Today we honored the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 that brought astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to the moon's surface. But we also discovered that NASA indeed taped over the footage of that first landing.

NASA TV specialist Dick Nafzger, who headed the search for the tapes, spoke to KPCC this morning:

"I don't think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong," Nafzger says. "I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody's happy about it."

After a three-year search for the tapes, NASA concluded that the original footage was deleted when the program started erasing old magnetic tape so it could record satellite data. Search team members say that as they discovered that tens of thousands of magnetic tape boxes had disappeared from the enormous government records center, their hope waned for ever finding the original moon landing footage recorded on the lunar camera operated by the astronauts. NASA says the picture was much clearer than the TV broadcast of the historic moment. How sad...

But wait! There's hope.

After piecing together a complete version of the moonwalk from a variety of broadcast television sources from around the world, NASA has contracted with Lowry Digital in Burbank, the digital restoration firm responsible for restoring movies from "Bambi" to "Star Wars," to make the "original" better. They're touching it up, making it less fuzzy and brighter so you can actually make out Neil Armstrong descending from the "Eagle" instead of the dark blob viewers saw in 1969.

So while technology makes it so that our generation and future generations will see the moonwalk with more clarity than ever before, the fact remains that it's not the original. Are we tampering with history, or preserving a moment?

Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

An international accord on global warming? The editorial board celebrates, even though the agreement falls far short of what's needed to make a real difference. Still, it represents a new willingness by industrialized nations to tackle the issue in a serious way. The board finds something else to celebrate in the new get-tough stance by L.A. schools chief Ramon C. Cortines, who sent out letters saying that teachers who don't perform basic job duties -- like giving required tests -- will be written up. A week later, the union suspended its boycott of the tests. Coincidence? The board thinks not. One final thing to kvell about: LAPD did a great job on security for the Michael Jackson memorial, the board cheers -- but what was going on with the rest of city government? Ordering sandwiches in from Wrightwood and posting a humiliating plea for pennies to cover the costs of the memorial? The posting didn't even work; the website went down.

It's not like the city is incapable of doing anything right. By all accounts, the Police Department and traffic officers handled their end of Tuesday's event flawlessly. But in so many other ways, City Hall bumbling makes Los Angeles look laughably low-tech, shamefully disorganized, simultaneously an easy mark and a swindler, and cheap and pathetic besides.

On the other side of the fold, former longtime legislator John Vasconcellos analyzes the ingredients that went into making the state budget crisis so bad (Hint: Proposition 13 gets dragged in by its tax-restricting toes), and offers his personal recipe for climbing out of the hole. And Miguel A. Estrada, a native of Honduras and member of the U.S. delegation to President Manuel Zelaya's 2006 inauguration, explains why Zelaya's ouster isn't the millitary coup people think. To understand that, he writes, you need to know a couple of quick things about the Hunduran constitution:

Article 239 specifically states that any president who so much as proposes the permissibility of reelection "shall cease forthwith" in his duties, and Article 4 provides that any "infraction" of the succession rules constitutes treason. The rules are so tight because these are terribly serious issues for Honduras, which lived under decades of military rule.

As detailed in the attorney general's complaint, Zelaya is the type of leader who could cause a country to wish for a Richard Nixon. Earlier this year, with only a few months left in his term, he ordered a referendum on whether a new constitutional convention should convene to write a wholly new constitution. Because the only conceivable motive for such a convention would be to amend the un-amendable parts of the existing constitution, it was easy to conclude -- as virtually everyone in Honduras did -- that this was nothing but a backdoor effort to change the rules governing presidential succession.

Photo: The closing moments of the Michael Jackson memorial event at Staples Center. Credit: Mark Terrill-Pool / Getty Images

It's been interesting to watch the slowly developing concerns about Ritalin and other stimulants used to help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). After a few reports of sudden deaths among children taking the drugs, the Food and Drug Administration asked drug manufacturers in 2007 to include better warnings with the medications. Now a new study is out that might concern some parents, although it provides no real answers for them.

The study, funded by the FDA and National Institutues of Mental Health, looked at the files on 564 children and teenagers who had died suddenly, with no real explanation for their death. They compared those files with those of an equal number of youngsters who had died in auto accidents. The findings: 10 of those in the first group had been taking Ritalin (other medications were not widely available at the time), while only two of those in the control group had been.

It sounds frightening at first glance-- five times as many? But the children taking Ritalin made up a small portion of either group, and sudden unexplained death is itself an extremely rare occurrence among children and teens. There were other possible factors the researchers couldn't account for. For example, teenagers with ADHD are more likely to experiment with illegal drugs. Could it be that those drugs, rather than Ritalin, caused some or all of the deaths?

The study's conclusion: That there is an association between stimulant use and sudden unexplained death in use. NIMH's conclusion: It always pays to remember that correlation does not imply causality. Just because there was an association doesn't mean that one caused the other. NIMH calls for further studies as well as better screening for heart conditions among youth. And parents are left, as always, to make the best judgment they can on whether to use these daily medications.

