Boston airport regrets 9/11 fire drill
Boston airport regrets 9/11 fire drill
BOSTON — Officials at Boston’s Logan Airport apologized for holding a fire drill, complete with smoke and flames, on the 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The two hijacked jets that were flown into the World Trade Center towers that day had taken off from Logan.
Gov. Deval Patrick, who did not know in advance about the drill, called the timing of it “dumb.” But he adds that he retained confidence in the leadership of the Massachusetts Port Authority, the public agency that runs the airport.
The port authority has apologized in a statement and says it “understands that it may have offended many of those touched by the events of Sept. 11.”
GOP spending plan vote to be delayed
WASHINGTON — A revolt by tea party conservatives forced House GOP leaders Wednesday to delay a vote on a temporary spending bill required to prevent a government shutdown next month.
GOP leaders pulled the measure from the House schedule after initial vote counts showed them running into opposition from several dozen staunch conservatives who think the leadership is not fighting hard enough to block implementation of President Barack Obama’s health care law.
The conservatives are unhappy with a plan by GOP leaders to advance the measure through the House coupled with a provision to derail implementation of the new health care law but allow the Democratic Senate to send it on to the White House shorn of the “defund ‘Obamacare’” provision so long as there is a vote on it.
The plan by top Republicans like Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia is designed to keep government agencies running through Dec. 15. Cantor’s office announced the delay.
Referendum on Bloomberg looms in NYC election
NEW YORK — The race to succeed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is shaping up as a referendum on the data-driven billionaire who guided the city for 12 years.
The top vote-getter in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, Bill de Blasio, was the most anti-Bloomberg candidate in the race, railing against the mayor’s pro-police, pro-development, pro-business stance. On the Republican side, the nomination Tuesday went to Joe Lhota, who has made it clear he wants to pick up where Bloomberg left off.
De Blasio won 40.2 percent of the vote — just over the threshold needed to win the nomination. But that could change when election officials recount votes and add absentee ballots. If de Blasio dips below 40, he will face second-place finisher Bill Thompson in an Oct. 1 runoff.
India mandates increase in charitable giving by large corporations
NEW DELHI — The Indian government has mandated that all large corporations in India spend at least 2 percent of their profits on community development projects.
The corporate responsibility law — which applies to both foreign and domestic companies — requires that all firms that generate profits of about $78 million or more annually in the country spend at least 2 percent of those earnings on community development projects.
If they don’t, and fail to give valid reasons for noncompliance, they could face fines or even imprisonment for top executives, officials said.
India’s government believes that the law will bring aid to the needy at a time when the wealth of corporations and some individuals has soared but philanthropic giving remains low, fueling resentment.
About two-thirds of India’s 1.2 billion people live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.
Suicide blasts kill nine in Egypt
EL-ARISH, Egypt — In near-simultaneous attacks, a pair of suicide bombers rammed their explosives-laden cars into military targets in Egypt’s volatile Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday, killing at least nine soldiers and nudging the conflict there closer to a full-blown insurgency.
The bombings in the town of Rafah on the border with the Gaza Strip appear to be a deadly response by insurgents to a military crackdown on their north Sinai hideouts that has reportedly left over three dozen dead.
Suicide attacks are a new element in the wave of political violence triggered initially by the ouster of Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi on July 3, and intensified by a violent crackdown on his supporters’ protest camps. They suggest that al-Qaida-inspired groups may be developing a new capability to strike at security and other targets, both in Sinai and elsewhere in Egypt.
One of the two bombings in the town of Rafah brought down a two-story building housing the local branch of military intelligence. It collapsed the entire structure, two security officials said, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk to the media. They said no bodies were found under the rubbles, but the attack left 10 soldiers and seven civilians, three of them women, wounded.
The second attack targeted an armored personnel carrier at an army checkpoint not far from the intelligence headquarters, the officials added.
The officials said the remains of the two suicide bombers have been recovered. The officials gave a death toll of nine for both attacks but did not say how many were killed in each.
Federal hiring down
WASHINGTON — With fiscal pressures continuing to force spending cuts, government agencies made fewer than 90,000 new hires last year, the smallest number in six years and a 37 percent drop since 2009, federal data show.
The government hired 89,689 new employees in 2012, many of whom eventually will move into leadership positions at their agencies. They include the largest number of veterans in recent years (44.7 percent), and three out of four are filling jobs at defense and security-related agencies.
These are some characteristics of the Class of 2012, which was profiled by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service to try to measure what corners of the government are seeking new talent even in a period of contraction.
The partnership analyzed data from the Office of Personnel Management to draw a geographic and demographic picture of the new employees.
The drop in hiring comes as agencies face a wave of retirements by baby-boomers, who are calling it quits amid budget cuts, furloughs and poor morale caused by a negative public view of federal service.
Pentagon contracts little changed in August as cuts sap spending
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Defense Department awarded $17.6 billion in contracts in August, little changed from July and one-third less than the same month a year ago.
Only one award topped $1 billion in value: an extension of a current deal to upgrade electronics in U.S. weapons systems and provide other engineering services, held by seven defense contractors including Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
August awards increased 1.7 percent from the previous month after dropping 55 percent in July from June. The larger decline reflects the continuing effect of across-the-board budget cuts on Defense Department operations, said Mark Amtower, who runs a government contracting consulting firm in Clarksville, Md.
The value of 324 contracts awarded in August was almost 34 percent less the $26.5 billion announced during the same month in 2012, as budget reductions unfolded under a process known as sequestration. The Pentagon is required to announce contracts of at least $6.5 million.
More than 200,000 Americans quit smoking after graphic ad campaign
WASHINGTON — An estimated 200,000 Americans quit smoking in the wake of a federally funded ad campaign that graphically showed the consequences of tobacco use, according to a study released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC said an estimated 1.6 million U.S. smokers attempted to quit this past year after encountering the three-month “Tips From Former Smokers” campaign, which was funded by the Affordable Care Act. Of those, 200,000 quit shortly after the campaign. More than 100,000 are expected to stop permanently.
The $54 million ad series, which ended in June 2012, featured stark images and emotional pleas from ex-smokers suffering from a variety of ailments, including amputated limbs, oral and throat cancer, paralysis, lung damage, strokes, and heart attacks.
The agency also said that calls to its toll-free quit line (800-QUIT-NOW) more than doubled during the ad campaign, and visits to its website were five times greater than during the same three-month period a year earlier.
Meat industry groups lose bid to delay US labeling rule
WASHINGTON — U.S. and Canadian meat industry groups lost a bid in federal court to temporarily block enforcement of U.S. country-of-origin food labeling rules.
The industry groups argued that the rules, issued by the Department of Agriculture, violate the U.S. Constitution by compelling speech in the form of costly and detailed labels on meat products that will confuse consumers and raise prices. U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington disagreed in a ruling dated Wednesday.
The regulations, adopted in May, require producers to specify where an animal was born, raised and slaughtered. Retail packages can’t mix muscle cuts from different countries under a general label.
The rules are more stringent than a set of regulations that came into effect in 2009 in response to the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, in a Canadian animal in 2003. Canada and Mexico told the World Trade Organization that the earlier rules discriminated against their products.
By wire sources