Government

The federal government Friday called for all baby boomers to be tested for hepatitis C, which kills more Americans each year than AIDS and is the leading reason for liver transplants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made the recommendation to find hundreds of thousands of people who don't realize that they have the infection, which greatly increases their chances of developing cirrhosis and liver cancer. The hepatitis C virus is transmitted by blood, usually through intravenous drug use or transfusions.

In rejecting PSA screening for prostate cancer, an influential federal panel has chipped a cornerstone of preventive medicine, declaring that it's not always best to catch cancer as early as possible. "At best, PSA screening may help only 1 man in 1,000 avoid death from prostate cancer," the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said Monday. "Most prostate cancers found by PSA screening are slow growing, not life threatening, and will not cause a man any harm during his lifetime.

Amid the many messages you will hear about screening for prostate cancer in the coming days, I hope these stand out: There is at best a small potential benefit from prostate cancer screening, and there are substantial known harms. We need a better test, and we need better treatment options. The panel I chair, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, has just issued a recommendation against screening men of any age for prostate cancer using the prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, blood test.

Just downstream from an industrial recycling operation and a stone's throw from a sewage treatment plant, a fisherman casts his line toward the passing barge traffic and watches it drop into the Delaware River. A couple eating lunch watch curiously. "No way would I ever eat anything from there," the woman says. The fishers who frequent the pier in Camden's Waterfront South neighborhood have heard it all before. That they're crazy, that they're going to grow an extra head or get sick from eating what they catch.

LOS ANGELES - Millions of people have endured a colonoscopy, believing the dreaded exam may help keep them from dying of colon cancer. For the first time, a major study offers clear evidence that it does. Removing precancerous growths spotted during the test can cut the risk of dying from colon cancer in half, the study suggests. Doctors have long assumed a benefit, but research hasn't shown before that removing polyps would improve survival - the key measure of any cancer screening's worth.

CENTRAL planning by the Washington elite, elected and appointed, determined that Chrysler, owned by shareholders, investors and banks, should be forced into bankruptcy. The new owners would become 55 percent the United Auto Workers, 35 percent a foreign auto company, 10 percent we the taxpayers, along with another 5-10 billion tax dollars in addition to the $8 billion lost in the bankruptcy. In essence, Washington decided that it would force property to be transferred from one owner and given to another, along with a bunch of our tax dollars.

Ronald Reagan got a lot of mileage out of his continual talk of our need for less government. After six years of government under Reagan, our government somhow got bigger than ever. That doesn't mean the Reaganisti haven't called off the federales who were harassing your local industrialist for putting poison in your drinking water. It doesn't mean they haven't made headway in building the character of the poor by denying them federal help. What it means is that the Reagan administration, behind the genial Charlie McCarthy figure of the president, has built up the government in other ways.

Here in the land of political lunches, tour-bus traffic jams and skyscraping monuments is where two Montgomery County senior citizens debated on Capitol Hill whether to cut the nation's defense or increase taxes. On Tuesday, Estelle Goodman, 80, of Wyncote, and Alfred Webb, 76, of Plymouth Meeting, tried to balance the federal budget for 1989. They had three hours. They failed. It was OK, though. The point of the task was to teach Goodman and Webb, along with 171 other senior citizens, the difficulty inherent in deciding how to spend 226 million people's money.

The time is now for us the people to take charge of our own destinies, to take, if you will, responsibility for our own lives - all of the people, now, before things descend too far out of hand. Our taking the responsibility is, after all, what this thing called democracy was intended to be about. My source for this notion is our Declaration of Independence. Just to remind you, that pivotal document states " . . . all men are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights . . . that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (or of property)

Thirty students from Cherry Hill schools got a taste of government yesterday at the municipal building. They met with key city officials.

"Today, city officials, community activists, residents … gathered to commemorate the end of unmanaged vacant land as we know it in Philadelphia's neighborhoods on what was the last unmanaged vacant lot in the city. " Those promising words were included in a Philadelphia Horticultural Society report on the city's vacant land; it was released in 2000. At that time, the city had 30,000 vacant and abandoned properties and the 2000 report was just the latest in a series of studies, programs and initiatives to clean up the city's act and claim, clean and/or dispose of its blight-inducing abandoned properties.

