American Scene

Assembly workers strike Boeing Co.

EVERETT, Wash. | Boeing Co. machinists walked out on strike Saturday after talks with a federal mediator failed to produce an agreement.

About 100 union members hoisted their strike signs at 12:01 a.m. outside the Boeing plant in this city north of Seattle, cheering and blasting air horns at passing cars, many of which honked back.

“It’s been about lack of respect,” said Steve Morrison, 42, a tester at the Everett plant. “They always tell us we’re valued … but labor is the first out the door, the first to be outsourced.”

The machinists assemble Boeing’s commercial planes and some key components. Key strike issues include pay, outsourcing, retirement and health care benefits.

This is the machinists’ second strike in as many contract negotiations with Boeing. They went on strike for 24 days in 2005.

Candidates and stars make historic night

LOS ANGELES | Three TV networks, cancer research advocates and more than 60 celebrities from music, sports, TV and film made history Friday night with a live telethon that aired simultaneously on NBC, ABC and CBS.

Jack Black, Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry and Keanu Reeves - along with presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama - were among the stars participating in “Stand Up to Cancer,” an hourlong, commercial-free fundraising show spearheaded by entertainment-industry heavyweights whose lives have been touched by the disease.

“This is an absolutely historic night, thanks to the unbelievable generosity of the three networks,” producer and cancer survivor Laura Ziskin told the audience at the Kodak Theatre before the show began.

Cancer survivors Lance Armstrong and Elizabeth Edwards kicked off the program with statistics: Cancer kills 550,000 Americans and 6 million people worldwide each year.

Second trial to start in KFC murders

HOUSTON | Darnell Hartsfield, 47, goes on trial this week in one of Texas’ oldest unresolved mass murder cases - the September 1983 slayings of five people abducted during a robbery at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in East Texas.

Prospective jurors were to gather Monday at the Brazos County Courthouse in Bryan, where Mr. Hartsfield faces trial on five capital murder charges.

Mr. Hartsfield’s cousin and co-defendant, Romeo Pinkerton, took a plea deal midway through his capital murder trial last year, avoiding a possible death sentence by accepting five life prison terms. Mr. Hartsfield apparently is not negotiating a plea, said State District Judge J. Clay Gossett.

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