hPolice look for mother of abandoned twins

hPolice look for motherof abandoned twins
CHICAGO -- Police searched Thursday for the mother of healthy newborn twins who were found abandoned in the vestibule of a church. The children were discovered Wednesday by a church custodian who heard a noise and found the twins in a baby carrier. The infants were listed in good condition, and hospital officials named them Mary and Joseph. The newborns were warm and wearing clean diapers, suggesting they had not been in the church long. Their umbilical cords had been cut, and Joseph's had started to dry, indicating he was born two or three days earlier, officials said. The mother had not been located, police spokesman John Mirabelli said. Illinois law permits parents to leave unharmed babies 3 days old or younger at hospitals, emergency medical centers, or police or fire stations. A church does not qualify, and authorities said the parents could be prosecuted.
R.I. fire regulations leadto death of Christmas tree
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- It's a Charlie Brown Christmas for Rhode Island's official Christmas tree. The 18-foot Colorado blue spruce lost its needles and died after Statehouse workers dried it with commercial fans and sprayed it with a fire-retardant chemical. The workers were following the stringent new fire code enacted after a nightclub blaze in Rhode Island nearly three years ago killed 100 people. The pathetic-looking tree was hustled out of the building Wednesday night. Gov. Donald Carcieri sheepishly explained the tree's demise and suggested the state might get an artificial replacement next year. "With the new fire code, we're supposed to spray it," he told WPRO-AM. "And apparently the spray killed it."
Ex-Nazi psychiatristimplicated in killings dies
VIENNA, Austria -- Dr. Heinrich Gross, a psychiatrist who worked at a clinic where the Nazis killed and conducted cruel experiments on thousands of children, died Dec. 15, his family announced Thursday. He was 90. Gross, who was implicated in nine deaths as part of a Nazi plot to eliminate "worthless lives," had escaped trial in March after a court ruled he suffered from severe dementia. No cause of death was given in a brief statement issued by his family. Gross was a leading doctor in Vienna's infamous Am Spiegelgrund clinic. Historians and survivors of the clinic had accused him of killing or taking part in the clinic's experiments on thousands of children deemed by the Nazis to be physically, mentally or otherwise unfit for Adolf Hitler's vision of a perfect world. Gross proclaimed his innocence for decades.
New coins will featureall 37 dead presidents
WASHINGTON -- New dollar coins featuring all 37 of the nation's dead presidents will begin rolling out of the U.S. Mint in 2007 under a bill President Bush signed into law Thursday. Lawmakers hope the coins -- and an accompanying $10 gold piece for collectors that features former first ladies -- will be a big money raiser for the government like the 50-state quarter program. They also hope the dollar pieces will spur interest in the Sacagawea dollars, which have been little-used. The front of the new dollar coins will depict former presidents, but not those who are living or have been dead for less than two years; the backs of the coins will show the Statue of Liberty.
Seoul university confirmsfaked stem-cell research
SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk faked results of at least nine of the 11 stem-cell lines he claimed to have created, his university said today, in the first confirmation of allegations casting his purported breakthroughs under suspicion. In a May paper in the journal Science, Hwang claimed to have created 11 stem-cell lines matched to patients in an achievement that raised hopes of creating tailored therapies for hard-to-treat diseases. But one of his former collaborators said last week nine of the 11 cell lines were faked, prompting reviews by the journal and an expert panel at Seoul National University, where Hwang works. In its first report on its progress today, the panel said it found that "the laboratory data for 11 stem cell lines that were reported in the 2005 paper were all data made using two stem cell lines in total."