Ancil Delaney served his country as a soldier during World War II and returned home to spend the next 30 years of life working for Johns Manville Corporation in New Jersey. His job involved working in a plant that produced roofing shingles containing asbestos.

He died a few years after the class action settlement that sent Johns Manville into bankruptcy to avoid paying the full dollar amount of claims employees filed for unknowingly working with substances that caused cancer. Ancil L. Delaney died penniless never having received but a fraction of his share of the asbestos settlement.

On February 15, 2006, Senate Bill 852 was narrowly defeated. The bill would have established a $140 billion trust fund to be administered by the federal government to handle asbestos related claims from victims. The trust fund would have limited the amount of claims victims could assess against any single company (involved in the mining of the substance or in the production of products containing the substance).

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ATLANTA (AP)-A bill that would pave the way for Atlanta Gas Light to bill customers for construction of a new $300 million pipeline has cleared a Senate committee, after the panel's chairman called for a vote on the measure once Democrats had left the room.

The highly unusual move by state Sen. Mitch Seabaugh, R-Sharpsburg, came under attack from critics who said it did Georgians a disservice.

"Consumers who will have to pay for this pipeline were misled as to when this bill would be voted on and were given no time to digest the substitute or lobby for improvements," Jim Kulstad, a lobbyist for Common Cause Georgia, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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After bouncing around from court to court for four years, lawsuits filed by the Atlanta Humane Society and its director, Bill Garrett, against two women who criticized the organization, were dismissed by the Georgia Court of Appeals as having no merit. The Appeals Court concluded that the cases should never have gotten past the trial court phase, and that both suits should have been dismissed by the judges in a summary judgment.

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