Photo by Robert Bukaly/AP

Oh, countries listen to the International Whaling Commission all right -- as long as they want to. Most nations observe the international ban on whale hunting because they agree with it. As for the rest -- well, of the big three that continue to kill whales, Iceland and Norway simply ignore the ban. And for years, Japan has operated under an exemption allowing it to take whales for scientific research. But with each whale worth tens of thousands of dollars in meat and other products, you can bet a lot more than research is going on, like whale dinners served in upscale restaurants. And does it really take close to 1,000 whales to conduct this research, which is the quota that Japan sets for itself? 

The whales that the Japanese hunt, mostly minke, are considered to be at "lower risk" of extinction. Now Greenland wants to hunt 50 endangered humpback whales over the next few years, saying this would be subsistence hunting for its indigenous people. There's certainly precedence for this: The Inuit have been allowed to take several dozen bowhead whales for years. This kind of subsistence hunting is an ancient part of their tradition. But there's more to it. Under the Inuits' tightly managed hunt, the bowhead comeback in the eastern Arctic has been a conservation success story. Adding an endangered species like the humpback whale to the list, though, raises a new set of complications -- which the International Whaling Commission put off dealing with at its recent meeting.

Another issue that has to be addressed is which individual whales are selected out for hunting by the Japanese whalers. A study presented at the IWC meeting found that nearly a third of the whales killed were pregnant. Assuming those whale calves would otherwise have been born and survived, this means a lot more whales are being killed than the number being counted as part of Japan's research.

* Photo of humpback whale by Greenpeace

Today's memorial service for Michael Jackson at the privately owned Staples Center reminds The Times editorial board of a sad fact of life in Los Angeles: It's a city without a public square. Though the backers of LA Live once promised that the downtown entertainment mall would become L.A.'s version of Times Square, the fact remains that it's a private space whose owners can bar the public anytime they choose.

We also weigh in on President Obama's trip to Russia, which isn't expected to accomplish much -- but even a small thaw in relations between the two countries, and the modest improvement represented by the nuclear weapons pact concluded Monday, is better than the chilly status quo.

And we ponder the lessons to be learned from the example of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died Monday at 93. Though many see parallels between the mistakes made in Iraq and the mistakes made by McNamara in Vietnam, we think the larger lesson is that using yesterday's solutions to today's problems is often the pathway to failure.

Over on the opposite page, columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks all the sturm und drang over the canceled "salons" by the Washington Post, in which lobbyists were invited to pay heavily to attend get-togethers with the newspaper's journalists and top politicians, amounts to little more than posing. After all, many publications offer similar meet-and-greet opportunities, Goldberg says.

The hand-wringing over genetically modified foods, meanwhile, reminds author Tom Standage of another food-related hysteria from a few centuries ago -- over the potato. When the tubers were first discovered in the New World, Europeans feared they were a dangerous, unholy poison. They got over it, just as they'll probably eventually get over their irrational fears about improved crops.

And psychiatry professor Sander L. Gilman cautions against jumping to conclusions about Michael Jackson's cosmetic surgery. True, the King of Pop clearly was fond of surgical reshaping, but that doesn't necessarily indicate self-loathing.

* Illustration by Bob Daly / For the Times

An international poll comes along showing that although Americans are fairly knowledgeable about Charles Darwin, they don't hold much truck with this whole theory-of-evolution business.

Some 71% of Americans know of Darwin and at least a little about his theory of natural selection, a number right up there with Great Britain, according to the poll of 10 countries conducted by the British Council, which describes itself as "the UK's international body for cultural relations." And if 71% seems sort of low, compare it with South Africa, where 73% had never even heard of Darwin.

But knowing isn't necessarily loving. Among those who are familiar with the author of "On the Origin of Species," only 41% of Americans agreed with the statement that "Enough scientific evidence exists to support Charles Darwin's theory of evolution." Where were the believers in evolution most likely to live? India, with 77%. And we wonder why that country is renowned for its good education, especially in the sciences--and why this country historically tests in the mediocre realm.

Photo by Darko Vojinovic/AP
 

Move over, marijuana. A new study finds that adding ginger to food in the days surrounding chemotherapy treatments reduces nausea and vomiting.

My grandmother could have told them that. Ginger ale was her remedy for all abdominal ills. And ginger has been touted by the alternative-health community in recent years as well.

Will this wipe out the whole debate around use of that other herbal remedy for chemotherapy discomfort? It's hard to imagine "medical ginger clinics" having quite the same ring -- or popularity. Besides, ginger can't possibly do as much to stimulate the appetite.

Photograph of cannabis plant by Richard Pedroncelli / AP

... and other things to get your mind off swine flu.

In today's editorial pages, The Times editorial board examines President Obama's attempt to triangulate on torture. Our conclusion: We can't close this chapter in history without reading it first.

