this paper started out as an investigation of the use of perfects in news items taken from newspapers in different European languages. The original goal was to see if one could identify anything like the "hot news" use of the perfect, as defined by McCawley (1971). To this end, we excerpted in a number of European languages with perfects or perfect-like categories the first sentence of a set of newspaper articles, characterizable as "news items" in the sense that their main point was to report some recent event. In the majority of the languages investigated (Swedish, Norwegian, American English, British English, Spanish, Finnish, Greek), we found that the majority of all news items were reported in the Simple Past, typically accompanied by a temporal adverb such as yesterday. The following exemplifies what could be seen as the "normal form" of a news item:
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