Today's Globe: BU lab fire, therapist on trial, tainted hogs, Afghan infant mortality, nursing home oversight

Smoldering medical waste left in a sterilizing machine spawned the cloud of smoke that wafted through a laboratory last month on the campus of Boston University's medical school, city health officials and the university said yesterday.

Lucy Wightman (at right in photo), who drew stares in the 1970s and '80s as the celebrated stripper Princess Cheyenne in Boston's Combat Zone, held the gaze of 16 jurors yesterday as a state prosecutor accused her of fraudulently posing as a licensed psychologist and treating children whose parents had no idea she lacked the proper credentials.

Up to 6,000 hogs in California, Kansas, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah that ate pet food tainted with industrial chemicals cannot be safely sold to humans, federal authorities said yesterday, and should be euthanized at the farms where they have been held from the market.

Infant mortality has dropped by 18 percent in Afghanistan, in one of the first real signs of recovery for the country five years after the fall of the Taliban regime, health officials said yesterday.

The Department of Health and Human Services is failing in its duty to make sure that nursing homes correct their shortcomings and then continue to meet quality standards, a Globe editorial says.