Kansas City, Mo.

American Airlines closes administrative center

American Airlines has announced it will close a former Trans World Airlines administrative center, costing about 400 workers their jobs.

The center had housed departments such as accounting, payroll, information technology and data processing. But it duplicated jobs and functions that TWA’s new owner, American Airlines, handled elsewhere.

The center employed about 1,500 workers in 1971 around the time TWA opened the facility.

Before American acquired TWA in April, about 700 clerical and management workers were employed there. The work force had shrunk since then because of post-Sept. 11 layoffs, transfers and attrition.

Washington, D.C.

Ratings high for Bush speech

President Bush’s State of the Union address Tuesday was watched by an estimated 51.8 million viewers, representing the annual speech’s largest audience in four years.

Tune-in ratings on eight broadcast and cable networks surged 30 percent compared with last year’s address, based on data from Nielsen Media Research.

No address has approached that level since 1998, when more than 53 million people were estimated to have viewed President Clinton’s speech, which occurred amid widespread speculation regarding his relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The audience Tuesday exceeded every other State of the Union telecast since 1993.

New York

Reno collapses during speech

Former U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno collapsed during a speech late Wednesday in Rochester, N.Y., shocking an audience of more than 700 as she tumbled to the floor.

Reno, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination to be Florida governor, was addressing a crowd of students at the University of Rochester when her speech began to slow noticeably.

“You’re going to have to excuse me for a minute, I’m going to have to sit down,” she said, according to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

She then collapsed.

Reno was conscious when emergency crews reached her. She was taken to Strong Memorial Hospital, where she was being evaluated late Wednesday. Hospital officials said she was in good condition.

Washington, D.C.

Anthrax traced to cow

Anthrax at the center of a bioterrorism attack that killed five people, infected a dozen more and forced the evacuation and sterilization of buildings in Florida, New York and Washington originated in a cow that died in 1981 in Texas.

Samples were sent for testing at Fort Detrick, Md., headquarters of the Army’s biological warfare research center, in a box with a prepaid label with the return address of the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, an Agriculture Department facility.

Since the box bore an Ames return address, researchers mistakenly called the anthrax isolate “Ames.”

The true origin of the killer strain that dead cow 21 years ago in Texas has now been confirmed in old Army documents, according to The Washington Post.