Large brush fire sweeps Fens area
By Ursula Munn, Globe Correspondent – April 5, 2010

A brush fire that broke out in the Fens this evening was put out after a “good two-and-a-half hours of chasing it,” according to Stephen MacDonald, Boston Fire Department spokesman.

About 50 firefighters battled the blaze, he said, which started along The Fenway side of the Muddy River and eventually jumped over to the Park Drive side. The only damage was the burning of vegetation, but police had to shut down nearby roads for a short period of time, MacDonald said.

“I guess one thing we’re fortunate for is that there was no Red Sox game tonight,” he said.

MacDonald added that any number of things may have ignited the fire, such as a carelessly discarded cigarette.

[Follow this link for more photos]

[Go here for Daily Free Press coverage of the fire.]

City asks exempt sector for help – Task force readies payment formula; Some nonprofits balk at proposals
By Andrew Ryan – Globe Staff / April 6, 2010

Boston’s hospitals, universities, and other tax-exempt nonprofits may be asked to contribute tens of millions of dollars more to city coffers to help pay for basic municipal services such as police and public works.

After 14 months, a mayoral task force has nearly completed its work examining the city’s uneven system of individual agreements with such institutions, under which they voluntarily pay cash and provide services in lieu of property taxes. Some pay millions; others pay significantly less.

The city is pushing institutions to gradually increase contributions to 25 percent of what they would owe in taxes if they were not exempt, a change that would more than triple the current amounts paid by some of the city’s biggest landowners.

Hospitals and universities say that higher payments in lieu of property taxes would force them to lay off workers and pass on to students and patients higher tuition and medical costs.

The new formula, which the city panel will begin finalizing at a meeting today, would seek to increase payments among hospitals and universities alone by almost $25 million over five or more years, according to preliminary figures.

In the search for cancer drugs, mice get new role
By Carolyn Y. Johnson – Globe Staff / April 5, 2010

Dr. Pier Paolo Pandolfi has begun an experiment that could radically change the way new cancer drugs are tested: Not far from where his colleagues give trial treatments to patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, he’s giving the same regimen to mice.

Normally, mice are test subjects for drugs long before they make it into the clinic. Animal models of disease are important to better understand cancer and to determine which of myriad compounds are safe and promising enough to be tried in people.

But in the new work, funded with a $4.2 million economic stimulus grant from the National Cancer Institute, mice are receiving treatment in tandem with humans, in the hope that what is learned at the bedside can be integrated with results from the lab bench to speed up and streamline the development of cancer drugs.

The novel strategy is an attempt to address a bottleneck that has emerged in the cancer drug pipeline because of a proliferation of drugs in development.

Surgery to keep James Levine off the podium longer
By Keith Powers/Boston Herald – April 6, 2010

The news just keeps getting worse for James Levine.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 66-year-old conductor, who last month canceled his remaining season performances due to back pain, is now scheduled to undergo back surgery this week. The procedure follows an operation for a herniated disk performed last September. It has forced Levine to cancel his remaining performances conducting New York’s Metropolitan Opera and could put his appearance at Tanglewood’s July opening night in jeopardy.

But so far the BSO is not saying.

“We will know more about his Tanglewood schedule once we have a better sense of the recuperation time needed to heal from his upcoming surgery,” managing director Mark Volpe said in an e-mail.