For someone 200 years old, Abraham Lincoln was in fine form yesterday - cracking jokes, posing for photos, wandering around Independence Mall, nodding at the tourists who gathered to celebrate his birthday.

For someone 200 years old, Abraham Lincoln was in fine form Friday - cracking jokes, posing for photos, wandering around Independence Mall, nodding at the tourists who’d gathered to celebrate his birthday.

Mayor Frank Vaslo said today that the city had experienced a 30% loss of water for some time. He said meter problems and leaking pipes, would not account for such a large loss.

Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861
By Harold Holzer
(Simon and Schuster, 623 pp., $30)

Abraham Lincoln: A Life
By Michael Burlingame
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1,976 pp., $125)

A. Lincoln: A Biography
By Ronald C. White Jr.
(Random House, 796 pp., $35)

The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now
Edited by Harold Holzer
(Library of America, 964 pp., $40)

Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
By Fred Kaplan
(Harper, 406 pp., $27.95)

Lincoln on Race & Slavery
Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Donald Yacovone
(Princeton University Press, 343 pp., $24.95)

Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
By John Stauffer
(Twelve, 432 pp., $30)

Four new exhibits make the River City the place to be this summer for all things Lincoln.

In his annual Independence Day message, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff evokes a speech Abraham Lincoln delivered in Chicago in 1858.

Lance Stephenson, along with co-defendant and former Lincoln teammate Darwin Ellis, learned that they would have to return to court on July 15 for the start of a criminal trial in their sexual assault case.

Lincoln National Corp., the Radnor insurer taking $950 million in U.S. aid, said it expects government compensation restrictions to be "manageable" and not hurt sales. The pay curbs that come with Lincoln’s acceptance of funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program won’t affect the company’s sales network, chief financial officer Frederick Crawford said today in a conference call with investors hosted by Wachovia Securities.

Lincoln police are investigating an armed robbery at a pharmacy this afternoon, according to authorities.
Police responded to the Twelve Bridges Pharmacy on Twelve Bridges Drive about 12:45 p.m. after a suspect displayed a semiautomatic handgun and demanded narcotics from an employee, according to a Lincoln police news release.
The suspect left with an undisclosed amount of drugs. He is described as white, 20 to 25 years old, 5 feet, 10 inches tall and weighing 150 pounds, according to the release. He has an acne-scarred face, and was wearing a black shirt, black pants, a tan fishing hat and aviator glasses.
He was seen fleeing in a late-model, white Toyota pickup truck with a second suspect, police said. The truck was last seen northbound on Highway 65 from Twelve Bridges Drive at a high rate of speed.
Anyone with information is asked to call Lincoln police at (916) 645-4040.
— Kim Minugh

Lincoln National Corp., of Radnor, flew top insurance agents and company executives to a Hawaiian resort the week before accepting almost $1 billion in U.S. bailout funds, two people with knowledge of the trip said.