Washington, D.C.

Test failure casts doubt on missile system

The Bush administration’s effort to build a system for defending the country against ballistic missile attack suffered a setback Wednesday when an interceptor missile failed to launch during the first flight test of the system in two years.

Pentagon officials could not immediately explain the reason for the snafu. They said some kind of anomaly prompted the automatic shutdown of the launch sequence just 23 seconds before the interceptor was due to take off from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. Plans had called for the interceptor to soar into space and knock down a mock warhead fired from Kodiak Island in Alaska about 16 minutes earlier.

The aborted test cast fresh doubt over when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would decide to put the new system on alert.

Greece

Hostages released after 18-hour standoff

Two armed men who hijacked a public bus and threatened to blow it up surrendered just after midnight Wednesday and released their six remaining hostages, ending an 18-hour standoff.

The freed hostages left the bus from the driver’s door, and heavily armed police then searched the vehicle. The two hijackers, believed to be Albanians, left the bus with their hands on their heads after throwing two shotguns out the door.

It was unclear what caused the hijackers to surrender. None of the captives were harmed.

The hijackers had initially seized 26 hostages, but the bus driver, a ticket inspector and a passenger escaped almost immediately.

Washington, D.C.

Pentagon to combat armor shortage in Iraq

Iraqi insurgents are growing more effective, and it will take time to get U.S. troops the $4 billion in armor they need for protection, defense officials said Wednesday. “This is not Wal-Mart,” one general said.

Officials rejected growing criticism that armor shortages in Iraq reflected poor war planning, and they said they’d been working as fast as possible to give troops what they needed.

At a Pentagon news conference, Army officials said that by the end of the next six to eight months, they would have spent $4.1 billion to try to make sure vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan have full armor.

Washington, D.C.

Study on birth control pill’s benefits flawed

Federal officials Wednesday backed away from the findings of two major studies on birth control pills, saying the research was flawed and that a new analysis showed there was no evidence that oral contraceptives cut the risk of heart disease.

The research, presented at a medical meeting in October, created a stir because it was from the nation’s largest women’s health study and found that women on the pill had lower risks of heart disease and no increased risk of breast cancer.

But Dr. Barbara Alving of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funds and oversees the women’s s study, said the work by researchers from Wayne State University in Detroit had not been reviewed by the study’s leaders or the government before it was presented.

A new analysis by senior statisticians determined that the heart findings were flawed and that the breast cancer findings now also were suspect.