Immunity

Measles are making a comeback. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says travelers to countries with large recent outbreaks, including France, Britain, Spain, Switzerland, India and areas of Africa and Asia, have returned to the U.S. and brought cases of the highly contagious disease with them. "Every traveler needs to make sure they are immune to measles," Dr. Phyllis Kozarsky, a consultant for the CDC's division of global migration and quarantine, said in an interview.

A growing number of Indian tribes are getting into the payday loan business, saying they just want to raise revenue for their reservations while helping cash-strapped consumers nationwide. But federal officials suspect that, at least in some cases, tribes are being paid to offer their sovereign immunity to non-Indian payday lenders that are trying to dodge state regulations. So far, the tribes have prevailed over California and other states that have tried to assert authority over tribal lending operations.

The Israeli Parliament on Tuesday stripped former Interior Minister Arye Deri of his immunity to criminal prosecution, clearing the way for formal charges of fraud and misuse of public funds to be brought against him. The vote was 65 to 9 with one abstention. Deri resigned from the Cabinet last month but kept his seat in Parliament. His ultra-Orthodox Shas party has all but formally dropped out of the ruling coalition.

Circumcision is known to reduce a man's risk of HIV infection by at least half, but scientists don't know why. A new study offers support for the theory that removing the foreskin deprives troublesome bacteria of a place to live, leaving the immune system in much better shape to keep the human immunodeficiency virus at bay. Anyone who has ever lifted a rock and watched as the earth beneath it was quickly vacated by legions of bugs and tiny worms...

Re "First job: FISA," editorial, March 30 Your editorial is misguided. Ignoring a lawless administration that has been illegally wiretapping U.S. citizens since well before 9/11, you urge Congress to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt. Apparently, your editorial board has learned nothing from the past seven years -- an illegal war based on lies, torture conducted in our name, politicization of the Justice Department and incompetence exhibited elsewhere. You urge Congress to bend to the administration's will and grant the telecoms immunity, and blandly assure us that a congressional investigation will shed light on seven years of lawbreaking.

Torture victims won a victory Tuesday when the Supreme Court ruled that federal law does not automatically protect ex-officials of foreign governments from lawsuits over the abuse. In a 9-0 ruling, the high court rejected a claim of immunity from former Somali Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Samantar. Although the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 shields other countries from being sued in American courts, it does not protect former officials of those states, the justices said.

Congress on Wednesday rejected a commission's recommendation to lift President Enrique Bolanos' immunity and blocked a bid to prosecute him on election fraud charges. The rejection was a further easing of a political crisis in Nicaragua that the United States had called a "creeping coup," and it shielded Bolanos, a U.S. ally, from facing charges of failing to disclose the origin of campaign funds.

The lower house of Russia's parliament substantially weakened a Kremlin bill that would grant former presidents sweeping immunity from prosecution, in a move that could bring legal problems for Boris N. Yeltsin. Under the new version, a former president can be prosecuted if parliament first agrees to strip immunity. Immediately after Yeltsin resigned Dec. 31, 1999, his successor, Vladimir V. Putin, signed a decree guaranteeing immunity for former presidents.

David Berst, director of enforcement for the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., took issue Thursday with statements made by Ron Watson, assistant athletic director at Oklahoma. Watson criticized the NCAA for giving Oklahoma State wide receiver Hart Lee Dykes immunity in exchange for information implicating four schools in recruiting violations. "If you want to find out what really happened, you have to have limited immunity," Berst told the Tulsa Tribune.

The House and Senate panels investigating the Iran- contra scandal voted Thursday to offer limited immunity to three lesser figures in the operation whose testimony could shed light on details the investigators have been unable to obtain. The three are Fawn Hall, former secretary to fired White House aide Oliver L.

Nine women working to immunize children against polio were killed Friday when gunmen opened fire on them in northern Nigeria, Kano state police said. Women involved in the vaccination drive were targeted in two areas of the northern city of Kano, news reports said. Witnesses told the Associated Press that the death toll appeared to be higher than what police had reported, saying eight were killed in one attack and four were dead in another. One injured woman told Agence France-Presse that two men stormed into a clinic and started shooting, then set a curtain on fire and fled, shutting the door.

