Sen. Frank Lautenberg, the oldest member of the Senate, died this morning of viral pneumonia. The 89-year-old Democrat was the longest-serving senator in New Jersey and the last senator to have served in World War II. Lautenberg had been fighting health problems for years, including stomach cancer, and had announced his plans not to seek reelection in 2014. He returned to the Senate floor in a wheelchair on April 17 to vote in favor of expanding background checks on gun purchases. Republican Gov. Chris Christie will appoint someone to fill the vacancy left by Lautenberg, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker has spoken about running for the Senate in 2014.
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Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that police can take DNA samples for people arrested for “serious crimes,” meaning a person’s DNA will forever be in the system, whether he or she is guilty or innocent. Justice Samuel Alito called the decision “the most important criminal-procedure case that this court has heard in decades,” and the 5-4 decision caused some unusual alignments: Justice Antonin Scalia joined with the three liberal members dissenting. Scalia wrote an angry dissent for himself, saying the decision violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unwarranted search and seizure. “This will solve extra crime, to be sure,” Scalia wrote. “But so will taking your DNA whenever you fly on an airplane.” A suspected rapist in Maryland had been arrested on an assault charge when police took his DNA, linking him back to a 2003 rape. A Maryland Court of Appeals threw out the case, but the Supreme Court now upheld the conviction.
June 3, 2013 11:18 AM
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Study: 1 in 3 New Marriages Start Online
We love our computers, and now we are increasingly turning to them to find love online, according to a study released Monday. Researchers found that more than a third of new marriages started online and that those relationships were slightly happier than those that began more traditionally. The study, which surveyed more than 19,000 people who married between 2005 and 2012, also found that roughly 45 percent of the couples who met online found each other through dating websites. The rest met through social networking, chat rooms, and other online forums.
June 3, 2013 7:17 PM
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On Monday 3 June, the Guardian
published an interview with the actor Michael Douglas in which he said that his cancer was "caused by HPV (human papillomavirus), which actually comes from cunnilingus".
Allen Burry, a spokesman for the actor, has since denied that Douglas said that oral sex was the cause of his own cancer, but was merely one of the many causes of oral cancer. "In a discussion with the newspaper," the Associated Press
quotes Burry as saying, "they talked about the causes of oral cancer, one of which was oral sex, which is noted and has been known for a while now."
The Guardian firmly denies this charge of misrepresentation. Mr Burry was not present at the Guardian's interview with Michael Douglas; the only two people present were Mr Douglas and the Guardian writer, Xan Brooks. Here is the audio file of the relevant part of the interview, along with a verbatim transcript of that section.
Xan Brooks: Do you feel, in hindsight, that you overloaded your system? Overloaded your system with drugs, smoking, drink?
Michael Douglas: No. No. Ah, without getting too specific, this particular cancer is caused by something called HPV, which actually comes about from cunnilingus.
