New Jersey

Jet skids off runway; several injured

A corporate jet skidded off a runway Wednesday on takeoff and hurtled across a six-lane highway during the morning rush hour, smashing into two cars and punching through the wall of a warehouse. About 20 people were taken to the hospital.

Crew members and passengers walked or crawled from the burning wreckage after the crash at Teterboro Airport, a small airport about 12 miles from midtown Manhattan that caters to executive jets.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known. The Bombardier Challenger CL-600 had been chartered by Kelso & Co., a New York-based investment firm, to take employees and guests to Chicago.

All 11 people on the plane were taken to the hospital; the most seriously hurt among them was a pilot who had a broken leg. One of those injured in a car was in critical condition. Five firefighters were taken to the hospital with minor injuries, and a man in the warehouse was also hurt.

Florida

3 doctors indicted in fake Botox case

A South Florida doctor and two Arizona physicians have been indicted for their alleged roles in a scheme to distribute a bogus Botox product for use on humans even though the substance hasn’t been approved by the Federal Drug Administration.

Bach McComb, a doctor who worked out of an Oakland Park, Fla., clinic, was named in the 48-page indictment released Wednesday. He, along with three others, contracted severe cases of botulism in November after receiving injections of a mixture of botulinum toxin far more potent than Botox, the popular antiwrinkle drug.

McComb has not been taken into custody, according to U.S. Atty. Marcos Jimenez. He is still in a New Jersey hospital, paralyzed.

Also indicted: Chad Livdahl and Zarah Karim, two Arizona doctors who ran a company called Toxin Research International Inc. They were arrested in Arizona on Wednesday. They will be prosecuted in South Florida.

New York City

Ford pulls ‘lustful’ Super Bowl ad

Ford Motor Co. on Wednesday abruptly yanked a planned Super Bowl advertisement that depicted a clergyman tempted by a new pickup truck.

The ad shows a set of car keys placed on a collection plate; the clergyman then finds a new Lincoln Mark LT truck in the parking lot. When the car’s owner shows up, his little girl smiling and poking her head from behind, the implication is that the child had dropped the keys in the plate.

The clergyman hands over the keys, and is then shown adding the letters L-T to a message board advertising an upcoming sermon — on lust.

The Chicago-based Survivors Networks of those Abused by Priests believed the little girl’s presence in the ad with the clergyman and the word “lust” had sexual overtones, and that Lincoln was playing off news of religious sex scandals to sell cars. The survivors’ group urged Ford to pull the ad and within hours the company obliged.

Atlanta

Vaccine reduces chickenpox deaths

U.S. deaths from chickenpox dropped to the lowest level ever after a vaccine to prevent the childhood disease was introduced in 1995, a study shows.

In the five years before the vaccine, chickenpox caused or contributed to an average of 145 deaths each year. That dropped to 66 in just a few years, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

The death rate was slashed by as much as 92 percent in the 1-to-4-year-old group.

Until the vaccine became available, nearly everyone got a case of chickenpox, which is highly contagious. Healthy children and adults can die from complications that include viral pneumonia, infection of the brain and bleeding.

Now, with 85 percent of young children in the United States getting a vaccine shot, chickenpox cases have dropped from 4 million a year to 800,000.