News briefs

Local and VCU

Hospitals limit visitation to combat spread of flu

Hospitals in the Richmond and Tri-Cities area Wednesday announced they would restrict patient visitation to help combat the spread of seasonal and swine flu.

Officials said that effective Monday, visitation would be limited to healthy adults 18 and older, and no more than two visitors at a time per patient.

Children are more likely to get H1N1 and can be infected for a longer period, putting them at greater risk of carrying the virus, officials said.

Limited exceptions will be made for special circumstances such as patients near the end of life, and expectant and new fathers younger than 18.

Officials said the policy will remain in effect throughout the flu season, at least through March 2010.

Brief by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

Merchants won’t hold Carytown New Year’s Eve

The New Year’s Eve celebration that has attracted thousands of revelers to Carytown will not be back for a fourth year.

The Carytown Merchants Association is not planning the celebration because of the high costs of security and other expenses, said Thom Suddeth, the president of the merchants group.

“It’s a done deal,” he said Wednesday. “We just can’t financially handle that burden.”

Last year, revelers were asked to donate $2 per person to help offset event costs, but the merchants association still lost about $24,000, Suddeth said. Those came on top of losses of $20,000 in 2007 and $10,000 in 2006.

“We don’t have that much income,” Suddeth said. “If we did it this year we would pretty much be bankrupt.”

Brief by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

Richmond convenience store robbed at gunpoint

No injuries were reported late Tuesday in the armed robbery of a convenience store in Richmond’s West End.

The robbery was reported at 11:13 p.m. at a 7-Eleven at 4601 W. Broad St.

Richmond police Capt. Scott Booth said the robber was wearing a ski mask and toting a handgun and a backpack when he entered the store and demanded money and cigarettes.

The robber fled on foot.

Anyone with information can call Crime Stoppers at 780-1000.

Brief by the Richmond Times-Dispatch

National and International

Feds: Mass. man planned terror attacks on US malls

A pharmacy college graduate conspired with two other men in a terror plot to kill two prominent U.S. politicians and carry out a holy war by attacking shoppers in U.S. malls and American troops in Iraq, prosecutors said Wednesday.

But their plans in which the men used code words like “peanut butter and jelly” for fighting in Somalia and “culinary school” for terrorist camps were thwarted in part when they could not find training and were unable to buy automatic weapons, authorities said.

Tarek Mehanna was arrested Wednesday morning at his parents’ home in Sudbury, an upscale suburb 20 miles west of Boston. He worked with the men from 2001 to May 2008 on the conspiracy to “kill, kidnap, maim or injure” soldiers and two politicians who were members of the executive branch but are no longer in office, authorities said. They refused to identify the politicians.

Prosecutors said the 27-year-old Mehanna, a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston, conspired with Ahmad Abousamra, who authorities say is now in Syria, and an unnamed man, who is cooperating with authorities in the investigation.

Brief by The Associated Press

UN: For 7th year, warming emissions grew again

The industrialized world again in 2007 boosted, rather than reduced, its emissions of global-warming gases, the United Nations reported Wednesday, as international negotiators looked ahead to crucial climate talks in December.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rose by 1 percent between 2006 and 2007 among 40 nations classified as industrialized under the 1992 U.N. climate treaty, the treaty secretariat reported, detailing data for the latest available reporting period.

It was the seventh consecutive year of an upward trend, it said.

European Union countries did cut their emissions year-to-year, by an average of 1.6 percent, led by Denmark’s 6.1 percent reduction. But the United States, the biggest emitter in this group, increased its emissions by 1.4 percent, and the output of heat-trapping gases by Japan, Canada and Australia also rose, the data show.

Brief by The Associated Press

Diplomats: Iranian negotiators back uranium deal

Iranian negotiators on Wednesday expressed support for a deal that if accepted by their leaders would delay Tehran’s ability to make nuclear weapons by sending most of its existing enriched uranium to Russia for processing, diplomats said.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said that representatives of Iran and its three interlocutors, the United States, Russia and France, had accepted the draft for forwarding to their capitals. ElBaradei said he hoped for approval from all four countries by Friday.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s chief delegate, praised the draft, saying it was “on the right track,” while emphasizing that senior Iranian officials in Tehran still had to sign off on it.

Brief by The Associated Press