Our two countries are separated by many miles, but share a passion for justice and a commitment to putting an end to illegal smuggling.”

In addition to the skeleton, the United States is also helping to return more fossils to Mongolia, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said.

The Tyrannosaurus bataar lived some 70 million years ago in what is now Mongolia, and its skeleton was discovered in 1946 in a joint Soviet-Mongolian expedition to the Gobi Desert, according to court and federal documents.

It was imported to the United States in 2010 from Great Britain, with customs documents that falsely claimed it originated in Great Britain and was valued at $15,000, far below its auction price.

(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; editing by Ros Krasny and Cynthia Osterman)

This is the first direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas, according to the Washington-based museum and research complex.

A recent excavation at the historic site revealed not just the remains of dogs, cats and horses eaten by settlers during the cold “Starving Time” of that year, but also the bones of a girl known to researchers simply as “Jane.”

Jane probably was part of a relatively prosperous household, possibly a gentleman’s daughter or maidservant, said Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley, who analyzed her bones after they were found by Preservation Virginia, a private nonprofit group.

Her back molars had not yet erupted, putting her age around 14 years, and there was a lot of nitrogen in her bones, indicating she ate a meat-rich English diet, Owsley said in a telephone interview.

It is not known whether Jane was killed or died of natural causes. The Smithsonian said there is no evidence of murder.

After her death, in a year when many Jamestown colonists starved, Jane’s body was hacked apart by a butcher or butchers who barely knew what they were doing. She may have been chosen because others in her household were already dead and there was no one to bury her, Owsley said.

UNSKILLED CHOPPING

“There was very clear post-mortem dismemberment that involved chops to the forehead, chops to the back of the head that cracked the skull open,” the scientist said.

“A puncture to the left side of the head was used to essentially lever and open the … head to remove the brain. There are cuts all over the face and on the mandible, inside as well as out.”

By 1609, Owsley said, the settlement was effectively operating under siege, with many of the male colonists killed by hostile Native Americans after venturing out.

Those who remained inside Jamestown’s confines were often women, children and the sick. Those who dismembered Jane might well have been women, he said.

The cuts were “very tentative, hesitant,” Owsley said. “This is not someone who’s skilled in terms of kitchen work or butchery, and yet they know, out of sheer need, that this is what they have to do.”

The brain, tongue, cheeks and leg muscles appear to have been eaten, with the brain probably consumed first because it decomposes soon after death, the Smithsonian said in an online announcement.

Scholars have speculated that extreme drought, hostile relations with the local Powhatan Confederacy and a lost supply ship made the Jamestown colonists desperate enough to eat humans. Writings had suggested it, but no hard physical evidence existed until now.

William Kelso, lead archeologist on the project, and his team discovered the girl’s remains last summer.

“We found a deposit of refuse that contained butchered horse and dog bones,” Kelso said. “That was only done in times of extreme hunger. As we excavated, we found human teeth and then a partial human skull.”

(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Xavier Briand)

The flimsy disc was silent for 138 years as part of the
Smithsonian Museum’s collection of early recorded sound, until
digital imaging, computer science, a hand-written transcript and
a bit of archival detective work confirmed it as the only known
recording of Bell’s voice.

Carlene Stephens, curator of the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of American history, first saw this disc and nearly 400
other audio artifacts donated by Bell when she joined the museum
in 1974, but she didn’t dare play them then.

“Their experimental nature and fragile condition … made
them unsuitable for playback,” Stephens said by email.

“We recognized these materials were significant to the early
history of sound recording, but because they were considered
unplayable, we stored them away safely and hoped for the day
playback technology would catch up with our interest in hearing
the content,” she wrote.

That day came in 2008, when Stephens learned that scientists
at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California had
retrieved 10 seconds of the French folk song “Au Clair de la
Lune” from a 1860 recording of sound waves made as squiggles on
soot-covered paper. That was nearly two decades before Thomas
Edison’s oldest known playable recording, made in 1888.

If the Berkeley scientists could coax sound out of sooty
paper, Stephens reckoned, perhaps they could decipher those
silent records she had guarded for decades.

She contacted Carl Haber at Berkeley and Peter Alyea, a
digital conversion specialist at the Library of Congress. They
chose six recordings from the collection, including the one that
turned out to be the Bell audio, and made ultra-high-definition
three-dimensional images of them.

The Berkeley lab’s scanner captures gigapixels of
information, and not just width and height but the depth of the
grooves, with measurements down to 100 nanometers, or 250 times
smaller than the width of a human hair, Haber said by telephone.

