Article:
The Los Angeles County coroner's office has confirmed that a body removed from the burned wreckage of a crashed car is that of journalist Michael Mahon Hastings. 
  
 Hastings' reporting for Rolling Stone magazine on U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal ultimately led to the resignation of the U.S. commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. 
  
 Coroner's Lt. Fred Corral says Thursday that the findings on the cause of death are deferred pending the results of toxicology tests expected in eight to 10 weeks. 
  
 Corral says an autopsy was performed Wednesday and the 33-year-old Hastings was identified by matching fingerprints to prints the FBI had on file. 
  
 The car crashed early Tuesday in Los Angeles and burned furiously. 
  
 Hastings' death was announced earlier by his employer without details. ||||| WASHINGTON – During the weeks before he was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, reporter Michael Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI. 
  
 Hastings, 33, was scheduled to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in Los Angeles to discuss the case, according to a person close to Kelley. Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed. 
  
 Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream of emails that were traced to Paula Broadwell, a biographer of former CIA director David H. Petraeus, according to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 3. 
  
 Petraeus resigned from the CIA after publicly admitting that he and Broadwell had carried on an extramarital affair. 
  
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 The story about Kelley, Broadwell and the Petraeus affair would have been consistent with topics that Hastings has focused on during his reporting career. His unvarnished 2010 Rolling Stone profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, led to McChrystal’s resignation. The story described the disdain McChrystal’s staff showed for President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. 
  
 Since Hasting’s death early Tuesday, wild conspiracy theories have bloomed on the Internet implying that he was murdered by powerful forces wanting to silence him. 
  
 On Wednesday night, the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks inserted itself into the story, publishing a message on Twitter that Hasting had contacted a lawyer for the organization hours before his car smashed into a tree on North Highland Avenue in Los Angeles. 
  
 The message read: “Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.” 
  
 The crash is under investigation and there will be an official accident report after a toxicology test is completed in the coming weeks. 
  
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 brian.bennett@latimes.com 
  
 Twitter: @bybrianbennett |||||

In short:
– Well this should provide some grist for the conspiracy theory mill: Michael Hastings was working on a piece about a privacy lawsuit from Jill Kelley before his fatal car crash. (You might remember Kelley from her role in David Petraeus' scandalous love quadrangle.) Hastings was scheduled to meet with one of the socialite's reps next week, the LA Times reports. Of course, given Hastings' usual beat, virtually any story he might have been working on could prompt conspiracy theorists, and some have already been at work. WikiLeaks helped matters along last night by revealing that Hastings had contacted a WikiLeaks lawyer "just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him." The Los Angeles County coroner, meanwhile, confirmed today that it was indeed Hastings who was killed, reports AP.
Text:
Buckinghamshire artist Tomas Georgeson has left a blank cheque for £8,000 in Milton Keynes Gallery in the hope it will raise local interest in the town’s fledgling art scene. Georgeson told the Telegraph that he concealed the cheque in the gallery on Tuesday morning, and has placed an advert in a local paper to inform local residents. The advert, which will be printed in The Milton Keynes Citizen on Thursday, says: “A blank cheque for £8,000 has been hidden somewhere in the public spaces of Milton Keynes Gallery. It will be collected on 1 March 2013 if unclaimed.” 
  
 Georgeson says that he decided to hide the cheque as a statement of support for the gallery, and that he wanted to “get people through the door and change the mood of the place.” 
  
 When the new town was devised in the late 1960s, Milton Keynes received generous funding for the arts in an attempt to encourage local culture. However, Georgeson says that the “brave” creative decisions that helped form the town in the 1970s had slowed by the 1980s to make way for developments which would generate cash flow more quickly. “You can’t just implant culture in a city and expect it to thrive,” Georgeson says. “But now it seems it’s the time for culture to come to Milton Keynes.” 
  
 While Georgeson says that he’ll stand by the cheque as an artistic statement, it is meant as a benevolent gesture to the gallery and its visitors, rather than an intrusion on the exhibited work. “The integrity of what the gallery does is fantastic,” he comments, “but I see a disconnect between the gallery and the public.” 
  
 Georgeson says that the £8,000 represents nearly all the money he has. “It won’t bounce if somebody finds the cheque and cashes it. I’m prepared to live with the consequences of that happening, and I could only be prepared if I thought it would really do some good” he said. ||||| An art gallery is at the centre of an off-the-wall treasure hunt - after an artist claimed to have hidden an £8,000 cheque among its exhibits. 
  
 Milton Keynes Gallery said it had no prior knowledge of Tomas Georgeson's apparent attempt to boost its visitor numbers by concealing the cheque - with the payee left blank - in one of its public spaces. 
  
 Mr Georgeson, who has previously worked as a volunteer at the 300-square-metre gallery, hopes the potential windfall will boost interest in local art and break down a "disconnect" between the visitor attraction and the public. 
  
 He told The Daily Telegraph: "It won't bounce if somebody finds the cheque and cashes it. 
  
 "I'm prepared to live with the consequences of that happening, and I could only be prepared if I thought it would really do some good." 
  
 The Buckinghamshire-based artist is reportedly planning to collect the cheque on 1 March if it has not been found. 
  
 Milton Keynes Gallery's communications director, Katharine Sorensen, was only made aware of the artist's claims when she was contacted by a reporter yesterday. 
  
 Ms Sorensen told the Press Association: "I put the phone down and went and had a look (around the gallery) with colleagues and couldn't see anything. 
  
 "It's not something we know about and we can't confirm or deny whether it's a hoax or not." 
  
 Ms Sorensen said the director of the gallery had made contact with Mr Georgeson after news of his offer broke. 
  
 "He (Mr Georgeson) says he has placed something in the gallery, but that it is not underneath or on any artwork so there is no need for anyone to touch the actual exhibits," Ms Sorensen added. 
  
 PA |||||

Summary:

– This is one way to fund the arts. A British artist has hidden a check in the amount of about $12,600 in an art gallery in the town of Milton Keynes, with the "To" line blank. Find it by March 1, and your name will be inserted, reports the Telegraph. Tomas Georgeson hopes that the treasure hunt will spur interest in the town's art scene. His work isn't currently on exhibit in the 3,200-square-foot Milton Keynes Gallery, and he says his intention wasn't to step on the toes of the artists who are showing there (he notes that the check isn't hidden on, behind, or in any displayed piece). But with statements like these—he says once the check is cashed he'll essentially be broke—it's tough to imagine that won't happen. It was also a sort of maverick move. Georgeson, who the Milton Keyes Citizen reports used to volunteer for the gallery, says he didn't tell the gallery he was tucking a check into one of its nooks. A rep says several employees "have made a careful search of the gallery’s public spaces and found no trace of a blank check." As such, "we can't confirm or deny whether it's a hoax," notes the Independent.