Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani's law firm lobbies for Citgo Petroleum Corp., which is controlled by the Venezuelan state oil company and President Hugo Chavez, but the firm said on Wednesday that Giuliani has never worked on the account.

The leftist Chavez is an ardent foe of President George W. Bush's administration and a bane to conservatives whose support Giuliani will need as he seeks the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

Records filed at the Texas Ethics Commission showed the law firm, Houston-based Bracewell & Giuliani, may have received up to $170,000 from Citgo since 2005.

A spokeswoman for Giuliani's campaign, which has been buoyed by recent opinion polls showing him leading his Republican rivals, declined to answer questions, but provided an e-mail statement denouncing Chavez.

"Mayor Giuliani believes Hugo Chavez is not a friend of the United States and his influence continues to grow because of our increasing reliance on foreign sources of oil," the statement read.

It concluded with a call for developing alternative sources of fuel to replace foreign crude oil. Venezuela is the No. 4 oil supplier to the United States.

Jerry Salzman, longtime outside counsel for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, joined Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom on Monday, leaving the law firm he co-founded as it winds down operations.

Freeman, Freeman & Salzman is going out of business after 40 years, he said. The firm had only nine lawyers after some partners retired in recent years.

"People were getting older, and it stopped being sustainable as we were getting smaller," said Salzman. "It was a good run."

Yet, Salzman said he did not want to quit working.

Who could blame him? The Merc recently agreed to acquire CBOT Holdings Inc., parent of the Chicago Board of Trade, in an $8 billion transaction that would create the world's largest futures exchange. The deal awaiting regulatory approval from the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Salzman joins one of the nation's elite law firms, and one he's worked with over several years. Skadden has represented the Merc in several matters, including its reorganization, initial public offering and, now, its merger.

Salzman is one of the few legal experts in derivatives regulation left in Chicago, as the city is no longer the banking center it used to be. He hopes to help build the practice at Skadden.

Meanwhile, a group of Salzman's former colleagues, he said, is moving to Jenner & Block, including Lee Freeman Jr. Freeman could not be reached for comment.

LEGAL AID: The charitable arm of the Chicago Bar Association for the first time has launched a fundraising campaign to help address what it calls a crisis in the state's legal aid system. The funds will be used to help supplement the disparity in incomes of lawyers who work for Chicago-area pro-bono and legal aid organizations compared with their counterparts in private practice.

Legal aid attorneys typically start at $38,500, according to a report from the Chicago Bar Foundation and Illinois Coalition for Equal Justice. A 2006 law school graduate earns $145,000 at one of the city's top-tier law firms.

The report forecast an impending exodus of legal aid lawyers because of the low pay.

Stopping the departures is an immediate priority for the legal community, said Kimball Anderson, president of the Chicago Bar Foundation and a partner at Winston & Strawn. Otherwise, the legal aid system is headed for collapse.

There are about 250 legal aid attorneys in the Chicago area to serve the more than 750,000 Cook County residents living in poverty.

The foundation distributed brochures and donation cards to about 35 law firms and corporations. Partners are being asked to contribute $500, and associates, $100, said Tony Valukas, a partner at Jenner & Block and chairman of the fundraising effort.

A 60-year-old bookkeeper who embezzled more than $1 million from a small, family-owned law firm in downtown Cincinnati will spend the next six years in prison.

Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Charles J. Kubicki Jr. ordered the sentence this morning for Candace Vail, who pleaded guilty last month to a charge of theft. Kubicki also ordered Vail to re-pay the $1,038,499 she stole from from Goodman & Goodman between Jan. 1, 2001, and Feb. 16, 2006.

Vail’s excuse in a letter to the court? She wasn’t paid enough and often did errands for the attorneys she worked for without extra compensation.

Vail used the money to bankroll her son's landscaping business, according to Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Andy Berghausen.

Court records show Vail filed for bankruptcy last October.

Vail took client checks to Goodman & Goodman from the mail, deposited them into little-used firm accounts and then wrote 1,325 checks to herself and her family. She forged attorney names on another 91 checks she wrote to herself, according to court records.

She even duped the Ohio Supreme Court, which began investigating shortly before she was caught. When the firm's trust account, which by law must be kept by law firms, was overdrawn, the bank alerted the Ohio Supreme Court.

Vail intercepted letters notifying the attorneys about the investigation, forged attorney signatures on documents and told Ohio Supreme Court officials they should deal with her. That investigation has been resolved since the theft was discovered, Goodman said.

The firm realized money was missing on March 8 when one of the firm's attorneys went to the bank himself and discovered several bounced checks. Vail was immediately fired, Goodman said.

Martha B. Sosman, one of three Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court judges who voted against the landmark decision legalizing gay marriage in the state, has died, the court said Sunday. She was 56.

Sosman was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005 and had been participating in some cases by watching Webcasts of oral arguments, reading legal briefs at home and talking with other justices and law clerks by telephone.

Republican Gov. Paul Cellucci hailed Sosman as a "conservative" jurist when he appointed her to the high court as an associate justice in 2000.

She said the argument to define gay partnerships as marriages versus civil unions was "a squabble over the names to be used."

Sosman was a former assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts and founded an all-women law firm in 1989, where she worked until she was appointed to the Superior Court in 1993.

Responding to a spate of deaths in clinical trials, the Food and Drug Administration yesterday issued its most severe warning possible for drugs widely used to treat anemia in kidney disease patients and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

The "black box" warnings placed on the prescribing label for Amgen Inc.'s Epogen and Aranesp and Johnson & Johnson's Procrit are expected to result in more cautious dosing by doctors.

