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Officials in Jiangmen, China, are banning residents from keeping dogs, in a move that will take effect at the end of August, according to Chinese media. In one week, owners can begin taking their dogs to drop-off centers, where they will be either adopted by residents of rural areas or euthanized.

Update at 6:23 p.m. ET, Thursday: City officials have now relented, and cancelled the ban on dog ownership. Our original post continues:

Last in a three-part series

For a decade, Helen Zhang has had a dream: to run an international scientific journal that meets international standards. So she was delighted to be appointed journal director for Zhejiang University in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

In 2008, when her scientific publication, the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science, became the first in China to use CrossCheck text analysis software to spot plagiarism, Zhang was pleased to be a trailblazer. But when the first set of results came in, she was upset and horrified.

For some inventions, say the light bulb, everyone knows who invented it.

But at the U.S. Capitol on a hot July day, no one seemed to know who invented the air conditioner. Even as the statue of a man many call the air conditioner's inventor stood just down the hall.

After an hour or so of searching, Mike Veselik, from Chicago, came close to knowing.

"I know that a doctor from Florida came up with it, trying to stop people from having fevers I think it was," Veselik said.

The early Earth had two moons instead of just one — our familiar moon, as well as a smaller companion moon that also rose and set in the sky for tens of millions of years.

That's according to a new theory that says this smaller moon eventually went careening into our moon and is still there, in the form of mountains on its far side.

Scientists have long puzzled over those mountains, and the fact that the two sides of our moon are very different. The near side has flat lowlands, while the far side is high and mountainous.

What Washington was worried about and what many Americans have been haunted by has seemed out of synch in recent weeks.

The fiery Washington debate was about the debt-ceiling, while the concerns of millions of Americans was about jobs, either finding or keeping one.

For Washington Democrats, the debt ceiling debate was a distraction from the jobs message they view as key to their re-election efforts.

It turns out the ones with a below average IQ are a number of people in the news media — including us — who were fooled by an elaborate hoax that claimed users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser were slow. We fell for it and so did others like the BBC, CNN, Forbes as well as the IT publication The Register, which we quoted.

During East Africa's worst drought in 60 years, tens of thousands have already died and millions urgently need food. The United Nations is warning that the crisis will worsen if aid is not increased. Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai says government systems have severely lagged in helping locals and solving environmental problems. She tells host Michel Martin what else should be done to bring relief to the region.

Alek Wek is among 60 refugees sharing personal stories on the 60th anniversary of the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention. She says stigma should never be attached to the term "refugee," and shares her struggles, triumphs and advocacy work with host Michel Martin. The United Nations' Larry Yungk also discusses the intent of this week's "First Refugee Congress."

There's one thing that freshman Republicans and the old-guard GOP leadership can agree on — the Class of 2010 fundamentally changed the focus of the debate over taxes and spending.

In a key test of their clout, the group of congressional newcomers largely stuck to their guns through tense negotiations, forcing a first-ever cap on discretionary spending and staving off tax increases.

Members of Congress have begun fleeing the nation's steamy capital for their summer break, leaving behind a funk of noxious politics and a debt-ceiling deal that averts a government default but inspires almost universal hatred.

They're also dragging along dueling narratives about what the acrimonious past few weeks have meant for the prospects of the Tea Party movement.

In 2007, James Ford Seale was belatedly convicted for his role in the 1964 abduction and killing of two black men in rural Mississippi. Seale died in jail Tuesday, while serving three life sentences. He was 76.

The AP has some background:

Seale was convicted of two counts of kidnapping and one of conspiracy to commit kidnapping in the 1964 deaths of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, both 19.

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Beat since 1999.

Following in uneasy but steady lockstep behind the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives, the Democrat-controlled US Senate voted 74-26 Tuesday to endorse the deal between President Obama and Congressional Republicans that will impose massive cuts in federal programs in return for a temporary hike in the debt ceiling.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

For House speaker John Boehner, Tea Party Republicans weren't the problem as he sought support for a package of spending cuts attached to an increase in the debt limit. The biggest impediment to a House majority was Republicans fearful a primary opponent would use a vote to boost the debt limit against them.

There are two apartment buildings in my Manhattan neighborhood that share a block. They sit very close. One is about nine inches from the other. In the small vertical space between them, a horde of finches have built themselves nest upon nest upon nest rising for nine human floors. It's a finch skyscraper. In March and April you can see finches busily flying in and out of this vertical crack, bearing twigs, grasses and nest-building material.

Seventy-seven people have gotten sick and one has died in a salmonella outbreak that's appears to be caused by tainted ground turkey, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

And the bacterial strain investigators are closing in on — Salmonella Heidelberg — is potentially quite bad because it's resistant to a lot of common antibiotics. That complicates treatment for people who get sick from it.

So why hasn't the government issued any turkey recalls?

Christina Larson is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

Hosni Mubarak, the man who ruled Egypt with an iron fist for nearly three decades, was wheeled into a Cairo courtroom on a hospital bed and placed in a metal cage as his trial opened Wednesday on charges of corruption and conspiracy in the killing of protesters who sought his ouster.

The ailing 83-year-old lay ashen-faced as he pleaded not guilty from inside the defendants' cage. His two sons, also on trial, stood beside him in white prison uniforms.

ABC News has a report out this morning that claims to name the source of the new information in the D.B. Cooper skyjacking. ABC says unnamed and unspecified sources have confirmed that a woman named Marla Cooper provided the FBI with a guitar strap for fingerprint testing.

NPR is trying to independently confirm ABC's claim. The FBI has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Good morning!

The story dominating the morning is that six months after his ouster, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is standing trial on charges of corruption and complicity in the deaths of protesters. The ailing 83-year-old was in a hospital bed inside a metal cage. The AP reports:

Ed Kilgore is a special correspondent for The New Republic.

Mathew Continetti is an opinion editor for The Weekly Standard.

The talks were going nowhere. It was July 13, the fifth straight day of negotiations between President Obama and congressional leaders over an agreement to increase the debt ceiling. The hour was late when House majority leader Eric Cantor repeated the Republican preference for a short-term increase. But the president wasn't having it. "Eric, don't call my bluff," Obama said. "I'm going to the American people on this."

Yet another politician has given up his seat because explicit pictures of themselves ended up on the World Wide Web and in this case on the site of a political adversary.

Louis N. Magazzu, 53-year-old Democrat, had been a New Jersey freeholder, or county commissioner, for nearly 14 years. He resigned, yesterday, amid a controversy that's becoming very familiar: Magazzu texted naked pictures of himself to a woman he'd never met in person and then those pictures went public.

The rise of fracking as a method for extracting natural gas from shale rock has triggered demand for a key ingredient in the process: silica sand. In parts of the upper Midwest, there's been a rush to mine this increasingly valuable product.