New York – The son of a ground-zero rescue worker who died last week from lung disease met with President Bush on Wednesday to urge expanded health services for those who are still sick.
“On behalf of all World Trade Center victims, I expressed the urgency and the desperate need for financial support for health services,” said Ceasar Borja Jr., 21.
He said he told the president that the funding should be expanded not just for “the heroes and heroines” who risked their lives looking for victims in the rubble of the twin towers, but also for men, women and children exposed to toxins because they lived or worked in the area.
Borja’s father, Cesar Borja, was a police officer who worked 14-hour days in the smoldering pit after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack. He died at 52 while awaiting a lung transplant, on the same day his son was in Washington to attend Bush’s State of the Union address.
Additional nation/world briefs:
ANCHORAGE, Alaska
Oil lingering after ’89 Exxon spill a hazard
Lingering crude from the nation’s largest oil spill has weathered only slightly in some places almost 18 years after the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground and fouled hundreds of miles of Alaska shoreline, a new federal study released Wednesday concludes.
The estimated 85 tons – or more than 26,600 gallons – of oil remaining in Prince William Sound is declining about 4 percent a year and probably even slower in the Gulf of Alaska, according to chemist Jeffrey Short of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
At that rate of decline, oil could persist for decades below the surface of some beaches, Short and his colleagues said in their report, to be published in the Feb. 15 edition of Environmental Science & Technology, the journal of the American Chemical Society.
“Such persistence can pose a contact hazard to intertidally foraging sea otters, sea ducks, and shorebirds, create a chronic source of low-level contamination, discourage subsistence in a region where use is heavy, and degrade the wilderness character of protected lands,” researchers wrote in their conclusion.
Exxon Mobil Corp. spokesman Mark Boudreaux said the Irving, Texas-based company’s Valdez team planned to closely review the findings.
OSLO, Norway
Cruise ship runs aground in Antarctica
A Norwegian cruise ship carrying nearly 300 passengers, including 119 Americans, ran aground on a remote Antarctic island and damaged its hull before getting free of rocks, officials said Wednesday. No one was injured.
The M/S Nordkapp got off the rocks under its own steam and sought shelter in a nearby harbor, where its 294 passengers were transferred to a sister ship as a precaution, said Hanne Kristiansen, a spokeswoman for Norwegian Coastal Voyage.
She said there was no danger to those aboard.
VATICAN CITY
Vatican defends papal book deal
The Vatican on Wednesday defended the choice of Doubleday to publish Pope Benedict XVI’s new book in North America.
Benedict is coming out with his first book as pontiff, titled “Jesus of Nazareth.” The conservative daily Il Giornale ran a front-page story Monday headlined “A ‘Ratzinger Code’ by Dan Brown’s Publisher.” The pope’s birth name is Josef Alois Ratzinger.
Doubleday is an imprint of Random House, the publisher of Brown’s worldwide best-selling novel, “The DaVinci Code.” It was heavily criticized by Catholic Church officials for contending that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had descendants and that the church was at the center of covering it up.
In its statement Wednesday, the Vatican Publishing House noted that Doubleday has previously published works by Popes John XXIII and John Paul II as well as “The Catechism of the Catholic Church.” It did not mention Brown’s book.
DES MOINES, Iowa
Missing woman found dead in lettuce truck
The body of a woman last seen at a produce plant in Arizona was found in a lettuce delivery truck in Des Moines, Iowa, police said.
Sheila Kay Ross, 47, was accidentally pinned inside the truck in Yuma while it was being loaded, Dr. John Kraemer of the Iowa medical examiner’s office said Wednesday. She died of compressional asphyxiation, he said.
Ross had gotten out of her own truck to get paperwork but never returned, police said. Her husband reported her missing that night.
