Nation in brief

U.S. to free 5 of Guantanamo's British

Easing a major irritant in relations between the United States and Britain, American officials agreed Thursday to release five of the nine British subjects held at the internment camp for suspected Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made the announcement, which came after months of sensitive negotiations between the two allies.

The Britons have been held at the U.S. prison camp for more than two years without charges and without access to their families or lawyers. Media coverage in Britain has been generally sympathetic to the detainees and has emphasized that they are in a legal "black hole" without recourse to normal due process.

Some of the nine men never had been to Afghanistan and were picked up in Pakistan and, in one case, even in Zambia, lawyers for their families said.

The group that sets the rules for using the country's electric transmission grid never looked in depth at how well its standards were being followed by long-established grid control centers and had particularly poor information about the Midwest, the group's president acknowledged Thursday.

In the wake of the Aug. 14 blackout, the North American Electric Reliability Council voted earlier this month to conduct "compliance audits" by June 30 on all electric transmission operators over the next three years, including the 20 largest, covering 80 percent of electric generation.

Council officials said they were chagrined to find that the blackout, the largest in American history, was caused by violations of existing rules, including some violations that had previously caused blackouts, such as failing to trim trees near power lines.

The Bush administration predicted Thursday that a record number of taxpayers can expect a refund this year, and that the average tax refund check will be $300 bigger than last year.

As a result of the summer's tax cuts, the Treasury Department expects the government to mail $195-billion in tax refunds this spring, a $37-billion increase over last year.

The refunds come at a price, however, in the form of more complicated tax forms. The Internal Revenue Service has already detected errors on more than 750,000 tax returns claiming the newly increased child tax credit.

Last summer's tax cut made the child tax credit worth up to $1,000 per child. It also reduced income tax rates ahead of schedule and lowered taxes for some married couples. Other changes lowered the top tax rate on stock dividends and capital gains to 15 percent.

Nearly all the changes became effective Jan. 1, 2003, even though the tax changes didn't become law until almost six months later.

Consequently, changes didn't show up in workers' paychecks until late in the year, leaving taxes overpaid during the beginning of the year to arrive this spring as a larger refund.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - A feminist author has written a magazine article accusing a noted Yale University professor of sexually harassing her while she was an undergraduate in the 1980s, and alleging a long history of such events at Yale.

The article is to appear in Monday's issue of New York Magazine and accuses Harold Bloom, a prominent literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale.

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, was a consultant to Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. She advised Gore on changing his image, including advice on how to convince voters that he was an "alpha male" who should be in charge. Bloom has written more than 20 books about the Bible, Milton and poetry.

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