Washington, D.C.

Fannie Mae eliminates bonuses for top execs

Mortgage giant Fannie Mae announced Friday it was withholding millions of dollars in bonuses from its top executives as it continued to come to grips with revelations of serious financial reporting problems.

The nation’s biggest backer of home mortgages announced in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its board of directors had voted to eliminate cash bonuses that would have been paid for the performance of top executives in 2004. The company said it also was postponing the payment of any stock awards for last year.

This action will affect 43 top officials who will lose millions of dollars in scheduled performance bonuses.

Fannie Mae’s chief executive, Franklin Raines, and its top financial officer, Timothy Howard, were forced out last month after revelations that the company will have to restate some $9 billion in earnings, or about one-third of its profits, dating to 2001.

California

Study shows genetics may play role in fitness

Some people stay fit and live to a ripe old age, despite never bothering to exercise. Why is that?

A report puts scientists one step closer to an answer.

Researchers from the United States and Norway ran rats on a treadmill until they were pooped. They bred the best runners with each other, and did the same with those that tired most easily, until they had superjocks and superwimps with vastly different capacities for exercise — and prospects for future health.

The average rodent jock could run 42 minutes without stopping; the average wimp just 14 minutes. What’s more, the least-fit rats gained more weight as they aged and scored worse on a number of measures that lead to heart disease and diabetes.

The results confirm that some rats — and, by extension, some people — are genetically more fit than others, and that this genetic legacy has an effect on health, said Steven L. Britton, one of the authors of the report in the journal Science.

Washington, D.C.

Government clears oil drilling in reserve

Citing a need for domestic energy, the government plans to open for exploratory drilling thousands of acres on Alaska’s North Slope that have been protected for decades because of migratory birds and caribou.

The Bureau of Land Management has concluded that oil and gas exploration in the northeastern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska can be conducted with “minimal impact” on the area’s wildlife.

While most of the 22 million-acre reserve is open to oil development, its lake-pocked northeastern corner has been fenced off, dating back to the Reagan administration, because of environmental concerns. That area also is viewed as having the highest oil and gas potential within the reserve.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton is expected to sign off on the bureau’s recommendation next week.

New Jersey

Ex-Philly mob boss sentenced to prison

Former Philadelphia mobster Ralph Natale, the nation’s first reigning Mafia boss to turn government informant, was sentenced to 13 years in prison Friday for drug dealing, racketeering and bribery.

Natale, 69, faced a life sentence when he was charged with narcotics trafficking five years ago, but won a lighter penalty for helping prosecutors convict other mobsters and the mayor of Camden.

He will serve no more than eight years because of time already spent behind bars.

Natale agreed in 1999 to cooperate with authorities. Since then, he has been a star witness at a string of mob and corruption trials.

In pleading guilty in 2000, he admitted that during his run as boss of the Philadelphia-South Jersey mob, he committed or ordered eight murders, oversaw drug dealing, loansharking and extortion and bribed Milton Milan, then mayor of Camden.

Washington, D.C.

EPA may limit fines to factory-style farms

Seeking data to enforce clean-air laws and possibly develop future regulations, the government on Friday told farms that generate huge amounts of animal waste they can escape potentially large fines if their air pollution is monitored.

The offer by the Environmental Protection Agency is aimed at factory-style farms that process animals, particularly hog, chicken and egg operations.

By signing on, the farms, increasingly run by a concentrated few companies, agree to abide by clean air, hazardous waste and emergency reporting laws after the data is collected. They would pay $2,500 into an EPA fund and agree to let EPA-approved contractors monitor the air. The fund would pay for two years of air monitoring at 28 to 30 farms nationwide at a cost of up to $500,000 each.

Companies also would have to agree to pay a civil penalty of anywhere from $200 to $100,000, depending on the size and number of farms they operate. Those fines would cover presumed violations, past and present, and fend off potential liability four years into the future, when EPA expects to issue its air standards.

