The bad news for animal lovers Friday was that an industrial chemical was found in recalled pet food, but the worst news was that authorities still didn’t know why hundreds of dogs and cats in North America fell ill or died.

The Food and Drug Administration said its tests of pet food made by Menu Foods Income Fund of Ontario, Canada, turned up melamine, a chemical used to make plastic, glue, fertilizer and paint. Scientists at Cornell University said they discovered the substance in the urine of sick cats and in the kidney of a cat that died after consuming some of the recalled food.

But it remained unclear exactly what caused pet illnesses and deaths that sparked this month’s sweeping recall.

Last week, scientists at the New York State Food Laboratory and the New York State Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell identified aminopterin, a substance found in rat poison, as the possible culprit. But the federal testing did not confirm the presence of aminopterin. 

The widely prescribed drug for severe constipation, Zelnorm, is being taken off the market after it was linked to a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes, federal regulators said Friday.

Doctors said the voluntary withdrawal of Zelnorm by its manufacturer would leave few options for patients who suffer from a type of irritable bowel syndrome that affects about 12 million Americans, mostly women.

The Food and Drug Administration said it asked for the withdrawal of Zelnorm after an analysis of 29 studies involving more than 18,000 patients found that those who took the medication had significantly higher rates of cardiac problems than those who were given a sugar pill.

Patients taking Zelnorm should call their doctors to discuss alternative treatments, the agency said. Options include laxatives. Any patients who experience chest pain, sudden weakness or other symptoms of heart attack or stroke should immediately go to the emergency room.

The drug’s maker, Novartis, said it was complying with the FDA request but did not believe the drug was to blame.

A consultant who reviewed the data for the company said the rates of heart problems in patients taking Zelnorm roughly corresponded with the expected rates in the population.

Although the overall rates of problems were low — 0.1% for those taking Zelnorm, compared with 0.01% for those on a sugar pill — the disparity between the two groups got the FDA’s attention.

Zelnorm ranked among the top 200 brand-name prescriptions last year, according to the Internet site drugtopics.com, which monitors the drug industry.

More than 2.6 million prescriptions were written for the medication in 2006, a 25% increase from the previous year.

Los Angeles has declared war on street gangs and Los Angeles defense attorneys are protesting what they see as overzealous prosecutions that seek enhanced jail time for suspects swept up by police for nonviolent crime.

Cases that might have been charged as misdemeanors are being filed as felonies with enhancements that increase penalties and put bail out of reach, defense lawyers say.

In some cases, judges have agreed, rebuking prosecutors by throwing out excessive charges against alleged gang members.

Some defense attorneys are claiming to see a lot of aggressive prosecutions for relatively minor crimes such as vandalism and petty theft because the suspect is an alleged gang member.

Anecdotally, there do appear to be more cases with gang enhancements landing on the desks of public defenders, but that might be a function of hundreds of additional gang members being arrested in the crackdown.

Prosecutors say they are not handling gang cases any differently, but are simply enforcing existing laws that recognize the sinister grip that gang crime can have on a community.

Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California say they are watching with interest.

The LA Police Chief recently announced a crackdown on gangs in response to a 15.7% increase in gang crime last year in Los Angeles. Fifty-six percent of the 478 homicides in 2006 were gang-related.

Since then, gang enforcement officers have made more than 800 arrests, including 392 members of 11 gangs identified by the chief as the worst in the city.

However, many of those arrests have been for nonviolent crimes, including probation violation, drug possession, curfew violation and vandalism.

By using laws that allow longer jail and prison sentences if nonviolent crimes are committed to benefit a gang, police and prosecutors are keeping alleged gang members off the streets longer.

It appears to many observers that police put youths’ names into a gang database just because they dress in baggy pants and were seen talking to an alleged gang member, though the police say additional corroboration is required.

Ever wonder what goes into a bottle of wine? The story winemakers love to tell on the bottle label is one of a mystical alchemy of climate, soils, ancient practices and long traditions. Wine labels tend to focus on romance; the small amount of government-mandated information includes the percentage of alcohol, a warning against consuming wine when pregnant or driving, and a disclosure of sulfites.

