Kentucky

Flames engulf bourbon warehouse

Fire engulfed a seven-story bourbon warehouse Monday, sending alcohol-fueled flames more than 100 feet in the air.

The Jim Beam warehouse in Bardstown collapsed about two hours after the fire was reported at 3 p.m. and continued burning.

The company said the metal-and-wood structure held about 19,000 barrels of bourbon, or less than 2 percent of its bourbon inventory.

There were no reports of injuries.

Firefighters doused two nearby warehouses with water in an attempt to save them.

Bourbon from the warehouse ran off into a nearby creek and caught fire. Firefighters began to dam up the area, said Fire Chief Anthony Mattingly.

Emergency officials did not know the fire’s cause, but the company said in a statement from its headquarters in Deerfield, Ill., that lightning was to blame.

Washington, D.C.

Powell denies report on plan to resign

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Monday dismissed as “nonsense” reports that he had informed the White House that he would not continue in his job if President Bush is elected next year to a second term.

In an unusually vigorous response to an article published Monday in The Washington Post, Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, insisted that a conversation the newspaper said Armitage had with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had in fact never occurred.

“I don’t know what they are talking about,” Powell said of the article. “I serve at the pleasure of the president. The president and I have not discussed anything other than my continuing to do my job for him.

Fire engulfed a seven-story bourbon warehouse in Kentucky on Monday, sending alcohol-fueled flames more than 100 feet in the air.

“This is just one of those stories that emerge in Washington that reflects nothing more than gossip, and the gossip leads to a rash of speculation about who might fill a vacancy that does not exist,” he said.

Washington, D.C.

S.C. senator plans to retire

Sen. Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings, D-S.C., on Monday announced his plans to retire from the seat he has held since 1966, increasing Republican hopes for broadening their majority in the South and in the Senate.

Hollings, 81, is the second veteran Democratic senator from the South to announce his intention to retire. Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who often votes with Republicans, said in January that he would not seek re-election in 2004.

Despite being elected seven times, Hollings was the state’s junior senator until the late Sen. Strom Thurmond retired last year. That made Hollings the longest-serving junior senator in history.

A staunch fiscal conservative, Hollings served on the Senate Budget Committee longer than anyone else. In 1985, he co-sponsored the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-cutting bill, which imposed discipline on Congress and led to lower deficits.

He was so sure that the government’s books would never show a surplus that he offered to jump off the Capitol dome if the Treasury ever reported one. He did not make good on that offer when the budget had a surplus from 1998 through 2001.