Nation in brief: Outages darken downtown for hours
Sporadic power failures Tuesday afternoon darkened a broad swath of downtown, an area dotted with Internet companies whose servers rely on a steady supply of electricity.
About 51,000 homes and businesses in San Francisco and south of the city lacked electricity at the height of the failure, which started at about 2 p.m. and lasted a few hours, said Pacific Gas & Electric spokeswoman Darlene Chiu. Many were rerouted to backup circuits as PG&E crews worked to identify the failure’s cause, Chiu said.
Transmission line breakers failed in a substation, she said. The failures were due to power surges from PG&E’s attempts to keep electricity flowing through the substation, she said.
Power was restored throughout the city by 5 p.m.
AT&T Park, home of the Giants, was also affected hours before a scheduled night game. The city’s famed cable cars were out of commission for a time.
New Orleans
No indictment in Katrina deaths
A grand jury refused on Tuesday to indict a doctor accused of murdering four seriously ill hospital patients with drug injections during the desperate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, closing the books on the only mercy-killing case to emerge from the storm.
Dr. Anna Pou acknowledged administering medication to the patients but insisted she did so only to relieve pain.
Pou and two nurses were arrested last summer after Attorney General Charles Foti concluded they gave “lethal cocktails” to four patients at the flooded-out, sweltering Memorial Medical Center after the August 2005 storm.
Charges against the nurses, Lori Budo and Cheri Landry, were dropped after they were compelled to testify last month before the grand jury under legal guidelines that kept their testimony from being used against them.
Washington
Fred Thompson replaces adviser
Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson is shaking up his still-unofficial campaign, replacing his top aide with a former Michigan senator and a veteran Florida strategist.
The shake-up comes amid consternation inside the campaign about the active role played by Thompson’s wife, Jeri, a lawyer, media consultant and former Republican National Committee official.
“Rumors are rumors,” said Thompson spokeswoman Linda Rozett. “It is not a personal issue. It’s an organizational issue. We are strengthening the organization as we enter the next phase.”
Acting campaign manager Tom Collamore will still advise Thompson, but his presidential operation will be run by the duo of former senator and energy secretary Spencer Abraham and a Florida GOP strategist, Randy Enright, according to Rozett.