Salt Lake City

Murder charge filed for Caesarean avoidance

A pregnant woman who allegedly ignored medical warnings to have a Caesarean section to save her twins was charged Thursday with murder after one of the babies was stillborn.

Prosecutors said Melissa Ann Rowland, 28, didn’t want the scars that accompany the surgery.

An autopsy found the baby died two days before its Jan. 13 delivery and that it would have survived if Rowland had had a C-section when her doctors urged her to, between Christmas and Jan. 9. The other baby is alive, but authorities had no further information.

The doctors had warned that without a C-section, the twins would probably die, authorities said. A nurse told police Rowland said a Caesarean would “ruin her life” and she would rather “lose one of the babies than be cut like that.”

The charges carry five years to life in prison. Rowland was jailed on $250,000 bail.

North Carolina

EPA studies emissions from microwave popcorn

The Environmental Protection Agency is studying the chemicals released into the air when a bag of microwave popcorn is popped or opened.

Exposure to vapors from butter flavoring in microwave popcorn has been linked to a rare lung disease contracted by factory workers in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has said it suspects the chemical diacetyl caused the illnesses.

However, health officials insist people who microwave popcorn and eat it at home are not in danger.

The EPA study began last fall and is expected to be completed this year.

Georgia

$40 million settlement made in crematory case

The families of more than 300 people whose bodies were found strewn across the grounds of a Georgia crematory will receive nearly $40 million in a settlement announced Thursday with the business and 58 funeral homes across the South.

The funeral homes agreed to pay $36 million and the insurer for Tri-State Crematory $3.5 million. The Marsh family, which operates the crematory in Rome, also agreed to preserve two acres as a tribute to the dead.

The families brought a federal class-action lawsuit in 2002 after crematory operator Ray Brent Marsh was arrested and accused of dumping 334 bodies instead of cremating them. Investigators say he gave families cement dust instead of their loved ones’ ashes.

The funeral homes in Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama had sent the bodies to the crematory between 1988 and 2002.

Marsh still faces 787 state felony charges.

Washington, D.C.

Ford F-150 lone pickup to earn top rating

Ford Motor Co.’s redesigned F-150 was the only 2004 pickup to earn the government’s top safety rating in two frontal crash tests, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Thursday.

NHTSA released ratings Thursday for three pickups that were new or newly redesigned for 2004: the F-150, the Chevrolet Colorado and the GMC Canyon. It also posted ratings for pickups that were tested earlier and weren’t redesigned for the 2004 model year.

The crash ratings can be found online at www.safercar.gov.

Washington, D.C.

Senators ask NASA to stick with Hubble

Senators demanded a second opinion Thursday on NASA’s plans to let the Hubble Space Telescope die, but space agency administrator Sean O’Keefe said new safety rules made it unlikely that a Hubble repair mission would be launched.

Sens. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., and Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., asked O’Keefe at a hearing to seek the advice of the National Academy of Sciences before abandoning any plans to send a repair mission to the ailing Hubble.

O’Keefe agreed to talk with officials at the academy, but later told reporters that safety rules approved by Congress and NASA after the space shuttle Columbia accident made it virtually impossible to mount a space shuttle mission to repair the orbiting telescope.

“We’re not likely to be able to do that,” O’Keefe said after his testimony before the Senate appropriations subcommittee on VA-HUD-Independent Agencies, the panel that provides oversight for NASA.