Two former Argentine dictators were sentenced Thursday after being convicted of stealing babies during the country’s “Dirty War" in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Jorge Rafael Videla, who ruled from 1976 to 1981, received 50 years in prison, while General Reynaldo Benito Bignone, who was in power from 1982 until 1983, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The two had been accused of systematically stealing babies from political prisoners and giving them new identities, and were specifically on trial for stealing 34 children. Videla claimed that while children may have been kidnapped, there was never any order to do so.

The European Central Bank cut its interest rates on Thursday in an effort to stop the euro from deteriorating any further, while China cut its bank lending rates and the Bank of England pumped billions of pounds into a stimulus program. The European Central Bank’s benchmark interest rate has dropped from 1 percent to 0.75 percent—its lowest level ever. Although Britain's announcement came as the same day as Europe's, ECB President Mario Draghi said the moves were not coordinated. As for China, analysts said the move likely reflects  uncertainty about the second-quarter growth.

Lawmakers in Britain on Thursday backed a plan to hold a government inquiry into the standards in the banking industry that led to Barclays’ rate-rigging scandal. Conservatives rejected the calls by the opposition Labour Party for an independent, judge-led investigation, similar to the Leveson Inquiry. During the politically charged debate, finance minister George Osborne and Labour’s shadow minister Ed Balls traded insults over who holds responsibility for the Barclays scandal. Barclays CEO Marcus Agius stepped down on Tuesday and then appeared before Parliament on Wednesday, one week after the bank was called out by regulators for manipulating interest rates. Barclays was fined $450 million for its role in rigging the key of Libor interest rates between 2005 and 2009.

If Mitt Romney gets elected, it looks like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner might be a little awkward. Sources told The New York Times that News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch “really wanted” Chris Christie to run for president, rather than Romney. Murdoch has lately been critical or Romney, both in tweets this weekend and then one of his newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, printed a blistering editorial about Romney on Thursday. Murdoch—and Fox News chairman Roger Ailes—admires Christie’s tough-as-nails personality. Ailes has reportedly agrees with Murdoch that Romney’s campaign is being mishandled, and although Ailes is network is often called a shill for Republicans, the chairman apparently considers Romney too soft.

Rep. Joe Walsh had a heated debate with CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield on Thursday, after the host criticized him for accusing his Democratic opponent of talking about her military service too much. Walsh’s challenger Tammy Duckworth lost both of her legs and the partial use of one arm while serving in Iraq, and Walsh has come under fire recently for his criticism of the candidate. Walsh told Banfield, “I don’t regret anything I said.” But the CNN host said, “It is not respectful for you to say, ‘Now I’m running against a woman who, my God, that’s all she talks about … She comes from a military family, she did lose both of her legs fighting in Iraq.”

Chicago hit its second straight day of temperatures above 100 degrees on Thursday, baking in at 103 degrees at midday and breaking the previous record for July 5, 102 degrees, set in 1911. The area got some relief when afternoon thunderstorms hit and the temperature dropped 19 degrees, to 84.  Officials said an elderly man was found dead in his car from heat-related causes, and the coroner’s office said they are investigating whether the heat played a role in at least two other deaths. An excessive heat warning has been issued for the area until 10 p.m. Friday.

Nonaganerian lifelong statesmen generally don't present a threat to America's borders. But apparently, the Arizona police would rather be safe than sorry. On Thursday, officials detained Raul Castro, former Arizona governor and U.S. ambassador to Argentina, for 30 minutes in the triple-digit desert heat—just a day after he underwent heart treatment. Castro was removed from his car and taken to a sweltering tent for inspection after his pacemaker apparently set off a radiation sensor on the highway, about 24 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. "I don’t condemn them for doing a job,” said Castro, “but once I was identified and I was 96 years of age and told them I had medical treatment the day before, I expected a little more."

A violent standoff involving a Long Beach police SWAT team has ended with a suspect in custody and only minor injuries. The man, who neighbors identified as Tony, was accused of shooting a code enforcement officer who had been sent to his house by the city of Long Beach. After the shooting, the man fled into his house. The standoff lasted several hours, but police eventually drew him out using gas and finally used a police dog to capture him. The suspect and the code enforcement officer were wounded during the incident. One of the neighbor’s described Tony as a “hoarder,” adding that “The city’s come out several times and cleaned his house.”

Commence the stay-at-home mom crushes. SNL’s Seth Myers is apparently the front-runner for the job of co-host on Live! With Kelly, Showbiz 411 is reporting.  Myers – who’s best known as The Weekend Update guy on SNL-- has been guest hosting on Live! since Regis retired last November. Now sources are reporting that the final three swoon-worthy contenders for the job are Seth Myers, Michael Strahan and Josh Groban. Myers is considered the favorite, though you still have time to call your bookie. Should Myers be chosen as Kelly’s new co-host, he may be able to continue hosting Weekend Update but would likely need to quit his job as head writer for SNL.