DEEP WIGGLES

Depth is important with these old recordings, Haber said,
because a lot of the information about how it sounds is stored
in the deep parts of the grooves.

“It’s not necessarily a groove that wiggles from side to
side, it wiggles up and down,” he said. “If you just took a
regular (two-dimensional) picture of it, you don’t get the
information you need.”

Haber and Berkeley colleague Earl Cornell used an algorithm
to turn that image into sound, without touching the delicate
disc. The system is known as IRENE/3D, short for Image,
Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.

Most of the recording is Bell’s Scottish-accented voice
saying a series of numbers, and then dollar figures, such as
“three dollars and a half,” “seven dollars and 29 cents” and
finally, “$3,785.56.”

This suggests Bell was thinking about a machine for business
recording, Stephens said.

“The recording on its own is historically interesting and
important,” Stephens wrote. “It answers questions about Bell
personally – what kind of accent did he have? (he was a Scot who
lived in England, Canada and the United States) … How did he
pronounce his middle name? (‘Gray-hum’ not ‘Gram’).”

The job of authenticating the disc began with a hand-written
transcript of the recording signed by Bell (online here).

In 2011, Patrick Feaster, an Indiana University sound-media
historian, inventoried notations on the discs and cylinders in
the Smithsonian’s collection. Many were scratched on wax and all
but illegible, Stephens recalled.

“We then matched up one wax-and-cardboard disc, from April
15, 1885,” Stephens wrote. “When we recovered sound from the
recording … the content matched the transcript word for word.
It is a recording of Bell speaking.”

Similar scanners are used in quality assurance for
micromanufactured products such as microchips, optical
components and to assure the flatness of touch screens. Dentists
use them to take three-dimensional pictures of cavities to aid
in making custom fillings.

The Berkeley lab has worked with the Smithsonian and the
Library of Congress to learn more about the earliest audio
records, some on tinfoil or even paper. And while Haber and his
colleagues now know how to authenticate the recordings, they
cannot do all the records that may exist.

The Northeast Document Conservation Center in Massachusetts
is working with the Berkeley lab on a digital reformatting
service for early audio recordings. There could be as many as 46
million of these early recordings in the United States.

The Bell recording was made at a time of creative ferment,
Haber said, as Bell, Edison and others invented devices to
change the way Americans communicate.

“Those guys were creating the future,” Haber said.

(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; editing by Marilyn W. Thompson
and Jackie Frank)

After coming to the capital aboard the presidential plane on Monday evening, the families had breakfast with Vice President Joe Biden. He said after the two-hour meeting, “I wish the members of Congress had been able to eavesdrop on the discussion in my home today.”

The 11 family members stayed largely out of sight on the first of three days of lobbying in Washington, maintaining that private meetings with lawmakers would serve their cause better than grandstanding. They did hold a conference call with reporters.

“We’re just private citizens who are now part of a club we never wanted to be in,” said Bill Sherlach, whose wife Mary was the school psychologist at Sandy Hook Elementary School, one of six adults and 20 children killed in the December 14 attack.

“We’re not up on all the political wranglings that go on,” Sherlach said. “We’re just the ordinary public, coming to the people that we elected to the offices nationwide and try to bring a program to the table that will be wide-ranging.”

The shooting in the small Connecticut town horrified the country and prompted President Barack Obama to seek ways to prevent such massacres, including gun control. But his administration has struggled to gain support for legislation amid strong opposition from the powerful National Rifle Association.

The Newtown families are pushing for background checks to prevent criminals and the mentally ill from buying guns, and they want a provision to limit the capacity of gun magazines.

KEEPING POLITICS TO A MINIMUM

The families planned a series of private meetings with Democratic and Republican senators, but declined to name the lawmakers, except for Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who they said had agreed to be identified.

They said no senator had declined to meet with them. Senator Mark Pryor, an Arkansas Democrat who faces a tough re-election race next year in a state where gun control faces stiff opposition, said his office would try to schedule a meeting.

Making the Capitol Hill meetings private would keep politics to a minimum, the families said.

Tim Makris, executive director of the advocacy group Sandy Hook Promise, said private meetings let legislators open up in a way public meetings don’t.

“When it’s public, unfortunately at times it can turn political and then nothing happens,” he said.

The Senate is expected to hold a preliminary, test vote on a gun-control measure on Thursday, but Democratic Leader Harry Reid said the bill may not get past Republican procedural hurdles. Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said there was no bipartisan support for the effort.

