Veteran Dem. Sen. Mikulski retires
BALTIMORE – Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a tough and dogged daughter of working-class Baltimore who rose to become the longest-serving woman in the history of Congress, said she had one question as she weighed seeking a sixth term: “Do I spend my time raising money, or do I spend my time raising hell?”
The 78-year-old Maryland Democrat, who led the powerful Appropriations Committee, announced Monday that she’d decided on the latter approach and would not seek re-election next year when her fifth term ends.
“I don’t want to spend my time campaigning for me,” she said at a news conference in Fells Point, the now-trendy waterfront neighborhood where her parents had a grocery store and her immigrant grandparents ran a bakery.
Her announcement opens the way for what could be a raucous fight next year to replace her in Maryland’s first open U.S. Senate seat in a decade. Potential candidates include former governors – Democrat Martin O’Malley and Republican Bob Ehrlich .
Feds: Bring boat panels to court
BOSTON – Prosecutors want panels of the boat in which Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found hiding to be brought to court to show jurors what they say is his written confession, but his lawyers want them to see the entire bullet-ridden boat.
Prosecutors have said Tsarnaev scrawled the motive for the deadly attack inside the boat. They say he referred to U.S. wars in Muslim countries and wrote, “Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”
Tsarnaev’s older brother had been killed hours earlier during a shootout with police, but Tsarnaev escaped and then was captured, wounded and bloodied, inside the boat, parked in a suburban Watertown backyard.
During a final pretrial hearing Monday, Tsarnaev attorney William Fick argued the jury would be seeing the writing out of context if the boat’s panels were brought into the courtroom. To see the whole boat would allow the jury to imagine Tsarnaev lying inside “much like someone lying in a crypt making those writings,” Fick said.
Ebola survivor sues Dallas hospital
DALLAS – The Dallas hospital that treated the first patient to be diagnosed in the U.S. with Ebola lied to Congress when it said its staff was trained to handle the deadly virus, a nurse who contracted the disease contends in a lawsuit filed Monday.
Nina Pham, who was an intensive care unit nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, says after being told last fall that she would be treating a patient suspected of having Ebola, “the sum total” of information she was given to protect herself was “what her manager ‘Googled’ and printed out from the Internet.”
She says in her lawsuit that the day after getting that information, the patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, tested positive for the disease. Duncan, who contracted Ebola in his native Liberia but started showing symptoms during a trip to the U.S., later died at the hospital. Pham, 26, and another nurse who treated Duncan, Amber Vinson, contracted the disease but recovered.
In a statement released through her lawyers, Pham said she felt she had no choice but to sue the hospital’s parent company, Texas Health Resources. “I was hoping that THR would be more open and honest about everything that happened at the hospital, and the things they didn’t do that led to me getting infected with Ebola,” she said.
Nasdaq 5,000: index passes milestone
NEW YORK – For the first time since its dot-com era peak nearly 15 years ago, the Nasdaq composite has closed above 5,000.
Major U.S. indexes rose from the start, with the Nasdaq passing the milestone number shortly before noon. The tech-heavy index then dropped, but rose again toward the close of trading to end at 5,008.10 on Monday, just 40 points from its March 2000 record. Merger news and an encouraging economic report drove the gains.
The long climb back for the Nasdaq, once a symbol of investor recklessness and self-delusion, has been marked by significant changes in its composition. Telecommunications stocks now represent less than 1 percent of the index, versus 12 percent in 2000. Gone also is the heavy reliance on Internet companies with little or no earnings, like Pets.com and Webvan.
As a result, valuations are more modest.
Investors are now paying $20 for every $1 in earnings per share thrown off by Nasdaq companies each year. During the dot-com frenzy, they were willing to pay $194 for every dollar.
Associated Press