ATHENS, Greece - Critical last-ditch talks to form a coalition government in crisis-struck Greece foundered once more Sunday, leading the country one step closer to new elections, although the socialist party leader said he retained "existing but limited' optimism for a deal. The political uncertainty has alarmed international creditors who have given Greece billions of euros in bailout loans over the last two years, and has thrown the country's continued presence in the European Union's joint currency into serious doubt.

JERUSALEM - In a turn of events that could influence a possible Israeli strike on Iran, Israeli media reports early Tuesday indicated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reached an agreement with the Kadima opposition party for a unity government, canceling an early election. There was no immediate comment from official sources on the decision. The reports came as Israel's parliament held debates into the night over whether to break up ahead of early elections called for the fall.

Syrian opposition boycotts election DAMASCUS, Syria - Syrians voted in parliamentary elections Monday that the government praised as a milestone in promised political reforms, but the opposition boycotted the polls and said they were designed to strengthen President Bashar al-Assad's grip on power. There were scattered reports of violence, including witness accounts that security forces launched deadly attacks on villages in central Syria where opposition supporters were refusing to vote.

BELGRADE, Serbia - A pro-European Union candidate and a nationalist opponent are headed for a runoff in Serbia's presidential elections, while the ruling pro-Western party is likely to form the next coalition government, independent pollsters said Sunday. The Center for Free Elections and Democracy said its unofficial complete count showed the previous president, Boris Tadic of the Democratic Party, taking 26.7 percent of the votes, while populist Serbian Progressive Party leader Tomislav Nikolic has 25.5 percent.

BEIRUT - In fresh attacks on symbols of state power, twin suicide bombs exploded Monday near a government security compound in northern Syria and rockets struck the central bank in Damascus, killing nine people and wounding 100. The regime and the opposition traded blame, accusing each other of dooming a United Nations plan to calm violence that has largely failed so far. The head of the U.N. observer mission acknowledged that his force cannot solve...

KIEV, Ukraine - Four explosions rocked an eastern Ukrainian city on Friday, injuring 27 people. Authorities say it was a terrorist attack but an opposition lawmaker claims it could be a government plot to divert attention from the imprisonment of opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko. Top law enforcement officials rushed to Dnipropetrovsk, 250 miles southeast of Kiev, to investigate but there was no immediate claim of responsibility. The violence undermined Ukraine's security just weeks before it co-hosts the European soccer championships in June.

Plaintiffs' lawyers famously chase society's "deep pockets," suing not the worst among us, but rich, slow-moving companies, people and institutions, on any convenient pretext, in hopes of grabbing enough dollars to get them to go away. Government does the reverse. Too often, agencies walk carefully around powerful potential malefactors and instead target people with relatively shallow pockets — brave, or just careless — who challenge the powerful. Here are two fresh examples.

Too much of our state and local government is still only crawling toward the 21st century. Yesterday a City Council committee considered legislation that would require the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication, which handles parking-ticket appeals, to allow citizens to fight tickets online or by phone. Shouldn't these options have been available, like, yesterday? Especially since for most of us, fighting an unfair parking ticket means taking a day off work and spending it in a waiting room — or else just deciding,"screw it, it's not worth it" and paying up. Concerned BAA administrators fear that these changes would lead to a flood of appeals and that face-to-face conversations are more "satisfying" for members of the public.

Not in Chicago anymore A few years back Venezuelan citizen Ozzie Guillen, then manager of the Chicago White Sox, publicly said about the same thing that the now-manager of the Miami Marlins has much more famously said ("Marlins' Guillen set to apologize yet again," Tuesday). Ozzie admires Fidel Castro for surviving decades of attempts to assassinate him (by agents of an unspecified government and of an émigré community). Ozzie was speaking his mind both times. In Chicago, that was fine.