Washington, D.C.

Battered refugee stays

A Guatemalan refugee who is the focus of a long-running debate over asylum for battered women will be allowed to remain in the United States, the Homeland Security Department decided Friday.

The case of Rodi Alvarado Pena had been in the hands of Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, who said two years ago he would decide her fate. On Friday, he opted neither to grant nor deny asylum to Alvarado, who came to the United States 10 years ago to escape repeated and savage beatings from her husband, a former soldier.

The new domestic security agency supported asylum for Alvarado in a memorandum to Ashcroft last year. The department, which took over most immigration matters from the Justice Department, is drafting new rules for asylum claims from battered women.

Texas

Suspect arrested in store clerk abduction

A college student whose abduction was captured on a surveillance videotape as she was leaving her clerk’s job at a Wal-Mart was found shot to death Friday, and a suspect was arrested, authorities said.

The body of Megan Leann Holden, 19, was discovered in a ditch alongside a highway in western Texas. Police said she was killed at the hands of a man who went on a multistate crime spree before he turned up Friday at an Arizona hospital with a gunshot wound.

The suspect, Johnny Lee Williams, 24, was being held on a $1 million bond on an aggravated kidnapping charge from Texas, authorities said, adding that Williams was driving the woman’s pickup truck, which was parked outside the hospital.

The abduction was captured in chilling detail Wednesday after the student at Tyler Junior College clocked out from the Wal-Mart in Tyler just before midnight.

Boston

Retaliation may be motive behind terror tip

The tipster who told federal officials about a potential terrorist plot involving Chinese and Iraqi immigrants may have fabricated the story out of revenge, a federal law enforcement official said Friday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the tipster might have been angry because a group of illegal immigrants had failed to pay for smuggling them into the country.

That scenario is one of many being examined in the case, said the official in Washington, who declined to describe other theories being explored.

FBI agents have been looking into an uncorroborated tip that 16 people might be planning an attack on Boston. They include 13 Chinese nationals, two Iraqis and a man identified on the FBI’s Web site as Jose Ernesto Beltran Quinones, whose nationality was not given.

The original tip was received by the California Highway Patrol. The tipster claimed that four of the Chinese entered the United States from Mexico and were awaiting a shipment of “nuclear oxide” that would follow them to Boston.

Washington, D.C.

NASA cancels plans for Hubble repairs

NASA is scrapping plans to service the Hubble Space Telescope, either with the space shuttle or with a robot repairman, a decision likely to set up a fresh confrontation with Congress over the fate of the orbiting observatory.

Sources said the White House, in consultation with NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, had decided to eliminate the Hubble funding from the 2006 federal budget because the cost of servicing is expected to exceed $1 billion.

The sources said the administration made the decision despite its intention to ask Congress for a 4.6 percent budget increase for NASA to $17 billion. The request is expected to focus on plans to reorient NASA’s priorities toward President Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration” to the moon and Mars.

The decision to abandon Hubble servicing was certain to rekindle the uproar that accompanied O’Keefe’s original announcement a year ago, following the 2003 Columbia tragedy, to cancel a space shuttle trip to service Hubble.

Atlanta

11-year-old found safe in Georgia woods

An 11-year-old boy was found safe Friday in Georgia, three days after he disappeared with a convicted child molester who had been living with him and his father in Florida.

Police were searching for the man who had been with the boy in the same woods where the child was found.

Frederick Fretz, 42, picked up the boy Tuesday from his school in Dunnellon, Fla., police said. Their drive ended about 375 miles to the northwest when their car stalled on an exit ramp off Interstate 75 north of Atlanta.

The discovery of the car Friday morning triggered the search for the two. Emerson, Ga., police received a call when Fretz and the boy went to a store to buy a gallon of water and some candy, police Maj. Mike Powell said.

Police found the child near a gas station less than 12 hours after the car was found and about two miles from the vehicle.