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2 die as Greyhound bus hits tree

By wire services
Published November 28, 2005

SANTA MARIA, Calif. - A Greyhound bus ran off a freeway, overturned and slid at least 100 yards on its side before hitting a tree Sunday, killing a pregnant woman and a man who were aboard, authorities said.

Authorities said driver fatigue may have contributed to the crash.

The previous night, the driver had traveled from Fresno, Calif., to Los Angeles, then left Los Angeles shortly after 3 a.m. Sunday. He had been on the road for about four hours when the bus overturned.

Dozens of passengers among the 44 people aboard the San Francisco-bound bus were hurt, at least seven of them with major injuries.

Four survivors were trapped in the wreckage and had to be rescued with hydraulic equipment, while some of the most seriously injured were airlifted to hospitals, authorities said.

Faro Jahani, 50, of San Francisco and Martha Contreras, a 23-year-old Santa Maria resident who was seven months pregnant, were killed, said Lt. Dan Minor of the California Highway Patrol.

WASHINGTON - Democrats fumed last week at Vice President Dick Cheney's suggestion that criticism of the administration's war policies was itself becoming a hindrance to the war effort. But a new poll indicates most Americans are sympathetic to Cheney's point.

Seventy percent of people said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale - with 44 percent saying morale is hurt "a lot," according to a poll taken by RT Strategies.

Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale while 21 percent say it helps morale.

The RTs in RT Strategies are Thomas Riehle, a Democrat, and Lance Tarrance, a veteran GOP pollster. Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq.

A majority believes the motive is really to "gain a partisan political advantage."

The poll results came from calls made to 1,001 adults from Nov. 17-20. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

WASHINGTON - A second Time magazine reporter has agreed to cooperate in the CIA leak case and will testify about her discussions with Karl Rove's attorney, a sign that prosecutors are still exploring charges against the White House aide.

Viveca Novak, a reporter in Time's Washington bureau, is cooperating with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity in 2003, the magazine reported in its Dec. 5 issue.

Novak specifically has been asked to testify under oath about conversations she had with Rove attorney Robert Luskin starting in May 2004, the magazine reported.

Novak, part of a team tracking the CIA case for Time, has written or contributed to articles in which Luskin characterized the nature of what was said between Rove and Matthew Cooper, the first Time reporter who testified in the case.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - With the death of Rosa Parks, the 50th anniversary of her arrest and the historic bus boycott it sparked will focus on the lesser-known foot soldiers in the protest. The commemoration will also look to the future, kicking off Thursday with a children's march to the Capitol.

Parks, who died Oct. 24, was remembered by national and civil rights leaders for her simple act of defiance - refusing to give up her seat to a white man - that helped inspire a movement for racial equality that spread to voting booths as well as buses.

Robert White, chairman of the 50th anniversary committee, said Parks' death puts the spotlight on others in the Montgomery Improvement Association, which turned Parks' arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, into a yearlong boycott of the city's segregated buses that began four days later.

It drew national attention to the association's president, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but it was carried out by some 40,000 black citizens who used car pools and church vehicles instead of buses.

Union organizers have obtained what they say is majority support in one of the biggest unionization drives in the South in decades, collecting the signatures of thousands of Houston janitors.

In an era when unions typically face frustration and failure in attracting workers in the private sector, the Service Employees International Union is bringing in about 5,000 janitors from several companies at once.

With work force experts saying that organized labor faces a slow death unless it can figure out how to unionize private-sector workers in big bunches, labor leaders are looking to the Houston campaign as a possible model.

[Last modified November 28, 2005, 01:05:08]