Posted on Tue, Jul. 15, 2008
Specter takes last chemo dose
WASHINGTON - Sen. Arlen Specter completed his last scheduled dose of chemotherapy in Philadelphia yesterday and said he planned to celebrate with a martini and dinner with friends.
Specter (R., Pa.), 78, traveled to Washington after receiving his 12th and final dose. He worked all day, as he has throughout the three months of treatment for a recurrence of Hodgkin's disease. He was treated for the same type of cancer in 2005.
Specter, who lost his hair from the chemo, described the treatments as "tough but tolerable." But "I'm feeling pretty good and raring to go," he said.
Specter's oncologist, John H. Glick of the University of Pennsylvania, said at the time of his diagnosis that Specter "has an excellent chance of again achieving a complete remission."
- AP
ACLU criticizes huge terror list
WASHINGTON - The government's terrorist watch list has topped one million records, becoming so large that innocent travelers are delayed, the American Civil Liberties Union said yesterday.
Government efforts to manage the list divert attention from the hunt for true terrorists, said Barry Steinhardt, director of liberty and technology for the group.
"There cannot be one million terrorists waiting to attack us," Steinhardt said at a news conference. "If there were, our cities would be in ruins."
There are more than a million records, though 400,000 people are on the list, said Chad Kolton, a spokesman for the FBI'S Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the list. He said one person could generate dozens or even hundreds of records.
- Bloomberg News
Court dismisses anthrax libel suit
RICHMOND, Va. - Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army scientist who sued the New York Times for libel, is a public figure who failed to prove that columns linking him to the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks were malicious, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously affirmed the dismissal of Hatfill's lawsuit. Hatfill alleged that columns by Nicholas Kristof falsely implicated him as the culprit in anthrax mailings that killed five people just weeks after 9/11.
The court said Hatfill, who worked at the Army's infectious-diseases lab at Fort Detrick, Md., from 1997 to 1999, had inserted himself into the national debate about bioterrorism years before the attacks. He advised the government, gave public speeches, participated in panels and was interviewed by the press.
- AP
Elsewhere:
A 10-member team of elite athletes and expert mountaineers fanned out on foot yesterday in mountains on the Nevada-California border, hoping to find what search planes and satellite imagery couldn't: the body of multimillionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, last seen taking off by plane Sept. 3.
Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski and Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller resigned yesterday at a time parent company Tribune Co. is cutting staff and shrinking its papers to save money.
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