Today's Globe: health bill, cellphones to change the world, fall death settlement, Stephen Lagakos, swine flu in healthy people, lead poisoning in China

A historic measure aimed at providing access to affordable health coverage to every American cleared a key hurdle yesterday, as the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill it had been painstakingly crafting over many months.

"The good news in yesterday’s Senate Finance Committee vote for health care reform was that Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine joined the effort and rewarded the push for bipartisan backing by President Obama and committee chairman Max Baucus, a Globe editorial says. "The bad news was the bill itself - a small step forward, but too skimpily funded to make the kind of difference that the public is counting on."

It’s an unlikely medical device: a sleek smartphone more suited to a nightclub than a rural health clinic. But it’s loaded with software that allows health workers in the remote northernmost Philippines province of Batanes to dramatically reduce the time it takes to get X-rays to a radiologist - and to get a diagnosis for a patient being tested for tuberculosis. The software, created by a nonprofit organization called Moca, is one of nearly two dozen cellphone-based projects that have sprung from NextLab, a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The family of an 86-year-old Dorchester woman who died after she fell from an operating table following hip surgery has settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Boston Medical Center.

Nearly 30 years ago, before the contaminated wells of Woburn spawned books and the movie “A Civil Action,’’ community activists visited the Harvard School of Public Health to talk about what they saw happening in their suburban city. Among those listening was Stephen Lagakos, a rising young biostatistics professor with a passion for ensuring that his highly technical work helped vulnerable people. Dr. Lagakos died in a car crash Monday, along with his wife, Regina, and his mother, Helen. He was 63 and had been living in Wellesley.

The largest US analysis of hospitalized adult swine flu patients has found almost half were healthy people who did not have asthma or any other chronic illnesses before they got sick.

Nearly 1,000 children in a central Chinese province have tested positive for excessive lead in their blood, state media reported yesterday, the latest of several lead poisoning cases that have involved thousands of children across the country.