Ohio

Third-party candidates request election recount

With support from John Kerry’s campaign, two third-party candidates for president officially asked on Tuesday for a recount in Ohio, the state that put President Bush over the top in November.

The requests, mailed to all 88 counties, were expected to arrive by today.

Generally, county election boards must agree to a recount, as long as the parties bringing the challenge pay for it. And the Green and Libertarian parties collected enough donations to cover the required $113,600, or $10 per precinct.

The request came a day after Ohio officially certified Bush as the winner of this battleground state by 118,775 votes. The president’s unofficial election-night margin of 136,000 votes shrank slightly after provisional and absentee ballots were counted and errors corrected.

Philadelphia

Discarded pipe blamed for tanker’s oil spill

A Greek tanker that spilled almost half a million gallons of crude oil into the Delaware River last month apparently gashed its hull on a discarded pipe protruding from the river bottom, the Coast Guard said Tuesday.

Sonar tests on Saturday located the 15-foot, U-shaped pipe. Investigators found gouges on it and traces of paint that matched the ship, officials said.

The rusty pipe, made of cast iron, stuck out about three feet from the river bottom and was found about 700 feet from the water’s edge, roughly the same distance from land where the Athos I began gushing oil after an uneventful trip from Venezuela.

The Nov. 26 spill dumped as much as 470,000 gallons of oil, killing wildlife and fouling 70 miles of the river. The cleanup is expected to cost millions.

Maryland

Arson ruled cause of subdivision blaze

Investigators combed through the rubble of dozens of torched houses Tuesday uncovering evidence of arson in a posh subdivision under construction near a nature preserve.

Some $10 million in damage was done as 41 homes burned Monday at the Hunters Brooke subdivision, about 25 miles south of Washington near Indian Head. A dozen of the homes were destroyed.

Environmental and community groups tried to block the development in a lawsuit last year that claimed it would hurt one of the nation’s last undisturbed magnolia bogs. FBI spokesman Barry Maddox said ecoterrorism was one of the motives that would be investigated.

Washington, D.C.

Commanders blamed in sex assault scandal

Air Force Academy commanders failed in the past 10 years to recognize and deal with the seriousness of sexual assaults against female cadets, the Pentagon’s inspector general says.

In a memo to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that was released Tuesday, Inspector General Joseph E. Schmitz wrote, “We conclude that the overall root cause of the sexual assault problems at the Air Force Academy was the ‘failure of successive chains of command over the past 10 years to acknowledge the severity of the problem.”‘

In response to this and other sexual assault issues in the armed forces, David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said the Pentagon would soon implement a new militarywide policy protecting the confidentiality of people who report being sexually assaulted.

Washington, D.C.

Sept. 11 charity prepares to close

A Sept. 11 charity backed by a big celebrity-fueled telethon will close its doors Wednesday, having raised more than $500 million, officials said.

The Sept. 11 Fund collected $534 million, aided in large part by a telethon appeal from some of the biggest names in film, television and music.

The one-night fund-raiser 10 days after the 2001 attacks featured George Clooney, Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen, and viewers responded by donating nearly $130 million.

The money was used to make payments to victims’ families and to provide health care, mental health counseling, legal advice, and employment assistance.

Fund officials said more than half of the money was given directly to victims, a category that included the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed, more than 35,000 displaced workers, and more than 7,000 displaced residents.