Obama’s proposals include expanded background checks for gun buyers, a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Makris said the Sandy Hook shooter brought 30-bullet magazines to the school and left smaller magazines at home.

“We know when the shooter stopped to reload, he made it possible for 11 children to escape,” Makris said. “And we’re left to wonder, if he had carried smaller magazines, and been forced to reload up to three times more … would more children be alive?”

The group sought to present a human face to lawmakers.

Asked what the group could bring to the debate what other gun-control advocates could not, Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son Daniel was killed in the shooting, told the conference call:

“Lots of people can discuss the issues from an intellectual perspective, but we bring a personal perspective.”

(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton and Richard Cowan; Editing by Frances Kerry)

As one of two leaders of a scientific “dream team” in the
initial phase of President Barack Obama’s ambitious $100 million
project to map the brain, Bargmann said the first step is to
find the right combination of people to set research priorities.

“You might start with people who are very senior and are
household words in their fields, and then you may realize that
what (you) actually need is the young Turk who’s a visionary
wild man,” Bargmann said.

Bargmann, a neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University in
New York, and William Newsome, a neurobiologist at Stanford
Medical School in California, are the co-chairs of a committee
announced by the White House on Tuesday for the Brain Research
through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative. That
long title has been dubbed BRAIN for short.

Both Newsome and Bargmann are at the top of the neurobiology
pyramid, professors at premiere institutions, winners of dozens
of scientific honors and awards, authors of research papers in
prestigious journals. As Newsome noted wryly, “I don’t need this
aggravation, to some extent, but I think this is really
important.”

Bargmann, who recalls watching the first Apollo moon landing
in 1969 as an 8-year-old, this year won a $3 million
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for her work on the genetics
of neural circuits and behavior and synaptic guidepost
molecules.

This project was something no scientist, so far, has turned
down.

“If there’s going to be a program to try to do something
significant and the taxpayer’s going to be involved in it, you
make the time to try to help,” she said. “As far as I know,
everyone who was asked to help said yes.”

The BRAIN effort isn’t quite like any other, Bargmann said.
Even the Human Genome Project had a more focused goal at the
start: to determine the precise sequence of chemical “letters”
that constitute the full complement of human DNA.

In contrast, before BRAIN tries to solve a single mystery of
the human mind, it will build the scientific infrastructure to
be able to ask the right questions. Like the U.S. space program
in the 1960s, she said, BRAIN could get the public excited about
science in a way that other research has not.

“I believe that brain science will be to the 21st century
what quantum physics and DNA molecular biology were to the 20th
century,” Newsome said.

The ultimate goal is to decode brain activity to help
researchers understand complex ailments ranging from traumatic
brain injury to schizophrenia to Alzheimer’s disease, which cost
Americans $500 billion annually, according to Francis Collins,
the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, who picked
Newsome and Bargmann for the job.

The program would initially be funded with $100 million
called for in the president’s fiscal 2014 budget, set for
release on Wednesday, which is subject to approval by Congress.
That sum would be divided among the National Institutes of
Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
and the National Science Foundation, with partners from the
private sector.

Bargmann found it refreshing that Obama said the project
would provide tools for understanding Alzheimer’s and
psychiatric disease, but he did not promise cures. “It isn’t
promising too much,” she said.

SWITCHING BRAIN CELLS ON AND OFF

She was also encouraged by support from two prominent
Republicans: House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric
Cantor of Virginia, and Newt Gingrich, former presidential
candidate and former House speaker, who credited Obama for
taking “a very important step toward the most dramatic
breakthroughs in human health.”

The Democratic president does not often get such enthusiasm
from his Republican opponents.

Fast-developing technology makes this “a unique moment in
time” to make this inquiry, Newsome said.

“I think the brain is the most mysterious and complex entity
in the universe,” he said by telephone. “And I think that new
technologies that have developed within the last five years give
us a shot at cracking open the problem of the brain in ways that
previous generations of scientists never dreamed.”

One of these technologies, Newsome said, is optogenetics,
which uses genetic engineering to make certain nerve cells in
the brain sensitive to different kinds of light, exciting or
inhibiting these cells depending on the light’s wavelength.

That means scientists can artificially switch the brain’s
circuits on or off during behavior to see how they contribute to
essential functions like vision, learning and decision-making,
Newsome said.

