New York City: Two pounds of heroin found with 5-year-old

More than 2 pounds of heroin were seized from a 5-year-old girl at Kennedy Airport after she traveled alone on a flight from Colombia, U.S. customs officials announced Monday.

“The youngest drug mule in history, I believe,” Customs spokesman Dean Boyd said. The girl, whose name was withheld by authorities because of her age, is in the custody of the city Administration for Children’s Services.

She arrived Thursday at Kennedy aboard an Avianca Airlines flight from Bogota and then picked up two suitcases from baggage claim, Customs officials said.

She was walking alone through Customs when an inspector opened one of the suitcases and noticed it had “an unusually thick side,” officials said. Further inspection revealed the drugs.

California: Trial challenges magazine tobacco ads

A trial opened Monday in a lawsuit filed by the state of California accusing R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. of violating the 1998 national tobacco settlement by running ads in youth-oriented magazines.

Holding up a copy of Spin magazine with an ad for Camel cigarettes on the back cover, Deputy Atty. Gen. Karen Leaf said the nation’s second-largest tobacco company should be punished for having “aimed its advertising at teens by advertising in magazines that teens read.”

Reynolds denied trying to sell cigarettes to teen-agers. A Reynolds attorney said the company limits ads to magazines that are aimed at people older than 21 and have a youth readership of less than 25 percent.

The 1998 legal settlement with 46 states and the major tobacco companies makes no specific mention of magazine advertising but includes a ban on the companies taking “any action, directly or indirectly, to target youth.”

Kentucky: Sierra Club files suit for chicken farm mess

The Sierra Club is suing poultry giant Tyson Foods for allegedly failing to clean up waste from four chicken farms in Kentucky.

The lawsuit, mailed to court officials Monday in Frankfort by the environmental group, includes charges that Tyson failed to report releases of ammonia.

Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson officials said they had not seen the suit and declined comment.

In the past, the company has said the farmer-operators it contracts bear liability for pollution. Ed Nicholson, a spokesman, said there have been no comprehensive studies measuring how much ammonia is released.

Tyson operations in three western Kentucky counties are at issue in the suit. Residents have also filed complaints in court against Tyson and the chicken farms about the smell.

Washington, D.C.: Living organ donors outpace gifts from dead

Organ donations from the living reached a high last year, outnumbering donors who are dead for the first time. With waiting lists growing, more than 6,400 people gave away a kidney or a piece of their liver.

For more than a decade, the numbers of organs donated by the living have been growing more quickly than those given after death as desperate patients have turned increasingly to families or friends.

In 2001, the number of living donors jumped by 13.4 percent, on top of a 16.5 percent increase a year earlier, the government said Monday. By contrast, donations from dead people inched up by just 1.6 percent.

Last year, there were 6,081 donor cadavers. Each can give several organs, so dead people still enable about three out of every four transplants.

They now are outnumbered by living donors: In 2001, there were a record 6,485.