As Iraq war veteran Brendan Marrocco recovers from an extremely rare double arm transplant, experts in the field of reconstructive transplantation say the surgery's ultimate success depends heavily on a patient's immune system response and nerve tissue regeneration. Marrocco, 26, underwent the 13-hour procedure Dec. 18 and appeared at a news conference Tuesday to answer questions with his surgeon, Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee. The procedure, which involved 16 surgeons, was performed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

More than two years after the Bell corruption case erupted, the prosecution called its first witness Friday in an effort to show that the leaders of the small, working-class city became some of the highest-paid city politicians in California by serving on boards that sometimes met just so they could approve further pay hikes. Rebecca Valdez, Bell's city clerk who has been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony, testified that it was her job to take notes at council meetings, including marking the start and end time of the various boards on which council members served, such as the Solid Waste and Recycling Authority.

As waiting rooms in other parts of the U.S. have been clogged with sniffling, feverish hordes, California has seemed to avoid the worst of this year's flu - so far. But that may change, as officials in California said this week that flu activity in the state had reached “a widespread level,” and that the number of visits to doctors and hospitals for the treatment of flu-like illness was higher than usual for mid-January.  (For more on...

Parents who indulge in an occasional cocktail around their kids have all been there: You're drinking it and they want to try it. "No, it's a drink for grown-ups," springs to your lips. But then you ask yourself, "When I cast alcohol as the forbidden fruit, doesn't that just make it more alluring?" If you've ever been stuck on the horns of that dilemma, you have company. In a recent survey of "pro-sipping" attitudes among mothers of young children in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, 1 in 4 expressed the belief that allowing a child a sip of an alcoholic drink would likely deter him or her from further drinking because either the taste would discourage it or because alcohol's cachet would decline when it comes with a parent's permission.

The psychedelic image above is a super-close-up view of the skin -- and the brightly colored blobs are immune cells. What's it about? Read on. Evidence is mounting that the bacteria that live on our bodies affect our health, for good or ill. It's a hot area of research , much of it centered on the gut -- and no wonder, for this is the spot where the richest bacterial communities are found. The bugs that dwell there seem to help our immune systems develop along the right lines, among other things.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has agreed to an internationally negotiated plan to step down within 30 days in exchange for criminal immunity for his deadly crackdown on protests that have tipped the nation perilously close to civil war, Yemeni officials and opposition leaders said Saturday. But the canny Saleh has broken many promises, and the latest concession could be another maneuver by a leader who has remained defiant amid massive street demonstrations and the defections of top military and government officials.

A nationwide settlement on foreclosure practices has ended one headache for the banks involved, but there are signs that it is only the beginning of many others. The agreement between 49 states and five large banks gives the financial giants immunity from future complaints about some aspects of their foreclosure practices. The banks had previously made changes to improve the way they foreclose on homeowners and had put aside most of the funds necessary to pay for the $25-billion settlement.

Decades after writer-director Nelson Lyon released the X-rated sex comedy "The Telephone Book" in 1971, the film was hailed as a neglected masterpiece. By then Lyons was a former "Saturday Night Live" writer long known for a darker connection: He went on a drug-fueled binge with John Belushi during the comedian's final days in 1982. "He was blamed for Belushi's death, and it ruined his career," said Dennis Perrin, author of "Mr. Mike," a 1999 biography of former "Saturday Night Live" head writer Michael O'Donoghue, who had been Lyon's writing partner.

In 1992, the acquittal of four police officers accused of beating Rodney King was the match that ignited a city, setting off a wave of violence that left 53 dead, thousands injured and hundreds of businesses destroyed. There was a lot of accumulated tinder to burn. Los Angeles was struggling with a faltering and de-industrialized economy that left too many without good jobs, a wave of demographic transition that caused ethnic and generational tensions, and a widening gap between rich and poor that was just beginning to emerge into public view - a bit like the U.S. today.