Free Republic

RALEIGH -- With posters and candles, about 30 people held a vigil Friday night outside the Wake County jail to support a man who was arrested Feb. 29 during a protest at a legislative committee hearing and is now being held for federal immigration authorities. Uriel Alberto was one of three people charged with disorderly conduct after a demonstration near the conclusion of a state House committee hearing on immigration policy. Wearing T-shirts that said "Undocumented and Unafraid," they began shouting after Republican state Rep. George Cleveland suggested illegal immigrants who come as workers bring crime to the state. Taken...

PHILADELPHIA — His patient, a spunky Italian-American woman in her 60s, was waiting in an exam room down the hall for the answer: Was the experimental drug stopping her deadly skin cancer? But as Dr. Keith Flaherty read out the measurements of her tumors from the latest CT scan, he could not keep the distress from his voice. “She’s worse,” he said to the clinical trial nurse at the University of Pennsylvania’s melanoma clinic. Like the 17 other patients on the drug trial — the corporate lawyer, the receptionist with young children, the Philadelphia philanthropist — the woman known in...

ORLANDO, Fla. — On a sunny afternoon last June, Dr. Keith Flaherty stood before a large room packed with oncologists from around the world and described the extraordinary recovery of the melanoma patients in the experimental drug trial he was leading. It was a moment he had looked forward to for months. Beyond a breakthrough for melanoma, the results were a promising sign for an approach to treatment for all forms of cancer that he and others had championed as more effective and less toxic than standard chemotherapy. But even as he flashed the slide of his favorite graph, showing...