San Diego

Sailor who refused duty sentenced to hard labor

A U.S. sailor was sentenced to three months of hard labor Thursday for refusing to ship out for the Persian Gulf in a protest against the war in Iraq.

Pablo Paredes was also demoted from petty officer third class to seaman recruit, the lowest rank in the Navy.

A military judge, Lt. Cmdr. Bob Klant, imposed the sentence a day after finding Paredes guilty of refusing to board the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard after it received orders for the Persian Gulf in December.

The 23-year-old New Yorker said he refused to support a war he believed was illegal and immoral.

Paredes had requested conscientious objector status after he refused to board the ship. A Navy officer found that his refusal was based on political opposition to the Iraq war, not a moral opposition to all war, and recommended it be denied.

Washington, D.C.

Report: Sealants help contain arsenic in wood

Sealants can help reduce the cancer risk from arsenic-treated wood found primarily in playground equipment and backyard decks, government scientists report.

Using an oil- or water-based sealant or stain at least once a year can limit the amount of arsenic in pesticide-treated lumber that can escape and come into contact with people’s skin, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Results from the first year of a two-year study by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the EPA show success in containing the pesticide, chromated copper arsenate.

The EPA said the sealants or stains were preferred because paints and other products “can chip or flake, requiring scraping or sanding for removal, which can increase exposure to arsenic.”

The pesticide has been used mainly to protect lumber from decay and insect damage. The EPA has removed the pesticide from a list of approved chemicals, and the lumber industry has stopped making new products with it.

New York

Governor aims to shore up trade center project

Trying to put the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site back on track after a series of snags, Gov. George Pataki gave assurances Thursday that a new, more terrorism-resistant design for the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower will be ready by next month.

“Failure to rebuild is not an option,” the Republican governor said in a speech in downtown Manhattan. “We will not tolerate unnecessary delays.”

The announcement came just eight days after Pataki announced the Freedom Tower would have to be sent back to the drawing board to address security concerns raised by the police department. Officials have said the concerns would probably delay the tower’s 2009 opening by at least a year.

Police were worried the tower would be too close to the street, making it vulnerable to car or truck bombings. Police spokesman Paul Browne said the new design would double the distance from the street and call for thicker glass.

The security concerns were the latest of several problems that have plagued the Pataki-led efforts to rebuild the site. The troubles included a long battle over the tower’s original design, the placement of a mass transit hub and the design of a memorial to the nearly 3,000 people killed in the 9-11 attacks.

Chicago

Flu shots could be suggested for everyone

Perhaps within five years, the government is likely to recommend annual flu shots for every American — not just young children, the elderly and other at-risk people, public health advocates predict.

The government panel that sets U.S. vaccine policy has started discussing “universal immunization” as a way to boost vaccination rates and reduce flu-linked sickness and death, Dr. Scott Harper of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week at a vaccine meeting.

The end of a chaotic season where many people seeking flu shots were turned away because of a shortage might seem an odd time to broach the idea of vaccinating even more people.

Harper acknowledged that the recent crisis momentarily upstaged universal immunization discussions, but said it remained a viable proposal.

New York City

Songbirds know what they’re meant to sing

Young birds raised in isolation can learn a song that is not part of their repertoire, but once spring arrives, they instinctively switch to their mating song even though they’ve never heard it before, a new study has found.

Scientists at Rockefeller University found that young male canaries raised in the lab had no trouble learning a computer-generated song that had no resemblance to the song their father would normally teach them.

But one morning, the scientists arrived at the lab to discover that the birds, on the brink of adulthood, were chirping the song they were destined to sing — even though they had never heard it before. The research will appear today in the journal Science.

“This is something we didn’t expect,” said Timothy J. Gardner, a former postdoctoral student at Rockefeller who is now working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They can imitate things we never expected they could, but then the innate learning system must be so strong that the real song breaks through anyway.”

Theorists have long debated whether language is innate or learned through experience. This study suggests it may be a bit of both.

Washington, D.C.

Toxic pollution levels down 6%, EPA says

Despite increases in levels of mercury, PCBs and dioxin, overall chemical pollution released into the environment fell more than 6 percent in the latest report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The decline was led by reductions among mining companies and chemical makers.

