GOP senator: Sotomayor group’s ‘extreme positions’
WASHINGTON — A top Republican senator says a Puerto Rican legal advocacy group advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor took extreme positions on capital punishment, abortion and racial quotas.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions says it’s absurd for the White House to argue that documents detailing the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund’s activities while Sotomayor sat on its board are not relevant to her nomination.
He’s the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee evaluating the federal appeals court judge.
The White House says the panel already has all relevant information on Sotomayor.
Sessions says more PRLDEF documents could shed light on Sotomayor’s her views on racial preferences in employment.
NASA astronaut takes Twitter to space in Spanish, English
WASHINGTON — NASA has tweeted in space, but now one of its astronauts is breaking a new space Twitter barrier. He’ll tweet from space in Spanish and English.
Astronaut Jose Hernandez grew up in a migrant farming family and didn’t learn English until he was 12. He is scheduled to fly aboard the space shuttle Discovery in August and tweet bilingually from orbit. It will be his first flight.
His twitter account is astro_jose. He has already started tweeting in both languages while training on the ground.
NASA says this is the agency’s first Twitter account in Spanish.
Baaad news? Global warming now reducing size of sheep
WASHINGTON — Like the wool sweater that emerges from the dryer a size too small, global warming seems to be shrinking sheep.
On average, wild Soay sheep on Scotland’s island Hirta are 5 percent smaller today than they were in 1985, according to a team of researchers led by Tim Coulson of Imperial College London.
“The decrease in body size was due to a reduction in growth rates caused, in part, by the changing climate,” Coulson said in an interview via e-mail.
Evolution favors the development of large sheep, which can more easily survive harsh winters, Coulson explained. So the researchers became curious about the overall decline in size of the animals on Hirta.
They discovered that as the climate has grown milder, small lambs that would not have survived previous winters were now living to grow up and reproduce.
The find adds to the understanding of how change occurs in many types of animals, he said, including birds, fish and mammals.
It shows how evolution and ecology each play a role in change, Coulson said: “And that, for our wild sheep at least, climate change is having a detectable effect on body size — a trait that is partly determined by genes — and that this compliments previous research showing how climate change can influence population size.”
Police: Conn. teens mishear sex screams, assault man
HARTFORD, Conn. — A 16-year-old girl thought she heard her mother being assaulted by her boyfriend and rounded up some friends who beat him up, only to learn later that the couple actually was having sex, the woman and police said.
The girl, two 17-year-old boys and Dilyen Langdeau, 19, of Torrington, were arrested Tuesday night and arraigned in Bantam Superior Court on Wednesday. Langdeau was charged with assault and conspiracy; the teens face similar counts. The fifth teenager was not charged.
The girl misinterpreted the woman’s amorous screams, and she and four other teens went to the woman’s bedroom in the Torrington home on June 6, police Lt. Bruce Whiteley said Thursday. One of the teens beat the 25-year-old man with a bat and others punched him, police said. He suffered a black eye and several bruises.
A judge sealed the police report. The names of the girl and the two boys were not released because of their ages.
The 34-year-old woman, Melanie Arnold, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the girl is her daughter. Arnold denied she was screaming, and said her daughter thought she heard a slap and believed an assault was happening.
“Instead of asking what was going on, they assumed and took matters into their own hands,” Arnold said. “Now they have to learn a lesson.”
The teens knocked on the bedroom door and Arnold opened it, according to the couple, who recently broke up.
The teens rushed into the room and the man, Roger Swanson, said he didn’t have a chance to explain himself. He said he tried to get away, but the teens chased him down and started beating him in the house.
He said he knelt down over a chair and tried to protect his face, but got hit in the eye and in the back. He said Arnold covered his back to try to protect him, but the teen with the bat started hitting him in the legs. Then the youths left.
“What if they fight someone else and those guys don’t walk away? What if they kill somebody?” he said. “Then they’re going to spend the rest of their lives in jail. These kids need to learn, go through the court system and see if you do something to somebody, you see what happens.”
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