Around the Nation

Pentagon hits coffins photos’ publication

DOVER, Del. — Photographs of flag-draped coffins bearing American casualties from Iraq should not have been made public under a Pentagon policy prohibiting media coverage of human remains, officials said.

“Quite frankly, we don’t want the remains of our service members who have made the ultimate sacrifice to be the subject of any kind of attention that is unwarranted or undignified,” said John Molino, a deputy undersecretary of defense.

A Web site published dozens of photographs of American war dead arriving at the nation’s largest military mortuary, prompting the Pentagon to order an information clampdown Thursday. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Keck said release of the photos appears to be in conflict with policy.

The photographs were released last week to First Amendment activist Russ Kick, who had filed a Freedom of Information Act request to receive the images.

The photos were taken at the Dover base — home to the mortuary — and most of the images are of flag-draped coffins.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy told reporters yesterday that Mr. Bush does not support the release of the photos.

“In all this, we must pay attention to the privacy and to the sensitivity of the families of the fallen,” Mr. Duffy said.

Soldier charged in wife’s death

TACOMA, Wash. — An Army sergeant who recently returned from a year in Iraq was charged Thursday with second-degree murder, accused of drowning his wife in a bathtub.

Sgt. 1st Class James Pitts, 31, of Sheffield Lake, Ohio, pleaded not guilty a day after turning himself in to military authorities at Fort Lewis, Wash. Bail was set at $250,000.

A medical examiner said an autopsy on Tara Pitts, 28, showed she had a neck injury consistent with her husband’s account of holding her head underwater, Pierce County prosecutor Dawn Farina said. She was found dead Wednesday in her Lakewood apartment.

Slain college student remembered at wake

CROSSLAKE, Minn. — Friends and family of Dru Sjodin gathered yesterday to remember the slain University of North Dakota student.

Car antennas and the church doors were adorned with pink ribbons — Sjodin’s favorite color — as mourners arrived for the four-hour wake, held about 10 miles from her hometown of Pequot Lakes.

Sjodin’s body was found in a northwest Minnesota ravine last Saturday, five months after she disappeared from a shopping mall parking lot in Grand Forks, N.D.

Researchers awarded top U.S. medical prize

ALBANY, N.Y. — The researchers whose groundbreaking work led to genetic engineering and spawned the multibillion-dollar biotechnology industry were awarded the nation’s richest prize for medicine and biomedical research yesterday.

Second only to the $1.4 million Nobel Prize in monetary value, the $500,000 Albany Medical Center Prize was shared by Stanley N. Cohen of Stanford University and Genentech co-founder Herbert W. Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco.

The two scientists met at a conference in 1972 and formed a partnership that led to the development of recombinant DNA a year later.

Boy switches schools after cookie threat

SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. — A sixth-grader who was suspended after supposedly threatening to expose a highly allergic teacher to peanut-butter cookies will be allowed to return to class next month at a different school, a superintendent said yesterday.

The boy had been kept out of class since April 2, after a girl in his social studies class at South Orange Middle School reported the threat.