Crisis averted. Popular music festival Coachella will continue to be held in Indio, Calif., after a city council member dropped his proposal to tax the event. Sam Torres hoped to put a 5-to-10 percent admission tax on the festival, which would have amounted to about $36 per ticket and cost festival promoter Goldenvoice between $4 million and $6 million.  But Goldenvoice’s president threatened to cancel the 2014 event and move to a new location for 2015. On Thursday, Torres finally said he would “suspend” his tax bid, because of the potential economic damage if the festival relocated. Coachella sold $47 million in tickets last year and brought more than 50,000 visitors to the community.

Turns out you didn’t have to read the tabloids to see this one coming. In an interview with Elle magazine six weeks ago, actress Katie Holmes alluded to trouble in paradise with Tom Cruise.  In the article that hits newsstands this month, Holmes said that she’s entering a “new phase” in her life and is “starting to come out on her own.”   “He has been Tom Cruise for 30 years,” Holmes said. “I know who I am and where I am and where I want to go, so I want to focus on that.”  A source present at the Elle interview noted that “Katie didn't speak about Tom in a lovey-dovey way at all. She deflected the Tom questions and brought them around to herself.”

Manaf Tlass, a general in Syria’s Republican Guards with close ties to President Bashar al-Assad, has reportedly defected. At least three people inside Syria have confirmed Tlass’s defection, but Tlass has yet to publicly declare his departure. If true, it is the first defection from Assad’s inner circle. A member of the Syrian National Council explained, “He’s a close friend to Bashar. So it is not only a strong strike against the regime, but the strongest message yet to Bashar that he is no longer safe, and message to other officers thinking about defecting.” In other Syria news, the commander of the United Nations monitors said that the violence in Syria had reached “unprecedented” levels and his statement was bolstered by reports that Syrian forces had killed as many as 63 people on Thursday.

A commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said on Wednesday that the country is “ready to fire missiles” at U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf within minutes of an attack on Iran. In a response to reports that the U.S. has increased military presence in the Middle East, Iran’s Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said that missiles have been aimed at 35 U.S. military bases in the Middle East—and targets in Israel, reported Iran’s semi-official news agency, Fars. Hajizadeh’s remarks came as the Revolutionary Guard participated in a three-day war game exercise called Great Prophet Seven, which Iranian officials claimed was show of defiance against western pressure—including the oil sanctions that went into effect this week. The U.S. also announced earlier this week they would be sending more soldiers to the Gulf.

Three children were found dead in the Iowa river Wednesday night after apparently drowning during a Fourth of July celebration. Police searched for the two girls, ages 7 and 9, and one boy, age 7, after they were separated from the rest of the children who had been swimming in the river. The Marshalltown police chief said that while the river is relatively shallow from recent drought, there are still parts of the water that are more than 12 feet deep. Another child drowned in the Iowa river last month.

Scotland Yard arrested five men and one woman suspected of terrorism in London on Thursday. Several people have been arrested, charged, and convicted over the last few months on terror-related suspicions or incidents. London’s Metropolitan Police are concerned about potential acts of terrorism ahead of the Olympic Games. The group apprehended, ranging between the ages of 18 and 30 years old, though, are not believed to have been involved with any plans related to the summer event.

Mitt Romney has been decidedly silent on the Supreme Court's recent health-care decision, until now! The Republican presidential hopeful waited until the Fourth of July, when he could count on every American to be at home or work following the news closely (not!) to say that he does, in fact, believe President Obama's individual health-care mandate is a tax, like the Supreme Court said. He broke his views down real nice and slow for CBS's Jan Crawford, explaining that he agreed with the dissenting justices view that the mandate was not constitutional, but since the court ruled that it's a tax, so it is! Now that he's told Jan Crawford, he should probably let his top advisers know where he stands on the issue. 

Katie Holmes’s reportedly shocked Tom Cruise with divorce papers—and the divorce also shocked the Church of Scientology, his religion. Scientology experts said that Holmes is sending a strong message that she won’t be cowed by Cruise or others within the church. “Katie ambushed Tom Cruise and in doing so, outwitted some of the most controlling people on earth,” said Karen De La Carriere, who was once one of the executives within Scientology and married to the church’s former president. A former Scientologist with close ties to Cruise’s family says that Cruise’s daughter, Isabella, from his marriage to Nicole Kidman, had worked for Holmes’s clothing line Holmes and Yang and was abruptly fired about two months ago.

