New York City

Giuliani testifies in fired workers’ suit

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani testified Wednesday that his fear of race riots led him to urge the firing of three city employees who rode on a parade float in blackface.

The white employees — firefighters Jonathan Walters and Robert Steiner and police officer Joseph Locurto — were fired after the 1998 Labor Day incident and are suing the city to get their jobs back.

The former employees have testified that they had no racist intent and that their actions were protected by the First Amendment because the float was a parody.

Those on the float threw chunks of watermelon and fried chicken to paradegoers and made it appear as if one of the men in blackface was being dragged, city lawyer Jonathan Pines said. The incident occurred the same summer a black man in Texas was dragged to his death from a pickup.

In his testimony, Giuliani told U.S. District Judge John E. Sprizzo that the float “was outrageous and it had the potential of causing serious disruption, civil unrest.”

Washington, D.C.

Lawmakers renew push to ban cloning

House members renewed their efforts Wednesday to ban human cloning, spurred by a company’s claim to have produced the first human clone.

Reps. Dave Weldon, R-Fla. and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., reintroduced their bill, passed 265-162 in the House during the past legislative session, but stalled in the Senate by lawmakers who want an exemption that allows cloning for research purposes.

Clonaid’s claim last month to have produced the country’s first human clone has not been verified. The company has ties to the Raelian sect, which believes space aliens created life on Earth.

Weldon and Stupak said they were approached by scores of lawmakers outraged by the company’s claims.

“A lot of people approached us and said, ‘Are you going to introduce your bill again? Whether a hoax or not, we think it’s wrong,”‘ Stupak said.

Washington

Cleanup phase complete at nuclear reservation

Workers have finished removing more than 2 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel from a Cold War-era storage pool on the Hanford nuclear reservation, officials said Wednesday.

The highly radioactive waste had been stored 400 yards from the Columbia River in indoor pools that were built in the 1950s and designed to last 20 years.

The fuel will be stored in a dry vault in central Hanford, 15 miles away, before eventually being shipped to the nation’s high-level nuclear waste storage site in Nevada.

The cleanup contractor, Fluor Hanford, now is removing fuel stored in a second basin closer to the Columbia River that has leaked twice since the 1980s.

The fuel in the basins represents about 80 percent of the nation’s remaining inventory of spent nuclear fuel. Most of the fuel rods came from Hanford’s N Reactor, which made plutonium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

South Carolina

Governor apologizes for forced sterilizations

South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges on Wednesday in Columbia made the state’s first apology for decades of forced sterilization that robbed more than 250 people of their ability to have children.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the state forcibly sterilized people — mostly blacks and women — to prevent them from bearing “unfit” children, records show.

The practice was signed into state law by Gov. Olin D. Johnston in 1935 and was guided through the Medical Affairs Committee by Strom Thurmond, who was a freshman senator. It remained on South Carolina’s books until 1985. During that time, 30 states had similar sterilization laws.