National News

Did you see the video of the meteor hitting the Moon on Friday? The meteor that NASA thinks weighed less than 100 pounds and was travelling at 56,000 miles per hour? You can check out a video of the event and the big explosion -- which could reportedly be seen with the naked eye.

Things crashing into the moon -- you know, that's how the third Transformers movie starts right? At least that's how the preview starts. Sorry Michael Bay, when it comes to explosions, we'd rather watch the NASA source footage.

Raised on the South Side, Manzarek brought Chicago sound to L.A.'s beaches with the trailblazing band. He died Monday at age 74.

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In Texas, it may be politically unwise to cross the governor, but some politicians and advocates in the poor Rio Grande Valley are starting to speak out in support of expanding Medicaid. Gov. Rick Perry opposes all parts of Obamacare.

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In Texas, it may be politically unwise to cross the governor, but some politicians and advocates in the poor Rio Grande Valley are starting to speak out in support of expanding Medicaid. Governor Perry opposes all parts of Obamacare.

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The deadly collapse of a textile factory in Bangladesh has heightened awareness about cheap clothes. Many Americans have become used to inexpensive clothing, but the garments are also discarded at a remarkable rate: Billions of pounds of clothing are recycled each year; nearly half is exported.

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The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said the tech giant claimed that three key offshore companies were not tax residents of Ireland or the U.S. One of those subsidiaries paid no taxes for the past five years while it reported income totaling $30 billion.

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Twitter captures firsthand accounts and reaction from the massive tornado that swept through central Oklahoma.

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The search for victims and survivors continues after a tornado packing 200-mph winds flattened neighborhoods outside Oklahoma City.

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The National Weather Service says it was at least an EF-4 tornado with winds in excess of 166 mph.

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A federal judge ruled that prosecutors failed to prove the executive knew about a pending congressional investigation into oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The decision left in place a second charge against the executive, for allegedly making false statements to investigators about the oil flow rate.

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The state straddles Tornado Alley and has had a number of especially strong twisters leave a path of death and destruction in their wake.

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Tornado strength is currently measured on what is called the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which gives the tornado a rating from 0 to 5 based on estimated wind speeds and the severity of the damage.

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In a day of big tech news, it can be difficult sometimes to pull back from the touchscreens and keypads to focus on something more tactile.

Something like paper.

Or paper notebooks. The distinctive black-bound ones made by Moleskine to be exact. You wouldn’t think they’d do well against an iPad. But you’d be wrong. The Moleskine notebook has history on its side.

“The product and the Moleskine story really go way back, toward the end of the 1800s to the beginning of the 1900s. A group of artists and literati, mostly based in Paris, started using this notebooks,” says Arrigo Berni, the company’s CEO. “But the product then disappeared toward the second half of the 1900s, around 1980.”

Moleskine notebooks, in their current iteration, are made by a company formed in the mid-'90s in Italy. The company launched their IPO earlier this year, on April 3. But unlike the Apples and the Facebooks of the world, the company chose to debut on the Italian stock market, despite the country’s troubled economy.

“As an Italian citizen, on a personal level, I am worried. As the head of a global company that kind of happens to be based in Italy, I’m taking a more global view,” he says. Italy accounts for less than 10 percent of the company’s sales.

Berni attributes the company’s success to the very thing some could see as a disadvantage.

“There are certain dimensions of our life where digital technology is definitely providing a benefit, an advantage, to us," he says, "but there are other dimensions, maybe closer to what human beings are and the physical experience of interacting with physical products. The emotional dimension ‘where technology is at a disadvantage in fact, compared to paper.”

Arrigo Berni on how to pronounce "Moleskine"

“We want people to feel free to say the name the way they want. Having said that, “moleskin” as a word is originally an English word. So the English pronunciation is ‘Mole-skin.’ But then you know, it was moved to France and over there, an ‘e’ was added and the French pronunciation is ‘mol-ey-skine.’”

The keyboardist co-founded the band after meeting Jim Morrison in California. The Doors went on to become one of the most successful rock 'n' roll acts of the 1960s. Manzarek, 74, died in Germany after a long battle with bile duct cancer.

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There wasn’t a hint of the trouble JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon now faces when he addressed Harvard Business School graduates in the summer of 2009. This was Dimon at his very height, a banker who had steered his firm away from the perils of the financial storm that wrecked the competition. He was a star Harvard MBA grad returning as Crimson conquering hero.

“I wanna do a great job for this company,” Dimon told students and their families, smacking the podium as he spoke. “I bleed JPMorgan blood.”

