Washington, D.C.

Operation Jump Start breaks up drug ring

Federal authorities said Tuesday they have broken up a drug smuggling ring that shipped heroin from Guatemala to the United States hidden in car batteries.

Operation Jump Start has resulted in 100 arrests since October 2003, including those of the drug ring’s leaders on Tuesday, Drug Enforcement Administrator Karen Tandy said. Authorities arrested 19 people in Colombia, Guatemala and New York.

The heroin was produced in Colombia, then placed in car batteries in Guatemala, Tandy said. From there, the cars were driven through Mexico and across the U.S. border.

Federal drug agents first became of the smuggling operation after police in Southern and Southwestern states discovered heroin during traffic stops, said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of ongoing investigations.

At least 20 kilograms, or 44 pounds, of heroin was entering the United States this way each month, the official said. A kilogram of heroin is worth $70,000 to $110,000, the official said.

Washington, D.C.

Court rules against reporters in CIA case

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling against two reporters who could go to jail for refusing to divulge their sources about the leak of an undercover CIA officer’s name.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with prosecutors in their attempt to compel Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper and The New York Times’ Judith Miller to testify before a federal grand jury about their confidential sources.

“We agree with the District Court that there is no First Amendment privilege protecting the information sought,” Judge David B. Sentelle said in the ruling, which was unanimous.

Floyd Abrams, the lawyer for both reporters, said he would ask the full appeals court to reverse Tuesday’s ruling.

California

Jackson trial delayed after star hospitalized

Michael Jackson was taken to an emergency room with flu-like symptoms Tuesday, delaying jury selection in the pop star’s child-molestation case for a week.

The entertainer was being treated for a “flu-like illness with some vomiting,” Dr. Chuck Merrill said during a brief news conference at Marian Medical Center.

The doctor would not answer questions, and it was not immediately known how long Jackson would be at the hospital.

Nearly 20 minutes after the singer was scheduled to arrive, Judge Rodney S. Melville announced that Jackson had been taken to a hospital.

Seattle

White supremacist arrested on gun charges

Federal agents arrested three men on gun and explosives charges Tuesday, including a white supremacist who once served time for plotting to kill Martin Luther King Jr.

Keith Gilbert, 65, a former associate of late Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, was arrested, FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs said.

He and the others arrested — William D. Heinrich, 50, and John P. Hejna, 44 — were ordered held until detention hearings.

A complaint said Gilbert had sold AK-47 assault rifles and other weapons to an informant working with the federal government. He was charged with five counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm, possession of a machine gun and possession of an unregistered gun.

He faces a maximum 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count.

Gilbert was arrested in 1965 and convicted of stealing 1,400 pounds of TNT, which authorities said was part of a plot to kill King by blowing up a stage while he spoke at an Anti-Defamation League convention in Los Angeles.

Washington

Air pollution may cause changes in fetuses

Air pollution from traffic and power plants seems to cause genetic changes — the kind linked to cancer — in developing fetuses, a federally funded study released Tuesday has concluded.

A first-of-its-kind study of 60 pregnant women in poor areas of New York City used backpacks to monitor the women’s exposure to airborne carcinogens and then tested their babies’ umbilical-cord blood after birth. Babies whose moms were exposed to higher pollution levels had 53 percent more aberrations in their chromosomes. Other studies have shown that these types of chromosomal changes increase the risk of cancer.

The study, which is in this month’s journal Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention, didn’t determine what parts of the babies’ genes changed or if they all changed in the same areas.