Tainted

Good morning--Mike Cameron--You could lead a chorus of suspended players in singing "Tainted Love."

DIGOS, Philippines -- As a presidential race tainted by violence and chicanery draws to a close, Vice President Joseph "Erap" Estrada is the man of the people to beat Monday.From a field of 10 1/2 candidates -- former first lady Imelda Marcos was in the race, dropped out and now is half-heartedly back in -- Filipino voters seem ready to elect a controversial former B-movie actor to navigate their country through the Asian financial turmoil and into the 21st century.Estrada's detractors scorn the 61-year-old, who has a seemingly insurmountable lead in the polls.

A Baltimore masonry contractor has pleaded guilty for a second time to illegally dumping lead-contaminated wastewater into city storm drains.Frederick Dean Cichorc, owner of New Faces Masonry, received a suspended jail sentence in 1994 for dumping water tainted with poisonous lead into the drains. In April, New Faces workers were found dumping a lead-and-water mixture into drains flowing to the Inner Harbor, according to Howard P. Nicholson, supervising attorney in the environmental crimes unit of the attorney general's office.

NEW YORK - Sometime this week, after years of delays, a floating dredge is scheduled to begin scooping thousands of tons of accumulated mud from one of the main channels plied by the container ships that carry televisions, orange juice, furniture and almost every other imported or exported product into and out of New York Harbor.Within weeks other dredges will similarly attack mud that has clogged several other important channels and berths.Last week, a variety of federal officials and New Jersey politicians, including Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and Democratic Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, made much of the impending dredging, proclaiming an end to a four-year environmental battle over how to clear slightly contaminated mud from the dominant seaport on the East Coast without threatening public health or marine life.

Washington -- THEY'RE JUST A couple of pot-smoking, draft-ducking, scandal-tainted Southern boys who found politicsto be a good life without heavy lifting.I'm talking about Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton -- peas in a pod.This may be disquieting news to Newt Gingrich's fans and Bill Clinton's enemies.But strip away ideology, the right-wing speaker-to-be and centrist president are really Dixie-fried Bubbas with troubled pasts.Neither has a monopoly on perfection.Sure, Newt Gingrich's brotherhood with Bill Clinton may not jibe with Newt's attacks on the prez as a "counter-culture McGovernite" and "an enemy of normal Americans."

LOS ANGELES -- More than three-quarters of all the paper money in Los Angeles has some amount of cocaine or some other drug stuck to it, according to a federal appeals court decision that vividly illuminates how extensively the drug trade touches mainstream commerce.Of every four bills in circulation in Los Angeles, more than three have traces of cocaine or another illicit drug actually stuck to the paper, according to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which relied on that fact to dismiss a case against a man suspected of drug trafficking.

The federal government is expected to announce today that it will for the first time require the seafood industry to keep detailed records of safety procedures and to label shellfish to show where it comes from.The new regulations are a major shift in the government's efforts to ensure the safety of seafood. They are aimed at preventing health problems from occurring rather than reacting to outbreaks of illness, said Dr. David A. Kessler, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

BETHESDA -- The Consumer Product Safety Commission has banned three brands of crayons imported from China, including one sold by retail giant Toys 'R' Us, because they contain enough lead to poison a child who ate even part of one crayon.Another eight brands of crayons imported from China were voluntarily recalled by their distributors after laboratory tests showed they contained enough lead to poison a child who ate an entire crayon, Ann Brown, the commission chairwoman, announced at a news conference yesterday.

The clandestine production and sale of adulterated fruit juice is a widespread and highly profitable practice, a review of court cases filed across the country shows -- a practice that is costing U.S. consumers an estimated $1.2 billion a year and exposing them to undisclosed and unapproved chemicals.Regulators at the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the food industry, had hoped that tainted juice would become less common after the federal prosecution in 1987 of Beech-Nut Nutrition Corp.

Even a year ago it would have been a paranoid fantasy to suggest that Egypt might fall under the control of the Islamic fundamentalists. Not Egypt, the most cosmopolitan, sophisticated country in the Arab world, with its large Christian minority and its long tradition of tolerance. But lately the odds don't look so good.On 14 August a civilian high court acquitted fourteen Islamic fundamentalists accused of the 1990 murder of the speaker of Egypt's parliament, the first shot in a wave of fundamentalist violence that has led to 200 deaths so far this year.