It might be disenchanting if the label also listed the chicken, fish, milk and wheat products that are often used to process wine. And it would be hard to maintain the notion that wine is an ethereal elixir if, before uncorking, consumers read that their Pinot Noir or Syrah contained Mega Purple (a brand of concentrated wine color), oak chips or such additives as oak gall nuts, grape juice concentrate, tartaric acid, citric acid, dissolved oxygen, copper and water. The mention of bentonite, ammonium phosphate and the wide variety of active enzymes used to make some wines would end the romance.

Federal regulators are considering revamping the rules governing wine labels, and if changes are made, the information revealed may surprise many wine buyers. Additives that supplement what nature failed to provide in an individual wine — tricks of the trade that winemakers rarely talk about — could soon be listed in detail on the labels.

The wine industry, through the Wine Institute, the industry’s chief lobbying arm, is opposing the regulatory changes. But could new regulations be good news for consumers?

Wine industry consultants familiar with the subject are divided on the question.

Supporters say the best wines don’t rely on additives. If ingredients were listed on wine labels, the finer wines would stand out.

But critics of the federal initiatives say ingredients labels would make widely accepted winery practices unnecessarily controversial.

For patients with clogged arteries who have not had a heart attack, the widely used surgical treatment of balloon angioplasty with the insertion of a stent is no better than conventional drug treatment, researchers said Monday

In a study of more than 2,000 patients, those receiving only drug therapy had the same number of heart attacks, strokes and deaths as those who received the medication and underwent artery-opening angioplasty, researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs told a meeting of the American College of Cardiology.

The only difference was a slight improvement in quality of life for those receiving angioplasty because of fewer chest pains, known as angina.

The findings deal a blow to the stent industry, which sells an estimated $3.2 billion worth of the devices each year in the United States. About 1 million stenting procedures are performed each year, costing about $40,000 per surgery. About 65% are performed on patients such as those in the study.

Stent makers criticized the studying, saying it said nothing new and failed to look at the newest generation of drug-eluting, or medicated, stents.

Experts also cautioned that the results do not apply to patients who have suffered a heart attack because of a blockage in the coronary artery. Numerous studies have shown that angioplasty is the gold standard for such patients, and physicians urge that it be implemented as soon as possible to restore blood flow to the heart.

But in non-emergency situations, the drugs act fast enough to forestall the need for angioplasty.

The study, called the Courage Trial, enrolled 2,287 patients at 15 VA medical centers and 35 hospitals in the United States and Canada.

It was sponsored primarily by the VA and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Most of the researchers involved have received consulting and lecture fees from major drug companies.

All the patients had at least a 70% blockage of their coronary artery and chest pains several times per week. Most also had high cholesterol and blood pressure, and many had diabetes.

All of the patients were placed on multiple medications, including beta-blockers, ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitors and diuretics to lower blood pressure, statins to decrease cholesterol and blood thinners to prevent clots. The drug treatments typically cost at least $1,500 a year, according to the American Heart Assn.

The patients were counseled about lifestyle programs for smoking cessation, increased exercise and a better diet.

Half the patients also underwent angioplasty, and most of them received a stent — a wire-mesh tube inserted into the artery to hold it open after the balloon is withdrawn. The balloon and the stent are threaded into the coronary artery through a small incision in the groin.

After an average of 4.6 years of monitoring, there were 211 deaths, heart attacks or strokes in the group receiving angioplasty and 202 in the group receiving only drug therapy — a difference the study deemed statistically insignificant.

The only difference between the two groups was that angioplasty patients had fewer symptoms of angina — although even that difference was not as large as had been expected.

After three years, 67% of those in the angioplasty group were free of angina, compared to 62% in the medication-only group.

The overall results should not be that surprising, said Dr. Valentin Fuster, director of the cardiovascular institute at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York.

Rat poison was identified Friday as the substance suspected of contaminating pet food that has killed or sickened dogs and cats across the nation, although it is still unclear how the deadly chemical got into the food.

Federal officials, meanwhile, reported an expanded recall of dog and cat food produced by Menu Foods of Ontario, Canada. The company last weekend voluntarily recalled 60 million cans and pouches of potentially contaminated products — including popular brands such as Iams and Eukanuba and private-label brands sold by large retailers.

The expanded recall and the findings released by New York state health officials raised concerns that the death toll from the contaminated food could rise significantly as more cases come to light.

