Across the Nation

ALBANY, N.Y. — A federal appeals court Friday blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from easing clean air rules on aging power plants, refineries and factories, one of the regulatory changes that had been among the top environmental priorities of the White House.

The new rules, strongly supported by industry representatives, would have allowed older plants to modernize without having to install the most advanced pollution controls.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington declared that the EPA rules violate the Clean Air Act and that only Congress can authorize such changes.

Fourteen states and a number of cities, including New York, San Francisco and Washington, had sued to block the change in 2003, saying it would allow more air pollution.

"This is an enormous victory for clean air and for the enforcement of the law and an overwhelming rejection of the Bush administration’s efforts to gut the law,” said New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who led the lawsuit for the states. "It is a rejection of a flawed policy.”

Two more women

die after using the

RU-486 abortion pill

WASHINGTON — Two more women have died after using the abortion pill RU-486, regulators said Friday in a warning that brought renewed calls for pulling the controversial drug from the market.

The organization that provided the pill to the two women said it would immediately stop disregarding the approved instructions for the pill’s use.

The Food and Drug Administration warned doctors to watch for a rare but deadly infection previously implicated in four deaths of women who had taken the drug. The drug, also called Mifeprex or mifepristone, has not been proved to be the cause in any of those cases.

Nor has the FDA confirmed the cause of the latest two deaths. However, in one of them, the woman’s symptoms appeared to resemble those in the cluster of four cases in California where the women died from an infection of the bloodstream, or sepsis.

Those women did not follow FDA-approved instructions for the pill-triggered abortion, which requires swallowing three tablets of one drug, followed by two of another two days later.

Instead of swallowing the final two tablets, the second course of pills was inserted vaginally in the four women, an "off-label” use that studies have shown effective and that has been recommended by a majority of the nation’s abortion clinics. That use does not have federal approval though studies have indicated it produces fewer side effects.<