More calling on Weiner to drop out of mayor’s race
NEW YORK – Anthony Weiner pressed ahead with his bid for mayor Wednesday despite growing calls for him to drop out over a new sexting scandal, saying the campaign is too important to abandon over “embarrassing personal things” becoming public.
Rivals, newspaper editorial pages and at least one former New York congressional colleague urged the Democrat to quit the race a day after he acknowledged exchanging raunchy messages and photos online even after the same sort of behavior destroyed his congressional career two years ago.
“I think he should pull out of the race. I think he needs serious psychiatric help,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.
Weiner brushed off such calls and kept up his campaign schedule.
“I thought these things would come out by the end of the campaign, and some of them have. Look, I am pressing forward, running a campaign about the issues, and I’m getting a good response,” he said afterward.
Obama promises to make economy his top priority
GALESBURG, Ill. – Seeking to build momentum for looming fiscal fights, President Barack Obama on Wednesday cast himself as the champion for middle-class Americans struggling to make ends meet. He chided Washington for having “taken its eye off the ball” and declared that the economy would be the “highest priority” of his second term.
Obama, in an hour-long address that was at times deeply partisan, also accused Republican lawmakers of succumbing to “an endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals.” He said gridlock had only gotten worse since his re-election.
“I am here to say this needs to stop,” Obama said in a speech at Knox College. “This moment does not require short-term thinking. It does not require having the same old stale debates.”
Groups seek new standards for pesticide use on farms
SAN FRANCISCO – Activists have filed another petition to force federal regulators to set safety standards that protect children from pesticides that drift from farm fields into nearby communities.
Pesticide Action Network, the United Farmworkers of America and other groups filed the petition Wednesday in San Francisco federal court.
It asks a judge to force the Environmental Protection Agency to answer a petition from 2009, which demanded the agency evaluate children’s exposures to pesticide drift and adopt no-spray buffer zones around homes, schools, parks and daycare centers.
EPA spokesman Bill Keener said the agency couldn’t comment.
Snowden to stay in Russia for now, attorney says
MOSCOW – National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, who fled to Moscow’s airport a month ago, aims to stay in Russia for the near future and learn the country’s culture and language, his lawyer said Wednesday.
To get him started, Anatoly Kucherena said he gave Snowden a copy of Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s lengthy novel about the torment and redemption of a man who thought himself outside the law.
“I am not talking about the similarity of inner contradictions,” Kucherena said after meeting Snowden in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo international airport, where Snowden has apparently been marooned since arriving from Hong Kong on June 23.
The day’s developments left the White House – and nearly everyone else – “seeking clarity” about the status of the man who revealed details of an NSA program to monitor Internet and telephone communications.
When Snowden first arrived at Sheremetyevo, he was believed to be planning just to transfer to a flight to Cuba and then to Venezuela to seek asylum.
Passenger train derails, killing scores in Spain
MADRID – A passenger train derailed on a high-speed stretch of track in northwestern Spain on Wednesday night, killing at least 35 people and leaving dozens injured in the country’s worst rail accident in decades, officials said.
Officials gave different death tolls in the immediate aftermath of the accident. Alberto Nunez Feijoo, president of the region of Galicia, said at least 35 people aboard the train were killed.
Spain’s leading Cadena SER radio station cited the president of the Galicia’s main court, Miguel Angel Cadenas, at the scene saying 56 people were killed, but that could not be independently confirmed. The station said three carriages had still to be inspected by rescue workers.
State-owned train operator Renfe said in a statement that 218 passengers and an unspecified number of staff were on board at the time of the accident.
Associated Press
