Nation in brief

No deal yet for auto workers

DETROIT - United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said Saturday the union had reached no agreements with any of Detroit's Big Three automakers, whose contracts expire at midnight tonight.

Gettelfinger, speaking at the AFL-CIO-sponsored LaborFest, would not speculate when agreements would be reached.

"We're keeping all options open," Gettelfinger said.

Sources familiar with the talks have told the Associated Press that a historic simultaneous resolution is likely before the four-year pacts expire.

Representatives of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group declined to discuss the talks substantively on Saturday.

The UAW and Big Three, along with suppliers Delphi Corp. and Visteon Corp., have been talking behind closed doors since mid July. The pacts will cover wages and benefits for 300,000 workers plus pension payments and benefits for a half-million retirees and their spouses.

A pioneering gene researcher and the discoverers of a powerful therapy for autoimmune disorders are the winners of the 2003 Lasker awards for medical research.

Christopher Reeve, the actor whose struggle against paralysis has given new hope to patients with severe spinal injuries, has won the Lasker public service award.

The awards are being announced today by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation.

Dr. Robert Roeder of Rockefeller University in New York City won the basic medical research award for his studies over the past 30 years into how genes are switched on and off in cells, a process called transcription.

Dr. Marc Feldmann and Sir Ravinder Maini of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in London won the clinical medical research award for a discovery that led to development of powerful drugs that can soothe joint pain and restore mobility among people with rheumatoid arthritis.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - AFL-CIO president John Sweeney was arrested with at least 100 demonstrators Saturday for blocking traffic as they marched through city streets in support of two striking Yale University unions.

Thousands of members of Northeast unions converged on New Haven for the demonstration in support of two unions representing about 4,000 clerical, technical and maintenance workers at Yale. The unions went on strike three weeks ago.

Astronomers for the first time have detected sound waves emanating from a supermassive black hole, researchers said. With a frequency of 10-million years, the wave is the deepest "note" found in the universe - a B-flat that is 57 octaves below a piano's middle C.

Researchers said heat generated by the sound wave might explain why gases moving within clusters of galaxies do not cool down to form more stars - an anomaly that has puzzled astrophysicists for years.

"We see about three ripples, then they die out," said lead researcher Andrew Fabian, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England. "It could be distance, or the limitations of the telescope, but we think they are putting energy into the gas to stop it from cooling any further."

Fabian and co-investigator Steven Allen, also of the Institute of Astronomy, used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory orbiting Earth to detect and photograph the sound waves coming out of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Perseus cluster, a group of galaxies about 250-million light years from Earth.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times 490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 Contact the Times | Privacy Policy Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright