South Carolina

Lawmaker wants Giuliani to repay speaking fee

A state lawmaker wants former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to return the $100,000 fee he received to speak at a tsunami relief fund-raiser.

Giuliani donated $20,000 from the fee to the event’s tsunami relief fund — twice the amount requested by the benefit’s sponsor, the South Carolina Hospital Assn., said Thornton Kirby, the group’s president.

But Rep. Tracy Edge said the full fee should be returned because the Feb. 9 speech in Columbia was publicized as a charity event.

The hospital group originally invited Giuliani to speak to its annual gala, which turned into a fund-raiser after the tsunami, Kirby said. He said the speech raised the benefit’s profile and helped raise $60,000 for the relief fund, including Giuliani’s donation.

Giuliani’s spokeswoman declined to comment Saturday.

Indonesia

Australian chopper crash kills nine

An Australian helicopter on a relief mission crashed Saturday on earthquake-devastated Nias Island, killing nine people on board, while workers searching for quake victims rescued a man who survived for nearly five days pinned under a pile of rubble.

Also Saturday, aid finally reached thousands of homeless and hungry victims of Monday’s 8.7-magnitude earthquake on remote islands still reeling from the Dec. 26 tsunami disaster.

Tens of thousands have been made homeless and at least 548 killed by last week’s quake, which devastated Nias, Banyak and Simeulue islands off the coast of Sumatra.

Officials said 514 of the deaths occurred on Nias, and another 100 bodies could be buried under the rubble. Miraculously, one man survived without water or food for nearly five days before his cries for help were heard Saturday by laborers who alerted Singaporean and Indonesian rescue teams.

Colorado

Testimony: Iraqi general beaten before death

Previously secret court testimony indicates an Iraqi general imprisoned by U.S. forces was badly bruised and may have been severely beaten two days before he died of suffocation during interrogation.

References to the alleged beating appear in a transcript, released under court order, from a military preliminary hearing for three soldiers charged with murder and dereliction of duty in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Mowhoush on Nov. 26, 2003. A fourth soldier faces the same charges but waived a hearing.

During the interrogation, Army prosecutors claim Mowhoush was put headfirst into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord and knocked down before the soldiers sat and stood on him, prosecutors said. The cause of death was determined to be suffocation.

According to the transcript, witnesses said others had also beaten Mowhoush days before the Army interrogation. Their names and agencies were blacked out.

Pittsburgh

Sen. John Heinz III died with $423M

Sen. John Heinz III had about $423 million in cash, stocks, trusts and other property when he died in a 1991 plane crash, according to documents released Friday after a newspaper challenge.

The estate of Heinz — whose widow, Teresa, later married Sen. John Kerry — paid about $41 million in federal estate taxes and $17 million in state death taxes, the records show.

Judge Frank Lucchino had ruled in March that the law favored opening the records, which were sealed the day after the 52-year-old senator, an heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune, and six others died when an airplane carrying Heinz collided with a helicopter.