COLUMBIA, S.C. - On a day when she had hoped to woo black South Carolina voters, Hillary Rodham Clinton spent yesterday fighting charges of racial insensitivity and launching multipronged attacks at rival Barack Obama.

Joining the fray was Clinton family friend Bob Johnson, the influential African-American founder of BET, who made a controversial remark seen by some as an insinuation about Obama’s admitted use of cocaine in his youth.

Clinton began the day defending her civil rights record to Tim Russert during a combative and occasionally defensive appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” She spoke as debate swirled over whether she had given the late President Lyndon B. Johnson more credit than Martin Luther King Jr. for advancing civil rights.

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Lockheed Martin has agreed to pay $2.5 million to end a racial discrimination suit brought by an electrician who says he was subject to harassment and threats to his life during the two years he worked for the giant military contractor.The settlement, announced Wednesday, January 2, is the biggest award ever obtained by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of an individual in a racial discrimination case. The consent decree reached with Lockheed has been filed in the U.S. Court for the District of Hawaii and is subject to the court’s approval.

In addition to the payment to Charles Daniels, an African-American avionics electrician who worked for the company from September 1999 to August 2001, Lockheed fired or barred from rehiring the team leader and four co-workers who verbally abused him. The company also agreed to establish a special anti-discrimination training program at its aircraft logistics centers.

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Minority women have a 65 percent chance of getting breast cancer, says a recent study conducted by the Northern California Cancer Center and Stanford University. Responsible for this alarming percentage is the BRCA1 gene, which appears to present abnormal mutations in Ashkenazi Jew women, as well as in Hispanic and African-American women, according to latest studies.

The new cancer research showed that although everyone carries the BRCA1 gene, it is not harmful in any way. On the contrary, it is responsible for making a protein that helps cells repair DNA. The problems appear though when the gene suffers a mutation, which will consequently increase the chance to produce cancer.

According to these studies, focused on multiracial subjects, 8.3 percent of the Ashkenazi Jew females with breast cancer have a mutated BRCA1 gene, while the prevalence of the mutation in other minorities, although not as big, still raises concerns: 3.5 percent for Hispanic women, 2.2 percent in non-Hispanic white women, 1.3 percent among African-American and 0.5 percent of Asian-Americans.

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