The bleeding, of course, came later, most famously in the form of the $6.2 billion loss by a trader known as the London Whale. Regulators have been bearing down on other JPMorgan businesses, including a federal investigation into the bank's energy trading.

This turn of events has built momentum for the greatest test of Dimon's leadership. Tuesday, shareholders weigh in on a non-binding proposal to remove him as chairman. Under fire is a bit of an unusual place for the 57-year-old CEO. Comprehending how he lost his post-crisis glow essentially requires understanding two things: risk and power.

Dimon's rise began in 1982. Fresh out of Harvard Business School, he had several offers from top Wall Street firms. He turned them down, making the surprising choice to join American Express and work for Sandy Weill, even though the Goldman Sachs job would have paid far more. Weill offered a whole different kind of possibility.

“The opportunity with Sandy was to actually build something,” says Duff McDonald, author of the Dimon biography “Last Man Standing.” “He saw a mentor who he loved working with, who said, ‘Stick with me kid and we’ll go places.’ And they did.”

Working for Weill was an uncertain path, a risk for a shot at power. They weren’t at AmEx long, moving on to gobble up companies to build what’s now Citigroup, a megabank that inspired the phrase "too big to fail."

By 1998, though, Dimon fell out with Weill and was fired. Bankers still talk about why the breakup happened, analyzing it the way tabloids pour over Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. But basically, Dimon wanted more power.

“If you want Dimon as CEO, you have to give him some freedom to run the ship the way he sees fit,” says Morningstar bank analyst Jim Sinegal.

Dimon waited a year and a half to find a ship that offered that power. He became CEO at Chicago’s Bank One and did well enough to gain the notice of JPMorgan, which bought his bank in 2004. Dimon rose to become JPMorgan’s CEO the next year, and also its chairman the year after.

Fast-forward to the financial crisis. Many top bank execs knew nothing of the exotic gambling their people were doing. But Dimon dug into details and grilled his execs.

“Oftentimes, Dimon will know more about the risks and what’s going on in their area of the firm then they do,” Sinegal explains.

Dimon’s skilled risk management increased his power as JPMorgan swallowed up failed banks Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual at cut rates. Dimon’s image was glimmering. His name was floated as a possible successor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

But the glow didn’t last. If Dimon had a time travel fantasy, it would be something like "Star Trek 4," when Captain Kirk and crew visit the past to save the universe. They were looking for whales.

But there was no chance to reverse the mistakes of the London Whale. Dimon had failed at his greatest strength, managing risk. He also drew fire for publicly fighting new banking rules. Critics pounced.

“It looks like JPMorgan Chase has become too big, too complex, too opaque, even for Jamie Dimon to manage,” says Simon Johnson, the former International Monetary Fund chief economist, now at the Peterson Institute.

Notice that critics don’t deny Dimon's superior management skills. Supporters, and there are many, point out the bank has racked up record profits.

Dimon is unapologetic lately, and has reportedly threatened to leave the company entirely if shareholders vote to strip him of the chairmanship. Observers predict a sudden loss of Dimon’s leadership would hurt JPMorgan’s share price.

“The market value would decline by $20 billion, a little more than 10 percent stock decline,” says CLSA bank analyst Mike Mayo.

At that energetic speech to Harvard business students, Dimon slowed down at the end and mused about how he wanted to be remembered.

“I hope people say, ‘We’re gonna miss the SOB, and the world is a better place for him having been here,’” Dimon concluded.

He will certainly be remembered, because taking and managing risk brought him great power. In Tuesday’s vote, the risk is losing power.

The 1,200-year-old European pilgrimage route known as the Way of St. James is undergoing a revival. Tens of thousands of people are walking across France to the Spanish coastal city of Santiago de Compostela, and the relics of St. James. Once a religious affair, it's now a cultural and social phenomenon as well.

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There is one place in the country where a law enforcement agency can trace a gun found at a crime scene back to a buyer: the ATF's National Tracing Center in West Virginia. But the tracing process is usually tedious, involving multiple phone calls and searching, by hand, through paper records.

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Microsoft has had few blockbuster successes in recent years. On Tuesday, when the tech giant is scheduled to introduce its new Xbox, it will be targeting more than just hard-core gamers. Analysts say Microsoft will also be aiming to make its console the center of entertainment in your living room.

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Helicopter images of Moore, Oklahoma show tracts of devastated neighborhoods.

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Tumblr joins GeoCities, Broadcast.com and Overture in the small fraternity of Yahoo's $1 billion-plus acquisitions. What can the company can learn from its previous purchases?

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