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attack on a left-wing student that left him with severe brain injuries. For months, he has warned about a spike in the level of violence used in racist attacks, as well as about the targets expanding more recently from immigrants to also include Greeks. He has not compiled numbers of his observations, but he has been an eyewitness to the evolution of the crimes.
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As deadline nears, applications to 9/11 victim compensation fund soar to more than 32,000
• NEW YORK (AP) -- With just a few days remaining until a key deadline, more than 32,000 people have applied to the federal compensation fund for people with illnesses that might be related to toxic fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks, program officials said.
• Congress has authorized paying as much as $2.78 billion to people exposed to the tons of thick dust that fell on Manhattan when the World Trade Center collapsed.
• The first deadline to apply for a payment comes Thursday, and as that date has approached, the number of applicants has soared. As recently as late June, only 19,733 people had applied. More than 6,000 registrations have been completed just since Sept. 15.
• Applications have come in the greatest numbers from firefighters, police officers and construction workers who spent months on the smoking debris pile. A smaller number of registrants are people who lived or worked many blocks away and are concerned about the heaps of ash that fell on the streets or blew through building ventilation systems.
• It is unclear how many of those people are actually ill, or who among them might qualify for compensation.
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Trial over BP's Gulf oil spill focuses on company's struggle to cap its blown-out well
• NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The focus of a trial over BP's massive 2010 oil spill has shifted from the causes of the deadly disaster to the company's struggle to plug its blown-out well while millions of gallons of crude gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months.
• The trial's second phase opened Monday with claims that BP could have capped the well much sooner if it hadn't ignored decades of warnings about the risks of a deep-water blowout or withheld crucial information about the size of the spill from federal officials.
• BP attorney Mike Brock denied those allegations and said the company's efforts to stop the flow of oil were guided by an overriding principle: "Don't make it worse."
• "It was what the government instructed us to do," Brock told U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier.
• The April 20, 2010, blowout triggered an explosion that killed 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and spawned the nation's worst offshore oil spill. BP used a cap (Continued on page 41)
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