September 27, 2005

WellPoint, the giant health insurer, is near a deal to acquire WellChoice, the largest health insurer in New York State and the parent of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, for about $6.5 billion in cash and stock, according to executives close to the negotiations. A deal, if completed, would give WellPoint, already the nation's largest health insurer with 28 million members, an expanded foothold in the Northeast. More important, a deal in New York would put it in direct competition with Oxford Health Plans in New York, a unit of UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint's acquisitive rival.

One of the most poignant passages in E.L. Doctorow's new novel ''The March'' quotes a letter of condolence from Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to Gen. William J. Hardee after Hardee, like Sherman, lost a son named Willie. ''How unnatural is this age when, in violation of God's grand stratagem, the young are unbodied of their souls before the old,'' Sherman writes. This ought to attest to the acuity and comprehensiveness of Mr. Doctorow's research into Civil War literature -- except that it doesn't. How did he find this particular sample of Sherman's writing? ''I don't know if I should tell you,'' he said recently, sitting in a restaurant decorated with redundant images (for the author of ''Ragtime'') of Old New York. He paused slyly, considered, then relented. ''O.K., that's mine,'' he said. ''I wrote that letter.''

Attorney General Peter C. Harvey charged in state court on Monday that 20 gas stations in New Jersey and the oil companies that supplied them violated state fuel pricing and consumer laws by raising their prices more than once in a single day during the recent run-up in gasoline prices. The civil action makes New Jersey the first state to take legal action in response to the growing anxiety over suddenly and steeply rising gasoline prices. According to oil industry and public policy analysts, New Jersey is the only state to have a law barring multiple price increases on gasoline in a 24-hour period.

For the second time in less than a year, the players union has agreed to reopen baseball's collective bargaining agreement with the owners and strengthen the testing, and penalties, for steroid use. But although the union agreed in principle to a player possibly being barred for life after three positive steroid tests and also agreed for the first time to tests for amphetamines, the response did not please Commissioner Bud Selig. He has called for a no-exception policy in which a player would be barred for life after a third positive steroid test.

Not down near bedrock in the depths of ground zero. Not across the waters of Upper New York Bay at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. But 536 feet in the sky over Lower Manhattan -- that is where construction workers have found what may be the newest evidence of 9/11's appalling human toll, four years after the fact. On Thursday and again yesterday, even as a debate raged far below over the appropriateness of building the International Freedom Center on the World Trade Center memorial site, workers preparing to dismantle the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street came across several bone fragments in the rooftop gravel.