Use of the drugs has escalated as physicians have sought to improve the quality of life of anemic patients by using them to stimulate creation of energy-boosting red blood cells. Marketing by manufacturers has reinforced the trend. But the FDA said yesterday that recent clinical trials have shown treatment beyond recommended limits increases the risk of death from heart attack and stroke in kidney patients, and of tumor growth and death in some cancer patients.

The agency advised doctors to give patients the minimum dose required to reduce the need for blood transfusions. It said antianemia drugs should not be used in an attempt to improve the quality of life of cancer patients because those claims are unproven. The FDA allowed claims of lifestyle benefits to remain for kidney patients, but said it is re-examining the validity of patient questionnaires about factors used to support the claims.

Recent concerns about the potential dangers of antianemia drugs and their overuse have been heightened by Medicare reimbursement policies for kidney dialysis treatment, which provide a profit incentive for clinics to administer more Epogen.

Medicare loosened its policy last year to let clinics get paid even if patients exceed the FDA's recommended red blood cell limits. The National Kidney Foundation -- in a set of guidelines paid for by Amgen -- suggested last year that higher targets for red blood cell counts are appropriate, citing statistical studies that showed lower mortality. The foundation is revisiting those guidelines.

The new warnings would effectively reduce the red blood cell target to about 10 grams per deciliter, compared with the upper limit of 12 grams that remains on the label, and the 13 grams permitted under last year's updated Medicare policy. The warnings are advisory, and the targets are still left up to the discretion of physicians, the FDA said.

The FDA said it has alerted Medicare to its latest findings. A spokesman at Medicare, which spends about $2 billion annually on Epogen for dialysis patients, did not respond to a phone message yesterday.

Black box warnings, said Dr. Eric P. Winer, chief of the breast cancer center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, will likely make doctors more cautious about prescribing antianemia drugs.

"These are drugs that have been somewhat overused. I don't think it's been without some effort on the marketing end," he said. "There has been a tendency, I think, for patients, and to some extent health providers, to attribute more fatigue to anemia than deserves to be attributed."

The warnings tarnished the image of a class of drugs that was among the biopharmaceutical industry's first big triumphs and has generated billions of dollars for Amgen and Johnson & Johnson.

Aranesp, which accounted for $4.1 billion in sales last year, is Amgen's second-generation version of the drug. Epogen, its original form, generated $2.5 billion in revenue last year, most of it in federal Medicare reimbursements for its use in dialysis treatment. Amgen makes Procrit, which is identical to Epogen, and licenses Johnson & Johnson to sell it. Procrit sales last year totaled $3.1 billion.

Amgen's stock dropped 2.1 percent to $60.86 yesterday. Johnson & Johnson stock slipped 0.7 percent to $62.14.

In November, an article in New England Journal of Medicine described a clinical trial of Procrit called CHOIR that was cut short because of higher rates of death from heart attack and stroke in kidney patients receiving larger doses. The dosing regimen in the trial pushed red blood cell counts higher than is recommended by the FDA. The results echoed a study of Epogen in kidney dialysis patients that was suspended in 1996, also due to an unexpectedly high death rate during testing.

In October, a trial of Aranesp in Danish patients with head and neck cancers was halted early because of apparent increases in tumor growth. Amgen said it told the FDA about the trial immediately, but it did not alert investors, leading to an informal review disclosed last week by the Securities and Exchange Commission . News of the suspended study was not known until it was reported in February by The Cancer Letter , a trade publication in Washington.

In February, Amgen reported on another study of Aranesp in cancer patients not undergoing chemotherapy treatment, which resulted in a higher percentage of deaths. The causes of death have not been disclosed. The FDA has scheduled a May meeting of its Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee to discuss the new data.

Mayor Frank Melton was released from jail Thursday after the Mississippi Supreme Court vacated his arrest and recused Judge Tomie Green from the case, according to court documents provided to The Associated Press.

Presiding Justice William Waller Jr. issued the orders without further comment.

Melton spoke to reporters at an impromptu news conference in front of the gates of his Jackson home after he arrived there from jail.

"It was quite a humbling experience," Melton said on Jackson news channel WAPT, noting he cleaned three bathrooms Thursday alongside other inmates.

"We're going to make this a great, great city," the 57-year-old mayor said. "I'm back on the job as of right now."

Melton had appointed Jackson City Councilman Frank Bluntson to be the city's interim mayor in an executive order late Wednesday.

The mayor turned himself in at the county jail Wednesday and was booked into the medical ward to await a hearing on whether he violated his probation on a misdemeanor weapons conviction.

Melton, who recently had heart surgery, checked himself into a hospital with chest pains a week earlier, the day Green issued a warrant for his arrest.

The mayor pleaded no-contest in November to a misdemeanor charge of carrying a pistol on a college campus and guilty to two other misdemeanor weapons violations. The plea deal spared him a felony conviction that would have forced him from office.

Melton was given a six-month suspended sentence on each count, one year of probation and fined $1,500.

Melton is a wealthy former TV executive and one-time state drug enforcement agency chief. He won a landslide election in 2005 on the promise of rooting out crime in Jackson.

He became a fixture on nightly newscasts, wearing fatigues, carrying guns and criticizing the district attorney's office for not putting away enough criminals. He cruised the inner city with police and often took troubled children back to his home in a gated community.

Separately, the mayor and his two former bodyguards are to stand trial April 23 on allegations they had roles in the use of sledge hammers to damage a building the mayor considered a drug haven.