State News-Thursday, Sept. 7th

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - A new report says Pennsylvania is among 43 states that fail to make college affordable. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education report says that minus financial aid, community college costs amount to 26 percent of an average Pennsylvania family's income.And the price of attending four-year public colleges and universities amounts to 39 percent. But a state Education Department spokesman says the findings are misleading -- noting that the figures combine the "state-related"universities like Penn State along with the 14 state-owned universities. He says there's been a nine percent drop in net tuition cost at the state-owned schools. That's due to an expansion of Pennsylvania's college grant program.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U-S Justice Department estmiates that more than half of America's prison and jail inmates have symptoms of a mental health problem. But fewer than one-third of those with problems are getting treatment behind bars. Pennsylvania Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard says mental health problems among Pennsylvania inmates had leveled off in the last year or so after rising for five of six years. Now 18 percent of Pennsylvania inmates have a mental problem requiring some treatment. That includes just under four percent with serious mental illness including schizophrenics and psychotics. Beard says in Pennsylvania, every inmate gets a mental-health exam.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Senator Arlen Specter is accusing a stem-cell research company of misrepresenting its work. Advanced Cell Technology drew fire yesterday from both Specter and Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. The company said last month it had developed a technique for removing from an embryo a single stem cell that can be developed into a stem cell line without destroying the embryo. The company's claim was echoed in an initial e-mail to reporters from Nature magazine. Later, it was disclosed that the company in its experiments had removed more than one stem cell from the embryos it used, killing the embryos. The company's vice president for research defended how A-C-T announced the development at a hearing Wednesday. He says his company developed a technique that works.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- The president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO says he was wrong to have referred to Adolf Hitler while criticizing Sen. Rick Santorum in a newspaper interview. The comment was in a Sunday story by The (Harrisburg) Patriot-News that contrasted the styles of Santorum, the Senate's number-three Republican, and his low-key challenger, Democrat Bob Casey. In it, George said Santorum feeds off negative passions and said "Some see him as Hitler." Today, the remark drew belated criticism from Santorum's campaign and Senator Elizabeth Dole, chairwoman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who called it "outrageous." Ironically, Santorum himself came under fire for referring to Hitler in defending his party's right to ban Democratic filibusters designed to block votes on President Bush's judicial nominations in May 2005. To explain his own choice of words, George borrowed a Santorum quote from that earlier dispute: "It was meant to dramatize the principle of an argument, not to characterize."