PITTSBURGH -- John Sweeney, stepping down after 14 years at the helm of the AFL-CIO, urged union leaders Sunday to keep up the fight to reform health care and overhaul labor laws so workers can form unions more easily.
"We're on the cusp of the greatest advance in labor law reform in 70 years, but we're taking heavy fire from the corporate captains of deceit," Sweeney told about 1,000 union members at the federation's convention.
He said efforts to pass health care legislation have been met with "a firestorm of meanness, stoked by politicians playing on fear, racism, nativism and greed."
Sweeney's longtime deputy, Richard Trumka, is expected to be named AFL-CIO president on Wednesday.
Father of 'green revolution' dies
DALLAS -- Scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug rose from his childhood on an Iowa farm to develop a type of wheat that helped feed the world, fostering a movement that is credited with saving up to 1 billion people from starvation.
Borlaug, 95, died Saturday from complications of cancer at his Dallas home, said Kathleen Phillips, a spokesman for Texas A M University where Borlaug was a distinguished professor.
"Norman E. Borlaug saved more lives than any man in human history," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program.
He was known as the father of the "green revolution," which transformed agriculture through high-yield crop varieties and other innovations, helping to more than double world food production between 1960 and 1990. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.
Workers die in fall down shaft
HONG KONG -- A construction platform inside an elevator shaft collapsed Sunday, sending six workers falling about 20 stories to their deaths inside a Hong Kong skyscraper, officials said.
The accident occurred at the International Commerce Center, which will be 118 stories high when completed next year, making it one of the world's tallest buildings and the highest in Hong Kong.
Speaking at the scene in the Kowloon district, Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang told reporters the men fell after the platform they were working on collapsed in the elevator shaft.
All six workers died, police spokesman Michael Kwan said. The workers were believed to have fallen from around the 30th floor to the 10th floor, he said.
Police find body in Yale building
NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Police in Connecticut say they found what they believe is the body of a Yale University graduate student hidden inside the wall of a building where she was last seen five days ago.
New Haven Assistant Police Chief Peter Reichard says the body has not been identified as doctoral student Annie Le, who has been the focus of a massive police search since she vanished in the building on Tuesday.
Le swiped her identification card to enter the university building, but there was no record of her leaving, despite some 75 surveillance cameras that cover the complex.
Le was from Placerville, Calif. She was set to get married Sunday in Syosset, N.Y., on Long Island's north shore.
FBI investigating Kennedy note
DALLAS -- The FBI is investigating a "stolen" handwritten condolence note by Jacqueline Kennedy to Ethel Kennedy that was penned shortly after Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 assassination.
The Dallas Morning News reported in its Sunday editions that investigators and Kennedy family members suspect the note was taken from Robert and Ethel Kennedy's McLean, Va., home.
The note, which has changed hands several times and has sold for as much as $25,000, opens with "My Ethel."
"You must be so tired," Jackie Kennedy wrote. "I stayed up till 6:30 last night just thinking and praying for you."
Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. The undated note appears to have been written after his June 8, 1968, funeral.
The two-page note made its way in 2006 to Heritage Auction Galleries, a Dallas auction house, where it was consigned by a Massachusetts attorney.
-- From wire reports
