Just in the unlikely case that the world of athletics did not know what they will be missing once Usain Bolt walks away in less than two weeks, the Jamaican superstar’s final eve-of-race news conference rammed home the message on Tuesday.

These events have become part and parcel of every global championship and though Tuesday’s version in east London lacked the dancing girl razzmatazz of his Rio welcome last year, it scored heavily on nostalgia as every aspect of his stellar career was raked over anew.

As always, journalists and TV crews, around 400 of them, from every corner of the world packed every available space and strained their arms in desperation to get their question answered by the great man, who playfully castigated one half of the auditorium for not giving him an enthusiastic enough welcome.

Bolt is an old hand of course and rolled out all the familiar answers, but always with grace.

His proudest moment was winning the world junior title on home soil as a 15-year-old while his most satisfying performance was his 200 meters world record run in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where he poured all his concentration into getting the mark he had always wanted, having earlier danced over the line when winning the 100m.

He explained how his motivation to keep putting his body through such a punishing regime was renewed each year by resetting his goals – with one often created for him by a casually “disrespectful” remark from one of his opponents.

His target in London is clear — to sign off with a fourth 100m title and a fifth 4x100m relay gold — taking his world haul to 13 to add to his eight Olympic golds – and then head off to play football with his friends and have fun.

“I’m ready,” he said. “If I show up at a championships you know I’m fully confident and ready to go.

“I ran 9.95 in Monaco so it shows I’m going in the right direction. Going through the rounds always helps me and it’s then about who can keep their nerve. “It’s go time, so let’s go.”

The London Stadium, where he successfully defended his sprint double in the 2012 Olympics, will rise to acclaim him when he settles into his blocks for the last time on Saturday night.

Then, other than the relay a week later, he will be gone, leaving the sport without the man who has been its focal point for a decade.

Tuesday’s event included big screen “farewell and thanks” messages from the likes of actors Samuel L. Jackson and Idris Elba, former France footballer Thierry Henry, model Cara Delevingne and India cricket captain Virat Kohli, underlining his status as probably the world’s most famous and arguably most admired sportsman.

Bolt, who turns 31 later this month, looked moved by the images, saying: “It’s just brilliant that people in other disciplines respect what you do as they know the work you have to do.”

British TV had screened his “I am Bolt” film on Monday night, which opened a window on the rarely seen battles he has had to go through to overcome so many injuries and was a testament to his willingness to work himself back into shape year after year.

That is one thing he will not miss, and although he thrives on the pressure of the big race, he says he is looking forward to watching the next one from the sidelines. “Oh yeah, sitting down, talking about it, no pressure,” he said. “The next championship should be fun.

“It’s going to be hard, as track and field has been everything for me since I was 10 and it’s been a rush — but we’ll see where life takes me.”

He intends to stay close to athletics and is eyeing some sort of roving ambassadorial role, inspiring the world’s youth to get involved in a sport he says is on the up after reaching “rock bottom” with the Russian doping crisis of two years ago.

While fans and the sport’s administrators will miss Bolt enormously, those lamenting his departure most of all will probably be his chief sponsor Puma, the German sportswear manufacturer which has shod him and ridden his glory for a decade while the rest of the sport has largely been dominated by rivals Adidas and Nike.

Bolt’s parents were on hand on Tuesday to present him with his final pair of spikes — a combination of gold to mark his career highs and the purple of his school, William Knibb Memorial, where it all started after his cricket coach suggested he try out for the track team.

“I didn’t know I would be a world record holder growing up, I had no idea,” he said. “So all I’ll say now is, if you work hard, that anything is possible.”
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The Pennsylvania childhood home of author John Updike is nearing its transformation into a museum and literary center.

The future of the Shillington home had been uncertain until The John Updike Society purchased it in 2012. Since then, the society has worked to re-create the 1930’s vibe of the late Pulitzer Prize winner’s home, based on old photographs and Updike’s writings.

Updike spent the first 13 years of his life in the Shillington house, about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of Philadelphia. The Reading Eagle reports Updike’s daughter is donating furniture from his childhood to the museum.

The Updike Society says restoration should be finished by the end of summer.

Updike won Pulitzers for the novels Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. He died in 2009 at age 76.
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The war in Syria destroyed more than its cities. It destroyed its soul, says American drummer and photographer Jason Hamacher, who has recorded a large collection of Syrian religious music in an effort to preserve it. Arman Tarjimanyan reports.
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Old inns along the Revolutionary War trails boast of George Washington sleeping there. But coin experts say they have found the first silver piece minted by the United States — one likely held by the most en vogue of Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton.

David McCarthy figured the silver coin had to be one-of-a-kind after spotting it in the auction catalog.

Its front features the all-seeing eye of God, surrounded by rays of light. The rays shoot out toward 13 stars — one for each of the colonies that had rebelled against Great Britain. A similar coin bore two words in Latin above the starburst: “Nova Constellatio,” or “new constellation” to describe the infant United States. But this silver piece bore no inscription at all. It was the first clue that the coin was something singular, said McCarthy, a senior researcher for the coin and collectibles firm Kagin’s.

He had a hunch it was the first coin ever minted by the U.S. government in 1783 — the prototype for a plan discussed by both Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson that arguably shaped the course of the nation. McCarthy staked his company’s money to buy the coin for $1.18 million at the 2013 auction.

