Honolulu: Democrat wins special House election

Democrat Ed Case, who lost in his party’s primary for governor, won the free-for-all election to fill the remaining five weeks of the term of the late Congresswoman Patsy Mink, election officials said Sunday.

He got 51 percent of the votes cast Saturday for 38 candidates in the 2nd District, which includes rural Oahu and the neighbor islands.

Case most likely will never cast a vote on the House floor and may not be sworn in, since Congress is not in session.

Mink’s widower, John Mink, was second with 16,624 votes, or 36 percent.

Case also is a candidate in the Jan. 4 special election to determine who will serve the two-year term which Mink posthumously won in the Nov. 5 general election. If he wins, Case would have the most seniority among the freshmen in the next Congress.

Mink died of viral pneumonia on Sept. 28, two days too late to have her name removed from the ballot.

California: Condor found dead under power line

A California condor released in the wild two years ago was found dead Saturday in Atascadero under a power line with burn marks on its feathers, wildlife officials said.

The death of the 3-year-old female reduces the condor population to 199, of which only 73 live in the wild, said Kelly Sorenson, executive director of the Ventana Wilderness Society, a nonprofit group that rehabilitates and releases birds into the wild.

A power outage about 10 a.m. may have resulted from the bird’s contact with the line, he said. The bird had a hole in its chest that may have come from the high voltage.

Earlier this year, three condor chicks were found dead from unknown causes in the Los Padres National Forest. The chicks were the first condors to be hatched in the wild since 1984 as part of a recovery program by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Of 33 condors released by the Ventana Wilderness Society, three have died :quot; all from collisions with power lines.

Houston: House built by former Enron executive burns

Authorities were investigating a fire early Sunday at a three-story mansion recently sold by indicted former Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow.

Houston Fire Department spokesman Jay Evans said the fire was contained in the front portion of the house, which federal prosecutors have accused Fastow of building with laundered money.

The house was sold to another energy company official for $3.9 million in October. About $300,000 of work remained on the house at the time, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether the new owner, Thomas Hook, had moved in.

Fastow pleaded innocent last month to a 78-count federal indictment charging him with masterminding complex financial schemes that enriched him and helped doom the energy trading powerhouse, which filed for bankruptcy a year ago.

New York City: New mayor declines wedding invitations

Breaking with recent tradition, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has declined to officiate at weddings in New York City, rejecting dozens of invitations since taking office, a published report said Sunday.

“It’s one of the few ceremonial duties he hasn’t embraced, (because) he knows he doesn’t have time to do it for everyone who asks him,” Bloomberg spokesman Ed Skyler told the Daily News. “And he doesn’t want to offend people by picking and choosing.”

Bloomberg’s decision not to officiate at weddings separates him from his two most recent predecessors, David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani.

But former Mayor Ed Koch also refused the ceremonial function. “It’s like performing an operation, and you’re not a doctor,” he said.