This latest entanglement for Miguel Tejada doesn't teach us anything new about baseball and performance-enhancing drugs. All it does is reinforce what we already knew, and the events of the past few days tell us that a lot of people needed reinforcing, or else they stay deluded about how bad this is. What Tejada's federal court appearance today - for allegedly lying to congressional investigators about his knowledge of teammates' use of performance-enhancing drugs...

BEIJING - Chinese police have detained at least five parents who were trying to hold a news conference to publicize the plight of their children, who are suffering from kidney stones as a result of drinking tainted baby formula. The parents were taken late Thursday to a hotel often used by police as a temporary detention center on the outskirts of Beijing. They had scheduled a news conference in the capital for yesterday afternoon, according to lawyers. "It is sorrowful for our nation.

BEIJING - The mayor of a city whose officials have been accused of failing to deal with reports of tainted baby milk was dismissed yesterday as the government announced that a fourth infant had died and that the police had arrested a dozen more people in a widening investigation. The mayor of Shijiazhuang, Ji Chuntang, was the most senior official to be fired so far in the growing milk scandal. Ji had been removed Wednesday from his post as deputy secretary of the Shijiazhuang Municipal Committee of the Communist Party, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

WASHINGTON - After warning Americans for six weeks against eating certain kinds of tomatoes, federal health officials gave the all-clear yesterday - without ever finding solid evidence that tomatoes were the cause of the largest outbreak of food-borne illness in at least a decade. In lifting the salmonella warning, the Food and Drug Administration met the demands of the tomato industry, which had been requesting the action. But the move is unlikely to stop tomato growers, packers and sellers from pushing for $100 million or more in federal aid to reimburse them for losses.

Not long ago, the global crisis in tainted and counterfeit drugs hit home for me. My cousin Laura - high-octane teacher, wife and mom - was rushed to her local emergency room. Six weeks earlier, she had had surgery for a broken tibia and fibula. Now a vein in her leg had clotted, and she needed immediate, high-dose anticoagulation. Physically and psychologically, Laura's first hospital stay had been bad enough. Unfortunately, after the surgery, no one had told her to stop taking her birth control pills because of the risk of clotting.

Good morning--Mike Cameron--You could lead a chorus of suspended players in singing "Tainted Love."

Thieves target auto GPS devices Thieves are breaking into autos in increasing numbers and grabbing popular Global Positioning System units. Campaign ad turns up the heat The latest television ad for Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. blames Baltimore's rising murder rate on Mayor Sheila Dixon, his chief rival in next month's primary election. Neglect at fire academy reported A new report details "unacceptable practices" that led to the death of recruit Racheal Wilson in a February training exercise.

Discount stores in Maryland and three other states sold toothpaste falsely packaged as Colgate and spiked with a poisonous chemical used in antifreeze, federal health officials said yesterday. The Food and Drug Administration is investigating who laced the toothpaste with diethylene glycol, which FDA inspectors first discovered last week in a tube on the shelf of a Silver Spring discount store. The Colgate-Palmolive Co. warned consumers to beware of counterfeits and is helping recall the tainted products.

Washington -- Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday that he has been pressing the Bush administration to move war crimes trials of suspected terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to courts in the United States because other countries might consider the military tribunals tainted. No matter how open the trials are under a new law, Gates said, they might not be deemed credible by the outside world because of prior military practices at Guantanamo, which included interrogation techniques that allowed physical coercion.

Trial over tainted wells scheduled for May 2008 A civil trial to determine whether Exxon-Mobil Corp. should have to pay damages to Jacksonville residents whose wells were found to be tainted after a 26,700-gallon fuel leak last year is tentatively set for May 2008. Contractors continue to test wells and add monitoring wells in response to the leak from an underground storage tank at an Exxon station in the heart of the northeastern Baltimore County community. The fuel and a gasoline additive tainted the water supply of some nearby residents and businesses -- all of whom rely on wells-- and caused widespread fears about possible contamination.