On display in Denver

After nearly four years of late nights sifting through the papers of the Founding Fathers and studying the beading on the coin’s edges, he is now making an exhaustive case that this silver piece is indeed the first American coin, the precursor of what ultimately would circulate a decade later as the U.S dollar.

The coin is on display this week at the World’s Fair of Money in Denver.

“You’ve used the progeny of this one coin in every transaction you’ve done in your life, whether it’s a bitcoin, a dollar or a euro,” McCarthy said.”

McCarthy published the details of his findings in the August issue of a coin dealer magazine, The Numismatist, as well as in a post on Medium. He vetted and refined his findings over the years with other top experts such as John Dannreuther, a rare coin dealer who found identifying marks on another coin that indicates that it had to have been struck days or even weeks later from the same steel dies.

“I’m 99.9999 percent certain this is the first U.S. coin,” Dannreuther said.

It was well-known among collectors that a first coin existed. Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who financed the American Revolution, recorded its existence in his diary on April 2, 1783.

Hamilton, Jefferson agreed

As first Superintendent of Finance of the United States, Morris wrote he received a delivery of “a Piece of Silver Coin being the first that has been struck as an American Coin.” Hamilton visited Morris a week later and the two corresponded on the “subject of the Coin.” The continental Congress was then presented with a fuller set of coins on April 22, which was then forwarded to Jefferson for his thoughts.

Both Hamilton and Jefferson — now popularly known as rivals from the musical “Hamilton” — embraced the idea that the U.S. currency should be in units of 10.

The coin purchased by McCarthy had a back with a wreath identifying it as a “500” quint, essentially the forerunner of the half-dollar. It had initially been found in 1860, about 15 years after the similar coin with the “new constellation” inscription. Because the new constellation coin was found earlier, experts labeled McCarthy’s coin as “Type 2.” Over the years, that label was mistakenly believed to refer to the coin being struck after the one with the inscription.

“You have this powerful word ‘2’ that implies something and it hijacked everyone’s ability to see what was right in front of them,” said McCarthy, 44.

Eureka moment

The day of the 2013 auction in Schaumburg, Illinois, McCarthy sat in his hotel room with his files and air conditioning cranked on high. He methodically convinced his boss, Donald Kagin, that the coin up for auction was the nation’s first. It was a nuanced case since other dealers claimed it was a forgery. But the initial explanation was that mints tended to add inscriptions to the steel dies used to make coins after having engraved the images.

So McCarthy bid on the silver coin — and then began the research needed to make his case ironclad. He searched through the National Archives for records, only to learn that the microfilm of original documents didn’t correspond to the actual files.

His eureka moment came in a New York hotel room while reviewing the original receipts for the steel dies used to make the coins. There had been a total of 10 dies made by a blacksmith, but the receipts showed that 12 dies had been engraved by two different artisans. This suggested that two of the dies had been recycled and refined after the first coin had been struck. He compared the beadings on the edges of the different coins, as well as a dent in the eye at the center of the inscripted “500” coin and its plain cousin. The evidence all pointed to him having uncovered the nation’s first coin.

‘Really, really good’ research

Jeff Garrett, president of the American Numismatic Association, called the research “really, really good.”

In terms of the coin’s possible value, Garrett said the closest comparison was a 1794 silver dollar that sold for more than $10 million four years ago. But the allure of coins isn’t just their rarity or metal content but the history that comes embedded to them as they pass through the ages.

“People always ask, how could a coin be worth a $1 million or $5 million?” Garrett said. “I always say it’s because of the stories.”
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Angelina Jolie responded to growing backlash over the casting process for her latest film, saying she was “upset” that an improvised scene during auditions had been misconstrued as taking real money away from impoverished children.

In a Vanity Fair interview published last week about her film “First They Killed My Father,” Jolie described a game played by the casting directors with the young Cambodian children auditioning for the lead role of Loung Ung.

Jolie, a special envoy for the United Nations refugee agency, told Vanity Fair she looked for her lead star in orphanages, circuses and slum schools.

Jolie defends casting process

In the casting, a child was placed in front of money on a table, asked to think of what they needed it for and to snatch it away. Jolie would then pretend to catch them, and the child would have to lie about why they stole the money.

“I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario,” Jolie, who directed the film, said in a statement on Sunday.

“The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened.”

Users on social media slammed Jolie’s casting game as cruel and exploiting impoverished children. Vanity Fair reporter Evgenia Peretz called the casting game “disturbing in its realism” in the profile, while Kayla Cobb at pop culture website Decider.com compared the game to a psychological thriller.

“Everyone should know better than to literally dangle money in front of impoverished children … no movie is worth psychologically traumatizing multiple children,” Cobb wrote.

Movie set during Khmer Rouge regime

“First They Killed My Father” is about the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime under which more than 1 million people died. It is due to be released globally and on Netflix in September.

Jolie said the young girl who won the part, Srey Moch, was chosen after “she became overwhelmed with emotion” when forced to give the money back, saying she needed the money to pay for her grandfather’s funeral.

“The children were not tricked or entrapped, as some have suggested,” Rithy Panh, a Cambodian producer on the film, said in a statement. “They understood very well that this was acting, and make believe.”

 
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