It's now clear that if the country is to move beyond what the president called a "dark and painful chapter in our history," there must be a credible and comprehensive accounting of what went wrong and a serious study of whether the architects of the Bush policy violated the law. Equally important is the need to move strategically to secure two sometimes conflicting goals: punishment for any official who knowingly broke the law and accountability to the public.

On another front, the board builds on its Sunday endorsement of five of the six measures on the May 19 special election ballot by drilling down into Proposition 1C, which would revamp the California Lottery and get some cash out of it without waiting for the state's numbers to come up.

We're not enthusiastic about giving lawmakers the power to borrow against every penny of lottery revenue in perpetuity, because we fear that's what they will do. But if the spending caps in Proposition 1A work as advertised -- admittedly, a big if -- there will be less financial pressure on the state to sell another round of lottery securities after the first one is paid off.

On the Op-Ed page, we're back to torture, this time in a piece by author and KNBC news producer Frank Snepp.He knows what he's talking about. Snepp was a CIA interrogator in Vietnam during the war, and by his own account he put his soul "at extreme peril." He draws a link between his actions and those of the Bush administration at Guantanamo.

Controlled brutality is a slippery slope, and once you pass through the moral membrane that should contain our worst impulses, it becomes so very easy to rationalize another step, and yet another, in the wrong direction.

Also in Op-Ed today: Molecular biologist Henry I. Miller chides government for standing in the way of what he claims is one rational and useful response to drought -- gene-splicing. And columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes apart Texas Gov. Rick Perry's flirtation with secession.

Photo of Camp V at Guantanamo Bay by Paul J. Richards / AFP / Getty Images

When it comes to definitions of life before birth, our society tends to draw lines in the sand. Are you pro-choice or anti-abortion? Do you consider an embryo a human life or a collection of cells?

But the editorial board's discussion earlier this week on embryonic stem-cell research revealed a more unsettled group of reactions, even among a board that has been a booster of such research for years, that endorsed Proposition 71 and that welcomed President Obama's decision to qualify hundreds of new stem-cell lines for federal grants.

At the heart of the matter was this: Is it acceptable to create human embryos with the sole intent of destroying them to create new stem-cell lines? Current law prohibits federal funding from being used for that; for that matter, it also prohibits the use of such money to derive stem-cell lines from any of the 400,000 or so embryos now frozen in fertility labs, even though about 8,000 of those are slated for destruction in any case.

Board members had no qualms about using embryos that would be destroyed, but several shuddered at the thought of creating embryos for the purpose of research, which means for the purpose of destroying them. A couple were unaware that Proposition 71 allows the state bond money to be used for both types of research work.

The question is how we reconcile these two reactions. If we have no problem with the idea of destroying embryos that would have been destroyed anyway, we imply a belief that trash is trash, embryos no different from any other, and we might as well make good use of it. Sort of like turning a milk carton into a bird feeder instead of shipping it off to the landfill, as long as we didn't create the milk carton to be a bird feeder. To the extent that we as a society have a gut reaction against creating embryos for destruction, though, we are saying we don't look at these microscopic collections of cells as simply scientific supplies that might be used to bring new life into the world, or to embark on potentially life-saving research, or to simply discard if we have no better use for it.

Perhaps we -- and by this I mean supporters of embryonic stem-cell research -- are of feeling and thought more mixed than we might have assumed. 

Photo: Paul Sancya/AP

Today's editorial page leads off with kudos to President Obama for reversing the Bush administration's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but chides him for not calling on Congress to reverse its own restrictions. While we're at it, we helpfully point out that California would be a terrific place to invest some of that federal money, given all the facilities and scientists here thanks to 2004's Proposition 71.

We also call for more transparency on earmarks, as the Senate prepares to approve an omnibus spending bill that contains more than 8,500 of them accounting for $7.7 billion. And we urge Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder to reverse the Bush administration's position on medical marijuana research and change the culture at the Drug Enforcement Agency, whose rigid ideological position on cannabis is thwarting the advancement of science.

On the Op-Ed page, Santa Monica City Councilman Bobby Shriver and environmental lawyer Joel Reynolds plea for the state Legislature to fix what ails the Orange County Transportation Corridor Agencies, an organization whose devotion to toll roads is threatening mobility, the environment and recreation.

David Schenker, Arab politics expert at a Washington think tank, worries that the Obama administration's efforts to reach out toward Syria's authoritarian government will come at the cost of U.S. attempts to advance human rights.  And writer Charles Fleming, in an installment of the "Postcards from the Recession" series about the real-world impacts of the troubled economy, describes the wrenching effects of hard times on Southern California's self-employed creative community.

Finally, columnist Jonah Goldberg wonders why liberals think it's OK for the Obama administration to use the economic crisis as an opportunity to impose a far-reaching liberal agenda, when they excoriated President Bush for using 9/11 as an opportunity to encourage right-wing policies. "It's not leadership. It's fear-mongering," Goldberg says of Obama's style.

All that, and Letters too!

* Photo of a public hearing for the Foothill South toll road by Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times