LITTLE ROCK — QUOTE OF THE DAY
“You don’t have to be a successful criminal to be a criminal.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Niewoehner,
in closing arguments at the corruption trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich Atricle, this page
Storm dead at 4; D.C. area limping
WASHINGTON - It could take days to restore power to hundreds of thousands of people in and around Washington after a storm downed power lines and trees and left four people dead, officials said Monday.
The Sunday storm brought cooler weather to the Mid-Atlantic region, which has been through a nearly two-week heat wave, but also left widespread damage in Washington and its suburbs.
Power failures resulting from the storm affected more than 430,000 customers. Officials said they hadn’t seen a similar failure since Hurricane Isabel in 2003, when flooding and fallen trees caused even more failures and some customers went a week or more without power.
LA suburb slashes officials’ high pay
BELL, Calif. - The City Council of this small, bluecollar city voted Monday to slash four members’ salaries by 90 percent, and the mayor and a councilman said they will not seek reelection.
The council voted unanimously to set every member’s salary at what Councilman Lorenzo Valez is paid - about $8,000 a year. The other four council members have been making about $100,000 a year for their part-time service on the City Council of this poverty-stricken city of about 40,000 residents.
Mayor Oscar Hernandez and Councilman George Mirabal said they would not seek re-election after their terms. Hernandez also said he would take no salary for the rest of his term.
Bell’s city manager, police chief and assistant city manager all resigned last week, after it was revealed they were making salaries totaling $1.6 million a year.
California Attorney General Jerry Brown said Monday that he has subpoenaed hundreds of records from the Los Angeles suburb. He demanded to see employment contracts within two days to determine whether to file charges.
U.S. senators urge Lockerbie answers
NEW YORK - British and Scottish officials who have declined to appear at a hearing this week on the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi should reconsider in order to dispel “a cloud of suspicion” over the issue, two U.S. senators said Monday.
U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, both Democrats, stood in Times Square along with relatives of some of those killed in the bombing and said it was important to get the facts surrounding the circumstances of al-Meghrahi’s 2009 release. The senators are probing whether an oil exploration deal between oil giant BP and Libya influenced the decision. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has a hearing scheduled for Thursday.
Al-Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of the Dec.
21, 1988, bombing that killed 270 people. He was sentenced to life in prison, but Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill decided last August to release him on compassionate grounds because the Libyan was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 07/27/2010