Morning Buzz: July 23, 2007

Pottermania reached new heights over the weekend with the release of the seventh and final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to bookstores around the country. The 759-page volume broke sales records with 8.3 million being sold in the United States within 24 hours.   U.S. News reported on the “Power of Potter”  in the summer of 2005, when the sixth in the series was released. That book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sold 850,000 copies the first day it was available.

Last week, President Bush called for an international peace conference to take place in the Middle East sometime in the fall. Today Bush’s longtime ally, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, descended on the region to negotiate with Israeli and Palestinian officials. Leaders on both sides are welcoming Blair, who helped form Northern Ireland’s peace accord. Blair’s job is to prepare for the building of a Palestinian state, not necessarily to finalize a peace agreement.

American astronaut Clayton Anderson took his first spacewalk today. He ventured outside the international space station to take out the trash. He heaved a 1,400-pound ammonia tank, the size of a refrigerator, out of the station with the help of Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin. NASA doesn’t normally litter, however, with the shuttle program slated to end in 2010, astronauts would have no room to bring back the tank and other junk on any of the remaining missions. U.S. News reported on the future of the shuttle program when Discovery was set to launch in 2005, more than two years after the Columbia disaster.