WASHINGTON

AMTRAK PRESIDENT IS FIRED

Amtrak’s board of directors yesterday fired its president, David Gunn, saying the debt-laden rail carrier needs “a leader with vision and experience.” Mr. Gunn has struggled to maintain Amtrak service amid a sinking financial picture and a push by the White House and some in Congress to recraft it as a group of regional intercity companies.

“Amtrak’s future now requires a different type of leader who will aggressively tackle the company’s financial, management, and operational challenges,” Amtrak’s chairman, David Laney, said in a statement.

Mr. Gunn, who assumed the post in 2002 after heading transit systems in New York City, Washington, and Toronto, could not be reached for comment.

Senator Schumer, a Democrat of New York, who has fought against a Bush administration effort to end subsidies for the passenger rail service, praised Mr. Gunn as “a brilliant manager.”

– Associated Press

HOUSE COMMITTEE TAKES UP PENSION PROTECTION BILL

A key House panel yesterday took up legislation to protect worker pensions, possibly the most important retirement issue Congress will address this year as Social Security reform fades into the background.

The House Ways and Means Committee is expected to approve a pensions bill that supporters say will tighten controls over employers that underfund pension plans, safeguard the financial future of the federal agency that insures plans, and ensure that millions of Americans with defined-benefit plans will get their promised benefits.

– Associated Press

SUPREME COURT CONSIDERS ALLOWING LAWSUITS BY STATE INMATES

The Supreme Court considered yesterday whether states can be forced to pay damages for not accommodating disabled prisoners, a states rights case that might turn on the vote of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s successor.

Justice O’Connor was the deciding vote the last time justices ruled on the scope of a federal law that protects people with disabilities. Another split vote would likely force the justices to delay a ruling in this case until next year, after Justice O’Connor’s retirement. Justices heard an appeal from a 41-year-old Georgia inmate, Tony Goodman, who claims he was kept for more than 23 hours a day in a cell so narrow he could not turn his wheelchair, and that he suffered serious injuries trying to hoist himself from his wheelchair onto the toilet.

– Associated Press

SOUTH

COURT LETS STAND RULING ALLOWING NEW TRIAL FOR YATES

HOUSTON – The state’s highest criminal court yesterday let stand a lower court ruling that threw out Andrea Yates’s murder convictions for drowning her children in a bathtub in 2001.

Harris County Assistant District Attorney Alan Curry said the case will be retried or a plea bargain considered. Jurors rejected Ms. Yates’ insanity defense in 2002 and found her guilty of two capital murder charges for the deaths of three of her five children. A lower court ruling in January had thrown out the convictions because of erroneous testimony that prosecutors used to suggest that Ms. Yates had gotten the idea for the killings from an episode of the television show “Law & Order.”

Mr. Curry said if the case goes back to trial, he is confident Ms. Yates will be convicted again. She had been sentenced to life in prison.

– Associated Press

MIDWEST

ANTI-EVOLUTION MOVEMENT WINS IN KANSAS, SET BACK IN PENNSYLVANIA

TOPEKA, Kan. – Critics of evolution won a big victory with the approval of new public school science standards that cast doubt on Darwinism. The standards were approved Tuesday by the Kansas Board of Education on a 6-4 vote.

The vote came amid an increasingly rancorous national debate on teaching evolution. In Pennsylvania on Tuesday, voters punished Dover school board members who backed a statement on intelligent design being read in biology class, ousting eight Republicans and replacing them with Democrats who want the concept stripped from the science curriculum.

– Associated Press