NEW YORK

Families oppose museum at Sept. 11 memorial

Ground Zero officials defended plans to build a museum on freedom at the site as dozens of victims’ relatives Monday launched a nationwide effort calling for its removal from the plans.

New York Gov. George Pataki’s chief of staff, John Cahill, stressed that rebuilding officials won’t allow the museum’s mission to be “hijacked from the political right or the political left.”

“We were attacked that day because of our values and because of our freedom,” Cahill said.

The center is expected to have exhibits on slavery in America, the Holocaust and global human-rights issues, but families are worried that some of the exhibits would take away from the sanctity of the adjacent memorial.

Relatives rallied at Ground Zero on Monday as they stepped up their opposition to the center, set to be located in a building next to the Twin Towers’ footprints that will be the centerpiece of the memorial slated to open in 2009.

Relatives are starting a letter-writing campaign to politicians calling for the building housing the International Freedom Center and the less-controversial Drawing Center to be removed from the block housing the 9/11 memorial.

WASHINGTON

Therapies help prevent ‘gunk’ linked to disease

Two experimental therapies show promise at preventing a sticky gunk from clogging up the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, a buildup called amyloid that is the newest focus in the fight against the disease.

One, an experimental drug called Flurizan, has begun late-stage testing to see if it at least helps slow Alzheimer’s inevitable worsening. Government-funded researchers are planning a large study of the second approach, a therapy called intravenous immune globulin, or IVIG.

“Most scientists think if you get rid of amyloid, it’ll moderate the disease,” explained William Thies, scientific director of the Alzheimer’s Association.

About 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, a creeping brain degeneration that slowly robs its victims of memory and the ability to reason, communicate and care for themselves. With the aging population, a staggering 14 million may have it by 2050.

Tennessee

Workers with fake papers entered weapons plant

Sixteen foreign-born construction workers with phony immigration documents were able to enter a nuclear weapons plant in eastern Tennessee because of lax security controls, a federal report said Monday.

Controls at the Y-12 weapons plant have since been tightened and there was no evidence the workers had access to any sensitive documents, said the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons facilities for the Department of Energy.

However, the DOE inspector general’s office said in the report issued Monday that its field agents found “official use only” documents “lying unprotected in a construction trailer, which was accessed by the foreign construction workers” at the plant.

The report, initiated by a tip in 2004, said the workers had fake green cards that certified them to work in the United States. Their cases were turned over to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for deportation.

The Y-12 plant, created for the top-secret Manhattan Project that developed nuclear bombs in World War II, makes parts for nuclear warheads and is the country’s principal storehouse for weapons-grade uranium.

Michigan

Judge to decide where Marine will be buried

The divorced parents of a Marine killed in the U.S. military’s deadliest air crash of the Iraq war are fighting in court over where to bury their son.

The Detroit-area judge who will decide the case scheduled a July 15 hearing on Monday and said she does not want it to turn into a “three-ring circus.”

The parents are arguing over the choice of cemeteries – a new national cemetery that has yet to open or a paternal family plot.

Lance Cpl. Allan Klein, 34, died in January along with 29 other Marine infantrymen and a medic in a helicopter crash. His remains are being kept in a Roseville crypt.

In military paperwork that Allan Klein filled out, he listed his mother as an emergency contact. But officials said procedure dictates that the remains belong to the older of the surviving parents. Klein’s father is 65, his mother 58.