Connecticut: Report: Studies delayed by tighter visa checks

More than two dozen research studies at 20 universities have been significantly affected since regulations on processing visas for foreign scientists were tightened after the 9-11 attacks, a newspaper reported.

The research involves diseases such as AIDS, cancer, the West Nile virus, leukemia and bioterrorism, the Hartford Courant said in a story prepared for today’s editions.

Leaders of the National Academies complained in December that heightened security was “having serious, unintended consequences for American science, engineering and medicine.”

A hearing on the issue is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday in the Science Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Philadelphia: Feds consider charges in Bill of Rights sale

Federal authorities are weighing the possibility of criminal charges over an attempt to sell a copy of the Bill of Rights, missing since the Civil War, that was seized during an undercover sting.

But proving criminality in the sale of government documents isn’t always easy, especially if they were taken during wartime.

Historians believe the handwritten Bill of Rights that surfaced last week was stolen from the North Carolina statehouse by a Union soldier on April 14, 1865, as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army stormed through Raleigh.

The soldier took it home to Ohio and sold it a year later, the document’s last known transfer until Tuesday, when a broker acting for the anonymous seller sought $4 million from an undercover FBI agent. Archivists have estimated the value of the North Carolina copy at $20 million to $30 million.

Houston: Enron employees must cover retirement fees

A bankruptcy judge has decided that current Enron Corp. employees, and not the company, must pay for the management of workers’ retirement plans.

The company and the U.S. Labor Department wanted to have Enron continue paying the nearly $4 million a year to an independent overseer of three retirement plans. Creditors, who are trying to get as much back out of the deflated former energy trading giant as possible, wanted to shift the cost to workers.

Employees, who are locked into the plans, will pay an average of $320 per year, according to the company.

Enron hired a firm called State Street to manage the plans in early 2002.