Washington, D.C.

DNA-access legislation signed into law

Rape victims and felons in prison will have greater access to DNA testing under a five-year, $1 billion program signed into law Saturday by President Bush.

The law, worked out in the final days of the congressional session that ended last month, ensures access to post-conviction DNA tests for those serving prison sentences, including prisoners on death row. It provides $775 million in grants over the next five years to clear the backlog of some 350,000 untested DNA samples in rape evidence kits.

In recent years, 111 people in 25 states have been released after spending years on death row for crimes they did not commit. Testing also has led to more than 50 convictions of the real perpetrators.

Washington, D.C.

U.S. faces record borrowing requirement

The federal government, running record budget deficits over the past two years, is projecting that it will have to borrow a record $147 billion in the first three months of 2005, the Treasury Department announced Monday.

The department projected net borrowing needs of $100 billion for the current October-December quarter, less than the $122 billion it had earlier estimated would be needed to meet the government’s obligations.

Treasury said it was projecting net borrowing of $147 billion in the January-March quarter of next year, which would top the previous record net borrowing amount for a single quarter of $146 billion set in the January-March quarter of this year.

In the recently completed July-September quarter, Treasury borrowed a net $89 billion and ended the quarter with a cash balance of $36 billion. For the current quarter, Treasury is projecting to end the three-month period with a cash balance of $25 billion.

South CarolinA

Study finds BB guns injure thousands yearly

A study has found that air rifles, paintball pistols and BB guns injure as many as 21,000 Americans each year, undermining the notion that such weapons are harmless in the hands of young people.

Nonpowder guns kill an average of four Americans yearly, and from 1990 to 2000, there were 39 such deaths — 32 of children younger than 15, according to a report in November’s issue of Pediatrics.

The report, published Monday, comes just two weeks after the BB gun death of an 8-year-old South Carolina boy accidentally killed by a 13-year-old friend. The pellet pierced the boy’s heart, said Richland County Coroner Gary Watts.

San Diego

CIA implicated in Iraqi’s death

The CIA interrogated and roughed up Iraqi prisoners in a “romper room” where a handcuffed and hooded terror suspect was kicked, slapped and punched shortly before he died last year at the Abu Ghraib prison, a Navy SEAL testified Monday.

Blood was visible on the hood worn by the prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, as he was led into the interrogation room at Baghdad International Airport in November 2003, the Navy commando said at a military pretrial hearing for another SEAL accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners.

Testifying under a grant of immunity, the witness said he kicked al-Jamadi several times, slapped him in the back of the head and punched him. Five or six other CIA personnel in the room laid their hands on the prisoner, he said.

Sometime later, Al-Jamadi was found dead in a shower room less than an hour after two CIA personnel brought him into Abu Ghraib as a so-called “ghost detainee.”

A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment on the hearing.