The Food and Drug Administration estimated that the contaminated food has caused 14 pet deaths in the United States. However, the agency said it had received 4,400 complaints and inquiries from pet owners and veterinarians about the matter, and others say the death toll may be higher.

As of midday Friday, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 10 confirmed pet deaths — five cats and five dogs — from kidney failure in recent days and 15 additional cases of very sick animals with similar symptoms.

Dr. Jonathan Fielding, the county’s public health director, said the department was investigating 86 suspicious cases in which pet food might have played a role in an animal’s recent illness.

Health officials in New York said laboratory tests of pet food made by Menu Foods found aminopterin, a substance that is used to kill rodents in other countries but is banned in the United States. The tests found levels of at least 40 parts per million.

The pet food samples were tested by the New York State Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell University and the New York State Food Laboratory, which identified aminopterin as the toxic substance. The labs are part of a nationwide network set up after the 2001 terrorist attacks to test for contaminants in the nation’s food supply.

Executives at Menu Foods said Friday that they didn’t know how the rat poison got into their products. They said they had stopped using an ingredient that might be responsible for the contamination. The company declined to say what it was.

Because aminopterin is widely used as a rodenticide in China, where Menu Foods gets wheat gluten that is used to make pet "gravy" for some of its pet-food brands, there is some suspicion that the country could be the origin of the problem.

Although the FDA said it hadn’t located the exact source of the contamination, it did say it had traced the delivery route of wheat gluten supplied to the Menu Foods plants in Kansas and New Jersey where the contaminated food was produced. Menu continues to produce pet food at the two plants.

FDA officials also said there had been no reports of human sickness in connection with the tainted products.

The agency said Menu Foods had voluntarily expanded its recall to include all 95 brands of its "cuts and gravy"-style food, regardless of when they were produced. Previously, the recall included products made from Dec. 3 of last year to March 6.

Dry pet food is not included in the recall.

Blue Cross of California "routinely" violated state law when it canceled individual health insurance coverage after policyholders got pregnant or sick, making no attempt to determine whether they did anything to merit such "harsh" treatment, according to a state investigation of practices that appear to be industry wide.

State regulators plan similar investigations of other health plans in California, and the findings against Blue Cross ratchet up the risk of liability for other insurers, many of whom face lawsuits from consumers who claim they were illegally dumped and subjected to substantial hardships.

As a result of its unprecedented investigation, the Department of Managed Health Care on Thursday said that it had fined Blue Cross $1 million — an amount immediately criticized by canceled policyholders and consumer advocates as too small to matter to an insurer whose parent company, WellPoint Inc., earned $3.1 billion in profit last year on revenue of $57 billion.

Indianapolis-based WellPoint disputed the findings, saying it acted legally and that some rescissions are necessary to combat fraud.

"The vast majority of Blue Cross’ rescissions are unquestionably proper under any criteria," WellPoint said.

At issue are individual policies, the type needed by consumers who cannot get group coverage from employers or others. Although insurers cannot deny coverage to members of group plans, state law allows insurers to deny granting individual policies to applicants with preexisting medical conditions.

The state investigation found that Blue Cross used computer programs and a dedicated department to systematically investigate and cancel the policies of pregnant women and the chronically ill regardless of whether they intentionally lied on their applications to cover up preexisting medical conditions — a standard required by state law for canceling individual policies.

Regulators examined 90 randomly selected cases of policy cancellations — out of about 1,000 a year in California — and found violations in each one.

The state report said the legal standard for cancellation was high because it put plan members at great risk — financially and medically — and because it left physicians and hospitals holding the bag for services rendered in good faith and often with prior authorization from the insurer.

Years of cost-cutting and lack of investment left British Petroleum’s (BP) Texas City refinery vulnerable to the catastrophic fire that killed 15 workers two years ago, said the Chemical Safety Board (CSB), America’s leading chemical accident investigator.

In a damning report into BP’s safety culture, the CSB found that: budget pressures impaired safety performance; internal audits and studies revealed serious safety problems at Texas City, including lack of maintenance and training; the audits were shown to executives in London, including John Manzoni, the board director in charge of refining.

The CSB’s lengthy report into the Texas City fire found that organisational and cultural deficiencies at all levels of BP’s hierarchy were responsible for America’s biggest industrial disaster since 1990.

