The nation in brief

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Drone OK’d to work for BP in Alaska

WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday that it has granted the first permission for commercial drone flights over land.

Drone-maker AeroVironment of Monrovia, Calif., and BP’s energy corporation have been given permission to use a Puma drone to survey pipelines, roads and equipment at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, the agency said. The first flight took place on Sunday.

Made by AeroVironment, the Puma is a small, hand-launched craft about 41/2 feet long and with a 9-foot wingspan. It was initially designed for military use.

Drones are often less expensive to operate than manned aircraft and easier to maneuver. Equipped with 3-D cameras, the Puma will provide images of hard-to-reach places not currently available, BP and AeroVironment say.

Congress directed the FAA to provide commercial drones access to U.S. skies by September 2015, but the agency’s efforts to write safety rules for such flights by drones have been slow, and it is not expected to meet the deadline.

Campus poll: Sex crimes up, others fall

WASHINGTON — The number of sex offenses reported at American colleges and universities went up in the past decade even as overall campus crime decreased, according to an Education Department survey that also suggests high schools are safer than they used to be.

The report released Tuesday said 3,330 forcible sex offenses were reported on campuses in 2011, the latest data available for colleges and universities that researchers have analyzed. That was a roughly 52 percent increase from the 2,200 reported a decade earlier, according to the report. But the number of campus crimes in every other category, such as burglary and car theft, declined during the same period.

The report acknowledges the steady increase in college enrollment that occurred during that period — census data show nearly 21 million students in 2011 compared to roughly 16 million in 2001 — but says the number of crimes reported on campus nonetheless declined for all categories except sex offenses.

EPA: Rules to curb West’s fires, floods

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The head of the Environmental Protection Agency promoted proposed clean power-plant rules to Western governors Tuesday, framing the plan as a way to deal with destructive wildfires and floods that have ravaged the region in recent years.

“There are some states that are really feeling some of the brunt of the changing climate most dramatically with wildfires and floods and droughts and all of those challenges,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said Tuesday after a two-hour meeting with 10 governors in Colorado Springs where the annual Western Governors’ Association conference is happening.

The plan has been met with reluctance — and skepticism — from some governors.

McCarthy emphasized that states will have flexibility in developing plans to reduce carbon output. But she acknowledged that some governors whose states depend heavily on coal expressed concern about the new rules.

NYC pact pays 14 Occupiers $583,000

NEW YORK — The city has agreed to pay nearly $600,000 to settle allegations that police wrongfully arrested a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters, marking what their lawyers Tuesday called the largest settlement to date in a single Occupy-related civil-rights case.

The $583,000 pact involves 14 demonstrators who said police ordered them to leave but prevented them from doing so and arrested them in Lower Manhattan early on New Year’s Day 2012. The disorderly-conduct cases got dismissed, according to the protesters’ federal lawsuit, which argues they were arrested “for expressing their views.”

City lawyers said settling “was in all parties’ best interest.”

Police have made more than 2,600 arrests on various charges at Occupy-related events over time. The Manhattan district attorney’s office agreed to dismiss more than 78 percent of the cases. More than 400 people pleaded guilty or were convicted at trials, 11 were acquitted, and judges dismissed some other cases, according to the prosecutor’s office.

A Section on 06/11/2014