NATIONAL NEWS AT A GLANCE Editors: To avoid duplication, please note that all these stories are also moving in longer form. For publication on Friday, Aug. 6. $16.6 MILLION ISSUED IN FINES FOR FATAL POWER PLANT BLAST Federal safety officials Thursday issued $16.6 million in proposed fines in connection with a huge explosion at a power plant that killed six workers in Middletown, Conn., determining that construction companies had blatantly disregarded industry procedures designed to safeguard workers. The fines, the third largest ever issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for a single episode, stem from accusations of 371 violations, including 225 considered 'willful,' found after the Feb. 7 blast, which occurred as flammable natural gas was being shot through a supply pipe to purge it of debris. Fifty people were injured in the explosion. REPORTS SUGGEST 2 NEW PATHS TO HELP HUMANS REGENERATE TISSUE Two research reports published Friday offer novel approaches to the age-old dream of regenerating the body from its own cells. In the first of the two new approaches, a research group at Stanford University has taken a possible first step toward unlocking the human ability to regenerate. By inactivating two genes that work to suppress tumors, they got mouse muscle cells to revert to a younger state, start dividing and help repair tissue. A second approach by Deepak Srivastava and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, have developed a way of reprogramming the ordinary tissue cells of the heart into heart muscle cells. GAY MARRIAGE CHALLENGES PARTIES AHEAD OF MIDTERM ELECTIONS A federal judge's decision Wednesday overturning Proposition 8 -- California's ban on same-sex marriage -- has tossed a largely unwanted issue into the middle of the November midterm elections. The decision, which ruled Proposition 8 unconstitutional, has complicated the political tasks before President Barack Obama, whose aides had to explain in the wake of the decision that the president supported equal gay rights but opposed marriage rights for gays. Meanwhile, Republicans said the issue could actually harm Republicans' chances of wining back one or both houses of Congress from Democrats this fall. IN CALM 911 CALL, KILLER OF 8 SPOKE OF WANTING TO KILL MORE The 911 call lasted just more than four minutes, the rare recorded words of a killer moments after he had slain eight people and was about to end his own life. Throughout much of the call, the voice of Omar Thornton, the 34-year-old beer truck driver, was calm but tinged with exhaustion. He seemed eager to explain his bloody rampage, but unwilling to surrender. Having carried out the state's deadliest attack in recent history Tuesday at a Manchester beer distributorship's warehouse, Thornton delivered what amounted to a spoken suicide note. LITTLE-NOTICED MILESTONE: CEMENT WORK TO PLUG WELL For more than three months, an oil-weary nation has waited for the moment when engineers would begin pumping cement into BP's runaway well, in hopes of plugging its flow for good. That moment arrived quietly Thursday, with cement following the tons of mud already poured into the well in the operation called a static kill. Because no significant amount of oil has leaked since the well was tightly capped July 15, the start of the cementing was almost anticlimactic. By applying cement to the well from a surface vessel, technicians can plug most, if not all, of the drill pipe and oil reservoir below. 