UPenn wants FDA to let them resume Gene Trials
A year after the federal government shut down eight human gene-therapy experiments at the University of Pennsylvania, the Ivy League school has decided to give up its efforts to get most of them restarted.

The crackdown by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration followed the 1999 death of Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old Arizona youth who had a fatal reaction to a gene drug being tested at Penn.

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The question is whether by aiming menthol-cigarette ads at blacks, tobacco firms committed a civil-rights violation.
Do black smokers prefer more dangerous mentholated cigarettes, or has that taste been seeded and nurtured by the tobacco industry through targeted advertising?

This thorny version of the chicken-and-egg conundrum was put to a panel of federal appeals judges yesterday. The jurists were being asked to reinstate a dismissed class-action civil-rights suit filed against the tobacco industry by black smokers.

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• It's business as usual inmate facilities Security the same here despite outbreaks elsewhere
  A recent rash of escapes from the Texas prison system hasn't sounded the alarm at area lockups.  State officials are still scratching their heads over the whereabouts of seven convicts who escaped a maximum security prison in South Texas. They went on a robbery spree in Houston and then Irving, killing a police officer in the process.