Across the Nation

The editorial, written by the journal’s editor in chief, Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, executive editor Dr. Gregory D. Curfman and managing editor Stephen Morrissey, also alleges the study’s authors deleted other relevant data before submitting their article for publication.

"Taken together, these inaccuracies and deletions call into question the integrity of the data on adverse cardiovascular events in this article,” the doctors wrote. Excluding the three heart attacks "made certain calculations and conclusions in the article incorrect.”

Adverse cardiovascular events include heart attacks, strokes and deaths.

House passes tax

cut to preserve

lower capital gains

WASHINGTON — The House voted Thursday to make sure investors hang onto lowered tax rates for capital gains and dividends for an extra two years.

Voting mostly along party lines, the House narrowly passed a $56 billion, five-year package of tax cuts that retains reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends in 2009 and 2010. The vote was 234-197.

Republicans said their record of tax cutting revitalized a sluggish economy, and the White House praised the bill. "These extensions are necessary to provide certainty for investors and businesses and are essential to sustaining long-term economic growth,” the president’s budget office said in a statement.

Democrats said tax cuts for investment income, and much of the GOP’s economic agenda, help Republican friends and ignore average workers.

"Everybody loses under this bill. Everybody, that is, except the top one-fifth of 1 percent,” said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. "Some might call them the superrich. Apparently, the majority calls them donors.”

Energy Secretary: Gulf oil, natural gas won’t recover until summer

WASHINGTON — Oil and natural gas production in the Gulf Coast area probably will not recover from this year’s hurricanes until next summer, Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said Thursday, urging conservation as the cost to heat homes is expected to soar this winter.

"The infrastructure of our country took a real blow with Hurricanes Rita and Katrina,” Bodman told reporters outside the White House.

"Even to this day, we have about a third of the natural gas and a third of the oil that is produced in the Gulf of Mexico still shut-in due to the damage that was done,” he said. "That’s not going to be back up and online, my guess is, until summertime.”

The latest figures by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, however, indicate a somewhat brighter picture, saying about a quarter of the Gulf’s daily natural gas production remains shut in, not a third.

Short supplies will contribute to high energy prices this heating season, said Bodman, who urged Americans to step up conservation.

His department’s Energy Information Administration recently predicted that households heating with natural gas can expect to spend from 50 percent to 70 percent more this winter, depending on location. The agency this week scaled back its heating cost predictions slightly because of mild weather in November.

With the recent onslaught of cold, stormy weather in the Midwest and Northeast, natural gas prices surged on Thursday by 9 percent to a new high of nearly $15 per thousand cubic feet for gas to be delivered in January. A year ago the price was $7 per thousand cubic feet.

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