WASHINGTON

FBI memo from 1961 alleges Kennedy tried to rent brothel

An FBI file contends that a young Edward M. Kennedy arranged to rent a brothel for a night while visiting Chile in 1961, a year before he was elected to the Senate.

The previously redacted State Department memo, dated Dec. 28, 1961, was released by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based organization that said it obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

According to the memo, the Massachusetts Democrat made arrangements to rent the brothel “for an entire night” in Santiago earlier in 1961. “Kennedy allegedly invited one of the embassy chauffeurs to participate in the night’s activities,” according to the memo.

One State Department official described Kennedy as “pompous and a spoiled brat,” according to the memo. Kennedy was making a fact-finding trip to several Latin American countries. “Kennedy met with a number of individuals known to have communist sympathies,” the memo said.

Kennedy was a 29-year-old assistant district attorney in Boston at the time of the trip. He was elected to the Senate in 1962 and served more than four decades until his death in 2009.

LOS ANGELES

Jane Russell, Hollywood star and pinup, dies at age 89

Jane Russell, the busty brunette who shot to fame as the sexy star of Howard Hughes’ 1941 Western “The Outlaw,” died Monday of respiratory failure, her family said. She was 89.

Although Russell largely retired from Hollywood after her final film, 1970’s “Darker Than Amber,” she had remained active in her church, with charitable organizations and with a local singing group until her health began to decline just a couple weeks ago, said her daughter-in-law, Etta Waterfield. She died at her home in Santa Maria.

“She always said, ‘I’m going to die in the saddle, I’m not going to sit at home and become an old woman,’ ” Waterfield told The Associated Press. “And that’s exactly what she did, she died in the saddle.”

Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, put her on the path to stardom when he cast her in “The Outlaw,” a film he fought over with censors for nearly a decade to get into wide release.

With her sultry expression and glowing sexuality, Russell became a star before she was ever seen by a wide movie audience. The Hughes publicity mill ground out photos of the beauty in low-cut costumes and swimsuits, and she became famous, especially as a pinup for World War II soldiers.

Then in 1948 she starred opposite Bob Hope in the box-office hit “The Paleface,” a comedy-Western in which Russell was tough-but-sexy Calamity Jane to Hope’s cowardly dentist.

Although her look and her hourglass figure made her the subject of numerous nightclub jokes, unlike Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and other pinup queens of the era, Russell was untouched by scandal in her personal life.

During her Hollywood career, she was married to star UCLA and pro football quarterback Bob Waterfield.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand

Mourning nation marks moment of deadly quake

Rescue crews switched off their jackhammers and joined in two minutes of silence observed across New Zealand today to mourn as many as 240 people killed in an earthquake exactly one week ago.

Church bells tolled throughout the country at 12:51 p.m. to mark the start of a national commemoration for those lost when the quake struck this southern city, collapsing office blocks and sending bricks and other rubble tumbling into the streets.

Thousands of people across the city gathered in groups, paused and bowed their heads. Backhoes and bulldozers tugging at the massive piles of rubble rumbled into silence. Traffic stopped.

Flags flew at half-staff across the country, and Prime Minister John Key asked the nation’s 4.5 million people to join in a show of unity for people “enduring tragedy beyond what most of us can imagine.”

The magnitude-6.3 quake struck within a few miles of downtown, when the city of 350,000 was bustling with workers, shoppers and tourists.