Today's Globe

French drug maker Sanofi-Aventis SA yesterday went public with an offer to buy Genzyme Corp. for $18.5 billion in cash, a move intended to step up pressure on the Cambridge company after what Sanofi executives said was a rebuff from Genzyme’s board.

Comfort Zone Camp is a nonprofit that is expanding its bereavement camps for children into Massachusetts. The camp helps youths deal with death in the family.

A dozen years after Massachusetts attempted to ban storefront tobacco ads within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds, the signs remain prolific and prominent in Boston's lower-income neighborhoods.

The US Department of Agriculture has announced a wide-scale recall of ground beef, including products sold in nine BJ’S Wholesale Club stores in Massachusetts, due to possible contamination with the bacteria Escherichia coli (third item).

Middleborough canceled or rescheduled all outside activities from dusk until dawn yesterday following a diagnosis of Eastern equine encephalitis in a Middleborough man (fifth item).

Thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD have been given a potent antipsychotic called Seroquel over the last nine years, helping to make it one of the US Department of Veteran Affair’s top drug expenditures and the No. 5 best-selling drug in the nation. Several soldiers and veterans have died while on the medication, raising concerns among some military families that the government is not being upfront about the drug’s risks.

Two New York State legislators want to require farmers in the state to vaccinate their chickens against salmonella.

"New egg safety rules just went into effect this summer, but the FDA itself should add a requirement that producers vaccinate their hens against salmonella," a Globe editorial says.

Even as supporters of human embryonic stem cell research are reeling from last week’s sudden cutoff of federal funding, another portentous landmark is quietly approaching: the world’s first attempt to carefully test the cells in people.

Millions of children who survived the floods that ravaged Pakistan over the last month are now vulnerable to a second wave of death caused by waterborne disease, according to the United Nations.

"Between the catastrophes of the Haiti earthquake and the Pakistan floods, there was actually some good news this spring on the global health front, which offers hope that the United Nations’ ambitious millennium development goals might not be at a standstill. Though a great deal remains to be done, all of us are living longer, fewer mothers are dying in childbirth, and fewer children are dying before school age," a Eli Y. Adashi, professor of medical science and immediate past dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University, writes on the opinion page.