Time editor defends handing over notes
Grapevine, Texas
The editor in chief of Time Inc. on Saturday defended his decision to surrender a reporter’s notes to a federal prosecutor investigating the unmasking of a CIA agent.
Norm Pearlstine has been heavily criticized since announcing July 1 that Time magazine would turn over staff writer Matt Cooper’s notes, e-mails and related documents to a grand jury investigating how reporters learned the agent’s name.
“I would not do anything different in terms of the decision,” Pearlstine said Saturday at a writers conference in Texas.
Pearlstine’s decision broke ranks with The New York Times, which allowed a reporter to be jailed for refusing to cooperate with the investigation.Since turning over the documents, Cooper has said that Karl Rove, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, told him about the agent in a 2003 phone call.
Teen spots man lost in park’s lava fields
Hilo, Hawaii
A sharp-eyed teenager on a helicopter tour over a volcano spotted a man who had vanished during a late-night hike across desolate lava fields days earlier.
Gilbert Dewey Gaedcke III, 41, of Austin, Texas, was dehydrated but apparently all right when he was found Friday after surviving five days in the heat, lost amid acres of black volcanic rock.
Gaedcke’s rented car had been found earlier at the end of a road near an old lava flow bordering the east side of the 333,000-acre Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
Fire crews and rangers searched for days – on foot and on horseback. Helicopters buzzed the area, but there was no sign of Gaedcke until he was spotted by 15-year-old Peter Frank.
The helicopter pilot flew the family back and then returned for Gaedcke, who was recuperating at a private home on Saturday.
Westmoreland buried at military academy
West Point, N.Y.
Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam during a major escalation of the war, was buried Saturday at the U.S. Military Academy, where he was once superintendent.
The World War II combat veteran died Monday at the age of 91 of natural causes at the South Carolina retirement home where he lived with his wife, Katherine.
“He left his mark in history,” Lt. Col. John J. Cook, said in a graveside eulogy. “The season of war is gone. … Now he’ll enter a season of rest.”
Following a private chapel service attended by about 50 people, Westmoreland’s widow received the flag from his coffin from Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker.
L.A., Long Beach ports open on weekends
Los Angeles
The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach began operating on weekends and evenings Saturday in a new initiative designed to ease Southern California’s traffic congestion and smog.
By expanding beyond regular Monday-through-Friday business hours, officials hope to reduce the ports’ tangle of shipping trucks, which would also cut exhaust emissions released when the vehicles sit in gridlocked traffic.
The combined ports are the fifth-largest in the world.