OMAHA, Neb. — A small fire briefly knocked out the cooling system for used fuel at a nuclear power plant in Nebraska, but temperatures never exceeded safe levels and power was quickly restored, federal officials said Wednesday.
The electrical system running the pumps that cool spent fuel in a pool of water was disrupted by a suspected electrical fire Tuesday, though one pump was restored shortly after the incident and another was running Wednesday, utility officials said.
The pumps are a key piece of safety equipment because if pumping systems fail for several days and are not fixed, cooling water could boil away and eventually cause radioactive releases.
Pa. district in spying probe hit with second lawsuit
PHILADELPHIA — A former suburban Philadelphia high school student was “humiliated and severely emotionally distressed” by seeing photos and screenshots quietly taken by his school-issued laptop, according to the second federal lawsuit filed against the district over the alleged spying.
Former Harriton High School student Joshua Levin sued Lower Merion School District on Monday. The suit claims the district violated Levin’s civil rights by taking nearly 8,000 webcam photos and screenshots from his laptop between September 2008 and March 2009.
Lower Merion settled a similar lawsuit last year for $610,000. In that suit, one student claimed a vice principal at the school cited a laptop photo in telling him that the school thought he was engaging in improper behavior. The student said in that photo he was eating candy that had been mistaken for drugs.
District spokesman Doug Young told The Philadelphia Inquirer that Levin had refused the district’s attempts to resolve his complaint without legal action. Young said Levin’s lawsuit is “solely motivated by monetary interests and a complete waste of tax dollars.”
After last year’s suit was filed, a district review found at least 56,000 images had been captured by the remote tracking program, which was sometimes left on inadvertently for months after laptops were located.
The suit prompted the FBI to investigate whether the district broke wiretapping laws. No charges were filed.
The district has since removed the monitoring software that took the pictures and instituted stricter privacy policies.
Military says US soldier killed in southern Iraq
BAGHDAD — The U.S. military says an American soldier has been killed during operations in southern Iraq.
The soldier died Wednesday, but was not identified because family had not been notified. Other details also were withheld.
The death brings to 4,460 the number of American service members who have died in Iraq since the war began in 2003, according to an Associated Press count. Five other American soldiers died earlier this week in a rocket attack on a base in Baghdad.
Shiite Muslim militias have stepped up attacks on U.S. forces with the approach of the year-end withdrawal of all American troops.
Cucumbers draw new attention in E. coli outbreak
BERLIN — Cucumbers were back on the radar of German health authorities Wednesday as the possible cause of an E. coli outbreak in Europe that has killed at least 26 people and sickened over 2,700 others.
Two weeks ago, investigators blamed cucumbers from Spain for the deadly outbreak and then later ruled them out as the source. Then, the focus shifted to sprouts from northern Germany, but none that were tested turned out to be contaminated with the bacteria strain blamed for the outbreak.
Now, suspicions have fallen on a cucumber of an unknown country origin that sickened a family in eastern Germany. The cucumber — the first food found to be contaminated with the strain that has sickened thousands — was in the family’s compost, but there is no conclusive evidence that it’s the source.
“It’s unclear whether the cucumber infected the people, or the people the cucumber,” said Holger Paech, the spokesman for Saxony Anhalt state’s health ministry.
The father of the family had diarrhea, the mother was hospitalized for several days and their 22-year-old daughter is among about 700 people across Europe with a severe complication that can lead to kidney failure. She has been hospitalized for almost two weeks.