The other technological leap of the last decade has been the
ability to record the electrical activity of hundreds or even
thousands of neurons, a big improvement over the previous
requirement of studying one neuron at a time. Since the human
brain is composed of some 100 billion neurons – nerve cells that
pulse with electrochemical signals – the one-at-a-time approach
slowed research to a crawl.

It’s not just the number of neurons, but seeing how these
billions of neurons interact with each other that could make a
map of the brain a reality.

That map is likely to be less like an atlas on paper and
more like an online traffic video, Bargmann said, “because the
brain is never the same in any two people, and it’s not the same
in one person at two different times.”

Both Bargmann and Newsome are working in their own
laboratories on pieces of this puzzle. Newsome focuses on the
brain’s way of mediating visual perception and visually guided
behavior (see his lab’s site at).

Bargmann’s research aims to tackle a big subject – how
environment and genes interact to shape human behavior – by
looking at the relatively simple neurological system of a worm.

But on Tuesday, the focus moved to the Adams Morgan neighborhood, where some saw a symbol of Washington – a gaping sinkhole in the middle of a bustling sidewalk.

Unlike the fatal sinkhole that swallowed a man as he slept in his Seffner, Florida, home on February 28, or the one a golfer fell into on an Illinois fairway earlier this month, the Washington sinkhole is more on the order of a large pothole. Surrounded by yellow tape, it is about a yard (meter) square, as deep as 10 feetand sits a few miles from the White House, another frequent source of late-night television humor.

But the sinkhole quickly took on larger proportions as chatter erupted on social media.

“A sinkhole has opened in Washington D.C. Last to push their congressman in is a rotten egg,” tweeted Bill O’Keefe.

“25 ft deep sinkhole in DC today and it’s expanding. Seems like I got out at the right time. It was nice knowing you, Washington,” tweeted T.C. Sottek.

Metropolitan Police were dispatched to the sinkhole site, and local residents said the problem might be due to a new sewer that had just been installed.

“If that is the case, it would be typical of this kind of sinkhole collapse,” said Jim Kaufmann, a research physical scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey.

Sinkholes are not uncommon, Kaufman said, because about 20 percent of the United States sits atop what is known as karst terrain, regions where rock below the surface can be naturally dissolved by groundwater. Hot areas for sinkholes are Florida, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

In a city like Washington, they can be traced to something as innocuous as a leaking pipe that erodes sediment below the surface, Kaufmann said by phone from Rolla, Missouri. They also are common after long dry spells followed by rainy periods.

Even Kaufmann initially saw the humor in Washington’s encounter with the phenomenon.

“It’s not on Capitol Hill, is it?,” he asked.

(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson)

“The White House is our house,” the class said in a video posted on Facebook. “Please let us visit.”

But their trip to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which had been set for March 16, is off. White House tours will be suspended starting on Saturday due to mandated across-the-board spending cuts known as “sequestration.” The move will save the federal government an estimated $74,000 a week.

Many were left holding worthless tour tickets, secured months in advance through members of Congress. There is no rain check for a White House tour.

The children’s video caught the attention of White House reporters, and of the top Republican in Congress.

“What is your answer, or the president’s answer, to the sixth-graders at St. Paul’s Lutheran School?” one reporter asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

“It is extremely unfortunate that we have a situation like the sequester that compels the kinds of tradeoffs and decisions that this represents,” said Carney.

He said the Secret Service, which is involved in the tours, offered various options to deal with sequester-related cuts ranging from canceling tours to furloughs and cuts in overtime.

“And in order to allow the Secret Service to best fulfill its core missions, the White House made the decision that we would, unfortunately, have to temporarily suspend these tours,” Carney said.

When another White House spokesman was asked whether private donations might put the tours back on track, he said that step might be unfeasible given the technical requirements of the sequester.

The last time the White House closed its doors to school groups was after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The tours resumed the following February, with a suspension in the spring of 2003 during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The general public was not allowed back into the White House until September 2003.

‘A LITTLE BIT HEARTBREAKING’

The decision found little favor with supporters of St. Paul’s sixth-graders, who asked Facebook viewers to “like” their video to agitate for putting the tour back on their Washington itinerary.

By late Friday, nearly 1,000 had “liked” the post, nearly 500 had shared it and more than 100 had commented.

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner boasted that tours of the Capitol would continue.

“Even though our budget’s been cut like everyone else’s, thanks to proper planning, we’re able to avoid furloughs amongst Capitol workers, and tours are going to remain available for all Americans,” Boehner told reporters on Thursday.

He called the White House decision “disappointing” and “silly,” the result of a failure to find savings in other parts of the budget.