Some 4.44 billion pounds of toxic chemicals were released in 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, the EPA said.

About 4.74 billion pounds were released in 2002, a revised figure for a year that had marked the first increase reported by EPA since 1997.

Metal mining companies and chemical makers reported the sharpest decreases, the EPA said. Metal mining’s 1.52 billion pounds, the largest single sector, dropped 18 percent from 2002. Manufacturers of chemicals reported 564 million pounds, a 3 percent decrease.

Washington, D.C.

Data show benefits of breast cancer treatment

Chemotherapy and hormone treatment have dramatically reduced the death rate from early breast cancer, according to a major international analysis that indicates the often-arduous regimes do cure many women.

The latest data from a massive, ongoing project involving 145,000 women with early breast cancer found that chemotherapy and hormone treatment continue to protect many women from dying from the disease for at least 15 years. The protection often gets stronger over time, increasing the likelihood that the therapy is truly eradicating cancer from their bodies.

The findings provide the most convincing support yet for using aggressive strategies against the most common malignancy to strike women, and they help explain why the death rate from breast cancer has been dropping in many countries, including the United States and Britain, experts said.

“This is really good news,” said Sarah Darby of the University of Oxford in England, who led the analysis being reported in Saturday’s issue of the journal the Lancet. “It means that the standard therapies we’re giving women really are working. It’s really quite exciting.”

Washington, D.C.

Lawmakers consider immigration changes

Calling the U.S. immigration system broken, a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers proposed a major overhaul Thursday that would allow immigrants to work here temporarily and later seek citizenship.

Using the framework of a guest-worker plan touted by President Bush, lawmakers said the measure aimed to fix a “broken” system that has allowed millions of undocumented immigrants, particularly entering through Mexico, to work underground and possibly pose security risks.

The plan essentially sets up another visa program, mostly for low-skilled workers. Under the plan, foreign workers must register, have a job lined up and pay a $500 fee. They can work here for up to six years in hard-to-fill jobs. Illegal immigrants already here could also sign up for the program after they pay a $1,000 fine and undergo a background check. At the end of six years and another $1,000 fine, they can apply for a green card.

Washington, D.C.

Officials came close to shooting down plane

As a wayward Cessna flew deep in restricted airspace, national security officials were on the phone discussing whether to implement the last line of defense: shooting it down.

The single-engine Cessna that prompted a frenzied evacuation of the White House, Capitol and Supreme Court on Wednesday veered away from downtown landmarks just before that decision needed to be made.

But it was a close call.

One senior Bush administration counterterrorism official said it was “a real finger-biting period because they came very close to ordering a shot against a general aircraft.”

Administration officials spent Thursday reviewing the bizarre series of events involving the small plane, which was carrying a pilot and a student pilot from Pennsylvania to an air show in North Carolina. It entered restricted airspace and then continued flying toward highly sensitive areas, prompting evacuations of tens of thousands of people as military aircraft scrambled to intercept it.

Washington, D.C.

DeLay says Democrats have ‘no class’

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, facing an audience of conservative well-wishers who reject as politically motivated the ethics questions that have dogged him for months, on Thursday night fired back at Democrats by calling them members of a party with no ideas and “no class.”

The Texas congressman’s supporters staged a high-profile show of support by throwing a $250-a-plate gala in his honor that brought nearly 900 people to the Capital Hilton. The money will be used to pay for the event, organizers said.

When he took the stage after other speakers had hailed him for his leadership in the Republican Party and the House, DeLay made only a passing reference to the problems that have sparked calls for an ethics probe.

Wisconsin

Taser official dropped as stun gun adviser

A Wisconsin researcher has removed Taser International’s medical director as an adviser to a study of the safety of stun guns after critics said his involvement with the manufacturer tainted the research.

University of Wisconsin-Madison professor John Webster had described his two-year, $500,000 study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice as the first to look at the safety of stun guns independent of Taser, the Arizona-based company that makes the weapons.

But documents show Robert Stratbucker, an Omaha physician who is Taser’s top medical officer, is one of four consultants to the study, which will look at how pigs’ hearts react to electric shocks from the devices.

Stratbucker’s studies are often cited by the company as evidence the weapons are a safe way to subdue unruly suspects.