The report also criticised OSHA for insufficient oversight of Texas City. The CSB called for “comprehensive inspections” and urged OSHA to adopt a new standard requiring companies engaged in major organisational change, such as mergers or reorganisations, to conduct a process safety review.

Citing internal BP documents, including safety audits, e-mails and surveys commissioned by BP, the CSB concluded that a cut of 25 per cent in fixed spending ordered by BP’s chief executive, after the takeover of Amoco, played a role in leaving Texas City “vulnerable to a catastrophe”.

The fire in March 2005 was caused by a release of flammable vapour during the start-up of an isomerisation unit. A follow-up study, conducted later in 2002, found that “the current integrity and reliability issues at  [Texas City] are clearly linked to the reduction in maintenance spending over the last decade”.

High school students may have a right to free speech, but that does not include the freedom to unfurl a banner promoting "bong hits" during a school activity, the Supreme Court was told Monday.

An unusual case from Alaska tests whether principals and teachers can punish students for banners, buttons or other messages that conflict with the goals and policies set by school officials.

During Monday’s argument, former U.S. Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr and a Bush administration attorney urged the justices to defer to school officials when deciding what messages were appropriate on and around a high school campus.

"Illegal drugs and the glorification of the drug culture are profoundly serious problems for our nation," said Starr, dean of Pepperdine University School of Law. He represents a school principal from Juneau, Alaska, who was sued for ripping away the banner and suspending the student who unfurled it.

Permitting the banner to be displayed would be "interpreted as an encouragement of the drug culture," Starr said.

But a lawyer representing the student said the right to free speech should prevail so long as the message did not disrupt classrooms or the education process. "This is a case about free speech. It is not a case about drugs," said Douglas K. Mertz, a lawyer from Juneau.

His client, Joseph Frederick, was an 18-year-old senior in 2002 when the torch for the Winter Olympics was scheduled to pass in front of the high school. Frederick was standing on a public street as the TV cameras came into range. He and several other students then unfurled the 14-foot banner that said, "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

The school’s principal, Deborah Morse, ripped it away from the students and sent Frederick to the office. She planned to suspend him for five days, but when he invoked Thomas Jefferson and the 1st Amendment, she doubled the suspension to 10 days.

Frederick sued, alleging Morse had violated his constitutional rights.

A federal judge rejected his claim, but the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled for the student and said the principal could be forced to pay damages.

No damages have been set, and the school board urged the Supreme Court to overrule the 9th Circuit.

During Monday’s argument, most of the justices seemed to lean in favor of Morse, who is no longer a principal but still works in the school district.

However, they sounded unsure where to draw a line between a student’s free-speech right and the authority of the principal.

Several also said they worried about giving school officials unchecked power to control what students say.

The battleship-gray fishing boat roared past in the dead of night with its running lights off, catching the attention of game wardens patrolling the open ocean just outside Los Angeles Harbor.

An onboard inspection turned up hundreds of California spiny lobsters — prized for their sweet flavor and meaty tails — but the skipper’s story about where he caught them didn’t seem to hold water.

The edgy encounter in early January prompted an elaborate undercover operation featuring an array of sophisticated tactics — including divers plunging into dangerous inky waters to secretly seed the fisherman’s traps with marked lobsters — that would seem right at home in a James Bond adventure.

It all culminated before dawn Monday with the arrests of two men who state Department of Fish and Game officials say had raided a protected marine refuge of lobsters, thereby gaining an unfair advantage over competitors who abided by state fishing regulations.

Only two days before the close of California’s six-month spiny lobster fishing season, "most commercial fishermen can work all day long to catch 20 to 30 pounds," said Fish and Game Capt. Martin Maytorena. "These suspects fished one day and trapped 500 pounds."

Two men were arrested without incident at a marina in Long Beach as they prepared to unload their catch, authorities said. They were unaware that the catch included about 15 marked lobsters placed inside their wire-mesh traps a week earlier by state divers.

The owner of the boat was charged with grand theft of property belonging to the people of California, and possession of fraudulent documents, both felonies, authorities said.

For those who protect coastal wildlife resources, it was a significant bust. There are 246 people in the state licensed to take California spiny lobster. Authorities say they know commercial poaching of lobsters occurs, but they rarely catch anyone.