Prison withheld tapes after Sept. 11

Washington The Justice Department’s inspector general said Monday a federal prison center in Brooklyn, N.Y., failed to turn over hundreds of videotapes to investigators probing the treatment of detainees taken into custody after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons discovered the tapes in February, 14 months after the inspector general found some staff members abused some detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Some tapes from the Metropolitan Detention Center contain conversations between lawyers and their clients, IG Glenn Fine said in a report to Congress. Fine is looking into the detention center’s failure to produce the tapes during his investigation.

Lawyers for the Legal Aid Society are suing detention center officers for secretly videotaping their conversations at the center. The lawyers say they were assured by the prison that the attorneys’ conversations with their clients were not being taped, despite the video cameras on the walls of the facility.

Evidence from the hundreds of tapes was incorporated into the Bureau of Prisons’ disciplinary review of staff treatment of detainees.

The Bureau of Prisons has sustained many of the IG’s findings that some staff members abused some of the detainees there, the IG said.

Judge rules Espiscopal property locally owned

Los Angeles

A conservative Newport Beach, Calif., parish that severed ties with the Episcopal Church in a dispute over scriptural teaching and homosexuality is the rightful owner of its buildings and other property, a California judge ruled Monday.

Orange County Superior Court Judge David C. Velasquez’s ruling in favor of St. James Church finalized a tentative opinion he announced last week that rejected the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles’ claim that the local congregation held the multimillion-dollar property in trust for the diocese – and that it forfeited any right to the buildings and other property, including hymnals, when it broke with the diocese and national church.

The Right Rev. J. Jon Bruno, bishop of the six-county diocese, said he would appeal. His attorney, diocesan chancellor John R. Shiner, called the judge’s ruling “a grave error.”

USDA reports rules violated on mad cow

Washington Inspectors have found more than 1,000 violations of rules aimed at preventing mad cow disease from reaching humans, the Agriculture Department said Monday.

No contaminated meat reached consumers, the agency said.

The rules were created in response to the nation’s first case of mad cow disease in December 2003.

They require that brains, spinal cords and other nerve parts – which can carry mad cow disease – be removed when older cows are slaughtered. The at-risk tissues are removed from cows older than 30 months because infection levels are believed to rise with age.

The Agriculture Department said Monday it had cited beef slaughterhouses or processing plants 1,036 times for failing to comply the with rules on removing those tissues. The violations occurred over 17 months, ending in May.

Crash near Los Angeles leaves seven dead

Moorpark, Calif. A pileup on a rural highway Monday killed seven people, including two children, authorities said.

Two people were injured.

The crash at an intersection near Moorpark, about 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles, left three vehicles strewn about.

Five adults and two children in a small Toyota van were dead at the scene, said Joe Luna, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

A four-door sedan and a full-size van also were involved.

The California Highway Patrol was investigating.

First-edition ‘Gatsby’ among unsorted books

West Chester, Pa.

A first-edition copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel “The Great Gatsby” sat in a box of unsorted volumes at Baldwin’s Book Barn for almost two months before it was noticed, and now the bookseller hopes it will bring more than $50,000.

“If you’re a serious collector, you have to have this book,” said store operator Thomas Baldwin.

He wouldn’t identify the man who left the book at his shop, but said he will receive a “very good” percentage of the book’s proceeds.

Baldwin identified the book as a first edition because protagonist Jay Gatsby’s first name on the dust jacket was accidentally printed with a lowercase “J,” an error corrected in later editions.

Bush reading list: salt, tsar and flu

Crawford, Texas

Gas prices are climbing, motorists are fuming, and President Bush is at his ranch with a book about the history of salt.

According to the White House, one of three books Bush chose to read on his five-week vacation is “Salt: A World History” by Mark Kurlansky, who chronicled the rise and fall of what once was considered the world’s most strategic commodity.

The other two books he reportedly brought with him to Crawford are “Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar” by Edvard Radzinsky and “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History” by John M. Barry.

“The president enjoys reading and learning about history,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.