Nation & World Digest
NYC to search for 9/11 victim remains
NEW YORK
New York City officials are planning to search through material excavated from around the World Trade Center site for any remains of Sept. 11 victims.
The three-month endeavor is scheduled to start Friday at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The material being searched was taken from the area around ground zero in the last two years.
The search is expected to cost $1.4 million.
2 time zones cut
MOSCOW
Russia’s president thought the country had too much time on its hands, so on Sunday he eliminated two of its 11 time zones.
The changes mean that Chukotka — Russia’s eastern extreme, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska — is now nine hours ahead of Russia’s westernmost area, the Kaliningrad exclave sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland. Formerly, there was a 10-hour difference.
As well as eliminating the time zone that previously covered the Chukotka and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky regions in the Pacific Far East, President Dmitry Medvedev ordered that Samara and Udmurtia, two regions in central Russia, should be on the same time as Moscow.
The changes went into effect before dawn Sunday when most of Russia switched to daylight savings time.
Attorney has long pursued Vatican
ST. PAUL, Minn.
Jeff Anderson has filed thousands of lawsuits alleging sex abuse by priests and won tens of millions of dollars for his clients, but he has had a bigger goal in mind for nearly two decades. He wants to bring his career-long legal crusade against misconduct in the Roman Catholic Church right to the top.
He’d love to question Pope Benedict XVI himself under oath. Though that is extremely unlikely given that the pope is a head of state, documents Anderson has unearthed have the potential to take a scandal that has plagued dozens of dioceses around the world and place it at the doorstep of Vatican leadership.
The documents, which became publicly known in the past week after Anderson shared them with The New York Times, show that a Vatican office led by the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, halted a church trial against a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 boys at a school for the deaf.
Ford to sell Volvo to Geely for $1.8B
DETROIT
Ford said Sunday it has reached an agreement to sell Volvo Cars to Chinese automaker Geely for about $1.8 billion.
Geely Chairman Li Shufu, Volvo Cars President and CEO Stephen Odell and Ford CFO Lewis Booth made the announcement at an event in Gothenburg, Sweden, at Volvo’s headquarters.
Booth said Ford will continue to cooperate with Volvo Cars in several areas in order to ensure a smooth transition, but will not retain any ownership Volvo. Ford expects the sale will close before Sept. 30.
Japanese architects win Pritzker prize
LOS ANGELES
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, a duo of Japanese architects praised for using everyday building materials to create ethereal structures that shelter flowing, dreamlike spaces, have won the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the prize’s jury announced Sunday.
Sejima, 54, and Nishizawa, 44, join Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Renzo Piano in receiving the top honor in the field in recognition of the art museums, university buildings and designer-label fashion boutiques they have designed in Japan, the United States and Europe.
Combined dispatches