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humble start have come the Paralympic Games, which this week will bring more than 4,000 athletes from around the world to London.
• "The Guttmann story is massive," said Olympic historian Martin Polley. "He was the one who linked rehab to competitive sport."
• This month has been Guttmann's moment, what with a BBC film about his life, "The Best of Men," an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in London and his daughter, Eve Loeffler, being named mayor of the athletes village -- a sort of ambassador in chief who welcomes the participants for games that start Wednesday and end Sept. 9.
• It follows a resurgence of interest in Guttmann, who escaped in the late 1930s and settled in Britain, where his research on treating spinal patients drew the attention of the government. Guttmann began working with injured soldiers at Stoke Mandeville hospital, just north of London, during World War II -- a time when suffering a spinal injury was considered a death sentence. Patients were discouraged from moving, leading to secondary infections from bed sores or from pneumonia.
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• WASHINGTON (AP) -- As tropical storm Isaac bears down on the Gulf Coast, there should be plenty of money -- some $1.5 billion -- in federal disaster aid coffers, thanks, in part, to a new system that budgets help for victims of hurricanes, tornadoes and floods before they occur.

• It's a system that Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee-to-be for vice president, had hoped to scrap as a way to make his House GOP budget look smaller by about $10 billion a year. Politely, party elders told him no way, at least for now.
• The Obama administration was the driving force behind the new disaster funding scheme and made it part of last summer's hard-fought budget pact, even though President Barack Obama himself had given short shrift to budgeting for disasters prior to a spate of them early last year, including tornadoes that ripped through Missouri and Alabama.
• Congresses and administrations, after all, always had been fairly forthcoming with whatever disaster aid was needed after the fact.
• The new system means disaster aid will not have to compete with other programs for financing, nor have to rely on less certain ad hoc funding at the height of a crisis.
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