Benno Nelson, a Los Angeles-based film director and self-described “civic nerd” who is planning a family trip to Washington in May, had a one-word response when told of the tour cancellations: “Nooooo!”

“Definitely to get a tour of the White House is something I was really looking forward to, and I planned it in advance and called my congressman. … To hear that they’re not doing that is a little bit heartbreaking,” he said.

The recorded White House message for those looking for tour information is as contrite as a recorded message can get:

“Due to staffing reductions resulting from sequestration, we regret to inform you that White House tours will be canceled effective Saturday, March 9, 2013, until further notice. Unfortunately we will not be able to reschedule affected tours. We very much regret having to take this action, particularly during the popular spring touring season.”

(Reporting By Deborah Zabarenko, additional reporting by Richard Cowan and David Lawder; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Xavier Briand)

“The White House is our house,” the class said in a video
posted on Facebook. “Please let us visit.”

But their trip to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which had been
set for March 16, is off. White House tours will be suspended
starting on Saturday due to mandated across-the-board spending
cuts known as “sequestration.” The move will save the federal
government an estimated $74,000 a week.

Many were left holding worthless tour tickets, secured
months in advance through members of Congress. There is no rain
check for a White House tour.

The children’s video caught the attention of White House
reporters, and of the top Republican in Congress.

“What is your answer, or the president’s answer, to the
sixth-graders at St. Paul’s Lutheran School?” one reporter asked
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

“It is extremely unfortunate that we have a situation like
the sequester that compels the kinds of tradeoffs and decisions
that this represents,” said Carney.

He said the Secret Service, which is involved in the tours,
offered various options to deal with sequester-related cuts
ranging from canceling tours to furloughs and cuts in overtime.

“And in order to allow the Secret Service to best fulfill
its core missions, the White House made the decision that we
would, unfortunately, have to temporarily suspend these tours,”
Carney said.

When another White House spokesman was asked whether private
donations might put the tours back on track, he said that step
might be unfeasible given the technical requirements of the
sequester.

The last time the White House closed its doors to school
groups was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The tours resumed
the following February, with a suspension in the spring of 2003
during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The general public was not allowed back into the White House
until September 2003.

‘A LITTLE BIT HEARTBREAKING’

The decision found little favor with supporters of St.
Paul’s sixth-graders, who asked Facebook viewers to “like” their
video to agitate for putting the tour back on their Washington
itinerary.

By late Friday, nearly 1,000 had “liked” the post, nearly
500 had shared it and more than 100 had commented.

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner boasted that
tours of the Capitol would continue.

“Even though our budget’s been cut like everyone else’s,
thanks to proper planning, we’re able to avoid furloughs amongst
Capitol workers, and tours are going to remain available for all
Americans,” Boehner told reporters on Thursday.

He called the White House decision “disappointing” and
“silly,” the result of a failure to find savings in other parts
of the budget.

Benno Nelson, a Los Angeles-based film director and
self-described “civic nerd” who is planning a family trip to
Washington in May, had a one-word response when told of the tour
cancellations: “Nooooo!”

“Definitely to get a tour of the White House is something I
was really looking forward to, and I planned it in advance and
called my congressman. … To hear that they’re not doing that
is a little bit heartbreaking,” he said.

The recorded White House message for those looking for tour
information is as contrite as a recorded message can get:

“Due to staffing reductions resulting from sequestration, we
regret to inform you that White House tours will be canceled
effective Saturday, March 9, 2013, until further notice.
Unfortunately we will not be able to reschedule affected tours.
We very much regret having to take this action, particularly
during the popular spring touring season.”

At a packed signing ceremony at the Interior Department – the White House couldn’t accommodate all the advocates who supported the measure, the president said – Obama signed an expanded version of the law that extends protection to gays, immigrants, Native Americans and sex-trafficking victims.

“One of the great legacies of this law is that it didn’t just change the rules,” Obama said. “It changed our culture. It empowered people to start speaking out … And it made clear to victims that they were not alone, that they always had a place to go, and they always had people on their side.

“And today, because members of both parties worked together, we’re able to renew that commitment,” he said.

In thanking Democrats and Republicans, Obama was tacitly recognizing the bill’s tough path through Congress. Republican lawmakers initially refused to support the measure, and then offered an alternative that advocates said would weaken domestic violence protections for women.

In the end, 87 Republicans in the House of Representatives and 18 in the Senate bucked party leadership to support the law and send it to Obama for his signature.

(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Paul Simao)