USS Abraham Lincoln to bid aloha

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was due to leave Pearl Harbor this morning with its 5,000-member crew and air wing.

The carrier will sail to San Diego and then its home port of Everett, Wash., the Navy said.

The Lincoln, which arrived last week, stopped in Hawaii at the tail end of a six-month deployment.

During that time, the nuclear-powered warship traveled 60,000 miles, operating in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and South China Sea, and visited ports in Malaysia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Saipan, the Philippines, the Seychelles, Japan, Israel, Thailand, Australia, Oman, Maldives, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.

The ship conducted exercises with France, Bahrain, Malaysia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and worked on community relations and community service projects with a dozen nations.

Its embarked Carrier Air Wing 2 flew more than 8,300 sorties and completed more than 23,500 flying hours, supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the Afghanistan missions, the carrier loaded more than 900,000 pounds of missiles, bombs and 20 mm rounds onto aircraft.

The Lincoln left its home port on Sept. 7.

Anti-drug effort by HPU wins grant

Hawaii Pacific University has won a $529,771 grant to develop a culturally specific drug prevention program for Hawaiian youth in Hawaii County, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports.

The grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse will pay for a drug prevention pilot program for three years.

"It is very exciting that the priorities of the Big Island are being recognized at the federal level," said Scott Okamoto, associate professor in the HPU School of Social Work and the principal investigator.

The project is a collaboration by Hawaii Pacific, the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the state Department of Education, with support from Hawaii County’s prosecuting attorney.

OT, sick pay for trash force scrutinized

The Kauai County Council wants Mayor Bernard Carvalho’s administration to explain why the Solid Waste Division has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of overtime pay and sick leave, the Garden Island newspaper reports.

County Engineer Larry Dill asked the Council on March 2 to appropriate $269,238 to cover overtime paid between July and December 2010.

He told the Council Wednesday that the division’s workers each averaged $12,237 in overtime last fiscal year. Two employees alone made almost $40,000 each in overtime during that period, he said.

During the year that ended June 30, division workers called in sick an average of 138.4 hours. They are entitled to 168 hours, or 21 days, each year, said Dill.

Employees are scheduled to work 10 hours per day, four days a week.