Now that the Fourth of July celebration is over, President Obama is hitting the road. His first bus tour of the 2012 campaign will take him to several cities in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania to court, specifically, male, blue-collar workers. While the latest average of polls by RealClearPolitics shows that Obama has a 2.6 percentage-point lead over Republican opponent Mitt Romney, both in Ohio and the country, his biggest followings come from women and Hispanic voters. Working-class men, apparently, have not been claimed as a demographic by either candidate, hence the road trip. “The ability of the president to win over blue-collar men is more tied to the reality of the moment: are jobs being created and do people feel more optimistic?” said a Democratic strategist. “For him, the proof is somewhat in the pudding.”

A parliamentary inquiry into last year’s nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant concludes that Japanese conformist culture and government-industry alliances were to blame. “It was a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented,” declared the report released by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission. “And its effects could have been mitigated by more effective human responses.” The 641-page report also suggests that the plant was not earthquake-proof, creating cause for concern as Japan begins to restart its reactors.

The heat is still blazing outside but more mid-Atlantic residents are able to cool off indoors as power is starting to be restored. As of Thursday, Washington, D.C. and Maryland power company Pepco said 90 percent of its customers’ electricity  had been restored. Earlier this week, more than 2 million people in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and New Jersey had their power knocked out by violent storms. Not everyone is safe from the heat just yet, though. In West Virginia, at least 500,000 customers are still without electricity.

It’s been a rough week for Bob Diamond. First he was forced to resign from his position as CEO of Barclays after the bank came under fire for falsifying interest rates and then, Wednesday, he was raked over the coals by parliament. But Barclays is hardly the only bank that will undergo investigation for manipulating the London interbank offered rate (Libor). Other banks also projected artificially low rates at the beginning of the financial crisis to give the impression that they were not suffering. Analysts predict settling the cases for these banks will cost billions of dollars for the banking industry and serious trouble for other bank chiefs like Diamond.

The Romney campaign's senior adviser on the female species, Ann Romney, suggested her husband might be considering a woman as his running mate. "We've been looking at that and I love that option as well," she told CBS News. Whomever Mitt picks, she said, should be "someone that obviously can do the job but will be able to carry through with some of the other responsibilities." Mitt was a little more tight-lipped about the vetting process during the interview, saying, "that's something I'm keeping close with my team."

Uh oh Assad, you’ve got some explaining to do. WikiLeaks announced Thursday that it is publishing 2.4 million Syria emails, several from government accounts. An official said that the emails show a relationship between Assad’s government and Western companies. Assange said that both Syria and the people in the emails will find the document dump “embarrassing.”  The emails (WikiLeaks hasn’t said who the source is) cover the time between August 2006 and March 2012.

Well it was a big boom. San Diegans gathered for the “Big Bay Boom,” the annual Fourth of July fireworks spectacle Wednesday night but were treated to a disappointing show when all of the fireworks exploded at once. “It shook the whole building. I thought it was a bomb or someone was shooting everybody,” said one spectator visiting San Diego from Kansas. “Car alarms, every kind of noise came on. It was really unexpected.” The crowd at the San Diego bay went quiet, confused as the sky went dark while “Proud to be an American” and “Born in the USA” blared on.

The 2009 Air France crash that killed 228 people was the fault of the plane's copilots, according to a new report. France's aviation authority finds that the pilots flying during the captain's break failed to understand that the plane system was in trouble after speed sensors failed during turbulence. The report finds the pilots quickly faced "a situation of near total loss of control" and "did not know if they were climbing or descending." The flight disappeared from radar systems en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro before it crashed into the ocean. French authorities are investigating Airbus and Air France for alleged manslaughter.

Well, that’s one way to conduct a social-media campaign. Supporters of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad reportedly hacked an Al Jazeera Twitter account Thursday. Hackers broke into the account of  Al Jazeera’s English-language social-media show The Stream and began tweeting pro-Assad material. In one message, the Syrian Electronic Army—a group known for targeting Syrian rebel sympathizers—claimed credit for the hack. Al Jazeera producer James Wright has confirmed that the account was hacked, and warned followers to disregard all tweets from the handle until further notice.

Here we go again. George Zimmerman’s bond has been set again—this time at $1 million. Zimmerman, who’s charged with second-degree murder in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, originally had his bond set at $150,000 before it was revoked last month. Prosecutors argued that Zimmerman and his wife had lied to the court about how much money they had. Zimmerman was granted the bond because he “poses no threat to the community," though a judge said he was "flaunting the system."

In case you had any doubt, Mitt Romney still knows how to make money. The Republican candidate for president raised more than $100 million in June and set a new one-month record for Republican campaigns. The campaign says that much of the money came from new donors and that New York, Colorado, Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio all performed above expectations. But the haul still falls below Barack Obama’s all-time record from September 2008, when he raised a whopping $150 million. Romney has had a lot of good fundraising news in recent months. In May, Romney’s campaign took in $77 million, besting Obama, who raised just $60 million.