Today's Globe: hospital expansion, diabetes clue, homeless hospital, Cipro, nursing ratios

State health regulators are expected today to make it significantly harder for Boston's teaching hospitals to expand into the suburbs, a move designed to protect smaller community hospitals that feel under siege from their powerful rivals.

Yesterday the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program departed its old inpatient medical respite care facility in Jamaica Plain for a gleaming, $42 million complex in the South End.

A protein made in the liver may give doctors a way to predict years in advance who is at high risk for the most common form of diabetes, a study published yesterday said.

Food and Drug Administration officials imposed the government's most urgent safety warning on Cipro and similar antibiotics, citing evidence that they may lead to tendon ruptures (third item).

"Before its legislative session ends in July, the Massachusetts Senate has an opportunity to protect hospital patients as well as the nurses who care for them by approving the Patient Safety Act that was passed overwhelmingly in the House a month ago," Suzanne Gordon, co-author of "Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care," writes on the op-ed page.