Nation digest 11/20/01

Gore now vice chairman of financial services firm

LOS ANGELES -- Al Gore has accepted a job as vice chairman of Metropolitan West Financial, a Los Angeles-based financial services holding company, the company said Monday.

The former vice president and last year's Democratic presidential candidate will "help us identify and evaluate new business opportunities and play an active role in shaping the future of our company," the firm's chairman, Richard S. Hollander, said in a statement.

In particular, Gore will help develop strategies in biotechnology and information technology and examine opportunities for international expansion, the company said.

Gore will continue to serve as a research professor focusing on family-centered community building at the University of California, Los Angeles, and will continue to teach classes on the subject at two colleges in Tennessee.

Many doctors would participate in execution

PHILADELPHIA -- Many doctors would be willing to participate in an execution, even though it violates the Hippocratic oath to do no harm and is prohibited by medical societies, according to a survey published today.

Asked whether they would perform any action on a list of 10 involving the mechanics of lethal injection, 41 percent of doctors who responded to a questionnaire said they would perform at least one; 25 percent said they would perform five or more.

The questionnaire was mailed to 1,000 randomly selected practicing physicians nationwide and 413 responded. The results appear in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The specific actions the doctors were asked about applied to execution by injection.

Kennedy nephew Skakel to be tried as adult

HARTFORD, Conn. -- The state Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel on Monday, clearing the way for his murder trial in the 1975 beating death of a Greenwich neighbor when both were teen-agers.

In a unanimous decision, the justices dismissed Skakel's bid to have his case transferred to juvenile court. No trial date has been set.

Skakel, a nephew of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, is charged with the murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley, who was beaten to death with a golf club.

No arrests were made for more than 24 years after the killing. Skakel was charged in January 2000 and later arraigned as a juvenile because he had been 15 at the time of his neighbor's death.

Officials probing deaths of 3 after knee surgery

MINNEAPOLIS -- State health officials are investigating the sudden deaths of three men after elective knee surgery and have asked all hospitals and surgery centers to suspend such operations for one week.

Brian Lykins, 23, and Wayne Hulterstrum, 78, died Nov. 11 after having surgery at St. Cloud Hospital, local officials said. A man in his mid-60s died on Friday at Douglas County Hospital, three days after surgery. The identity of the third man was not immediately known.

Health officials limited their request to elective knee surgeries since that is the only common link in the deaths, Hull said.

Study: Cholesterol helps AIDS virus infect cells

WASHINGTON -- When the AIDS virus invades a cell, it picks a place on the cell's membrane that is rich in cholesterol, according to a new study at the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of NIH, found that HIV, the virus that causes AIDs, attaches to a semi-solid patch on the cell's membrane that is loaded with cholesterol. These patches, which move around on the cell membrane, are called rafts.

In laboratory studies, the researchers found that when they removed cholesterol from the cells targeted by HIV, the virus' ability to make new viral particles or to infect additional cells was crippled.

-- From wire reports