Baltimore

Priest found guilty of molesting teen

A defrocked priest was convicted Thursday of molesting an altar boy who a decade later shot and wounded him on the street in a fit of rage when the clergyman refused to apologize.

Maurice Blackwell, 58, former Roman Catholic pastor of a Baltimore church, was found guilty on three of four counts of sexually abusing Dontee Stokes, now 29, during the early 1990s. He could get up to 45 years in prison when he is sentenced in April.

Stokes testified that the priest molested him from age 13 to 17. Prosecutors declined to charge Blackwell when Stokes first raised the accusations a decade ago.

In May 2002, a tormented Stokes shot Blackwell three times in the hip and hand during a confrontation on a city street.

The following December, Stokes was acquitted of attempted murder after claiming temporary insanity but was found guilty on gun charges. Jurors urged the judge to be lenient, and Stokes was sentenced to 18 months of home detention.

Above, Dontee Stokes is kissed by his mother, Tamara Stokes, on Thursday outside Baltimore City Circuit Court after the verdict.

Florida

Study: Vitamin D may fight prostate cancer

Getting a little sunshine may be one way for men to cut their risk of prostate cancer.

A large study presented at a cancer conference Thursday found that men with higher levels of vitamin D in their blood were half as likely to develop aggressive forms of the disease than those with lower amounts.

Doctors are not ready to recommend the “sunshine vitamin” without more study, but many see little harm in getting the 15 minutes a day that the body needs to make enough of this nutrient.

The research involved nearly 15,000 men in the Physicians’ Health Study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Five years ago, this study found that men who consumed a lot of calcium had modestly higher rates of prostate cancer.

The new findings fit with that notion, because too much calcium lowers vitamin D.

Washington, D.C.

Audit finds no bias in IRS election probes

An outside audit found nothing inappropriate in Internal Revenue Service examinations of allegations of improper political activity by churches, civic groups and charities.

But the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration said Thursday that an IRS committee formed to check out potentially improper political activity acted too slowly, creating the appearance of political motivations.

The IRS contacted the first group under investigation on Sept. 21, six weeks before the presidential election, despite forming a special panel to track potentially inappropriate political activity in June.

Louisiana

Investigation focuses on outgoing NASA chief

Congress’ investigative arm is looking into Sean O’Keefe’s tenure as NASA chief, including whether he misused government airplanes and went on too many expensive getaways with underlings, former and current senior NASA officials say.

The focus of the Government Accountability Office investigation is not fraud but waste, one of the four NASA officials said. The four — two still with NASA, two recently departed — asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. Two said they had been questioned by the GAO.

O’Keefe is leaving NASA after three years as its administrator and will become chancellor of Louisiana State University on Monday. When they hired him late last year, university officials showered praise on him for his budget-conscious management skills.

Washington, D.C.

Trials link suicide risk, antidepressants

Adults taking popular antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as patients given sugar pills, according to an analysis released Thursday of hundreds of clinical trials involving thousands of patients.

The results mirror a recent finding of the Food and Drug Administration that the drugs increase suicidal thoughts and behavior among some children and offer tangible support to concerns going back 15 years that the mood-lifting pills have a dark side.

The examination of 702 controlled clinical trials involving 87,650 patients is the most comprehensive look at the subject and is particularly telling because it counted suicide attempts and included patients treated for a variety of conditions, including sexual dysfunction, bulimia, panic disorder and depression.

The new study is published in the current issue of the British Medical Journal.

Washington, D.C.

Lawsuit challenges new national forest rules

Environmentalists sued the Bush administration Thursday over new rules for managing the 192 million acres of national forests.

The rules issued in December give managers of the 155 national forests more discretion to approve logging and other commercial projects without lengthy environmental reviews.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claims the rules water down protection of wildlife and the environment “to the point where they are virtually meaningless.”

The suit filed by San Francisco-based Earthjustice on behalf of a coalition of conservation groups said the rules failed to include important environmental protection measures mandated by Congress under a 1976 law, the National Forest Management Act.

The suit contends the rules reverse more than 20 years of protection for wildlife and other resources without any scientific basis for doing so and removes requirements to use measurable standards to protect wildlife.

Washington, D.C.

Researchers identify cockroach mating scent

Scientists have identified the “come hither” scent that female German cockroaches use to lure males, a discovery that may help control one of the world’s most troublesome and resistant household pests.

Female cockroaches emit a pheromone, or chemical attractant, to let males know they are ready to mate. Researchers earlier identified the courtship chemicals used by other cockroach species, but the romance scent of the German cockroach remained elusive.

“The German cockroach is the one we wanted because it is a worldwide pest that gives all the other cockroaches a bad name,” said Wendell L. Roelofs, a Cornell University entomologist and senior author of a study appearing this week in the journal Science.

The discovery may lead to a new weapon to control the German cockroach, an insect that is a resistant and tenacious pest in virtually every city on Earth.

Roelofs said the pheromone could be used to attract males to sticky traps or to poisoned baits that the insect would then carry back to other cockroaches.

Washington, D.C.

Class-action suits sent to federal courts

Congress sent President Bush legislation Thursday aimed at discouraging multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuits by having federal judges take them away from state courts, a victory for conservatives who hope it will lead to other lawsuit limits.

The legislation the House passed, 279-149, is the first of Bush’s 2005 legislative priorities to win congressional approval. The Senate voted 72-26 for the bill Feb. 10. The president has described class-action suits as often frivolous, and businesses complain that state judges and juries have been too generous to plaintiffs.

But Democrats say the legislation is aimed at protecting GOP business donors and hurting trial lawyers, a traditional part of their base. They also warn that Republican changes to the legal system will only make it harder for people to sue over injuries caused by corporations.

Washington, D.C.

Troops trashed photos of Afghan prison abuse

In a case that echoes the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan posed before cameras while threatening to shoot prisoners in the head, shoving a detainee into a wall and in “trophy shots” with the corpse of an enemy fighter who invaded their camp last year.

According to military documents disclosed Thursday, the American soldiers, fearing “another public outrage,” destroyed many of the photos and video images after photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib were beamed around the world.

The remaining images were discovered last year during the routine cleaning of a captain’s office at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The photos, apparently shot at a small base in Afghanistan around the same time as the abuses at the large prison in Iraq, triggered an internal army investigation centering on soldiers from the 2nd platoon of the 22nd Infantry Battalion of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division based at Fort Drum, N.Y. It led to preliminary charges against eight soldiers for dereliction of duty.

Chicago

Gay groups criticize AMA leader’s remarks

After being criticized by gay and lesbian groups, the president of the American Medical Assn. said Thursday his views were misrepresented in a newspaper article that quoted him defending a Roman Catholic-affiliated medical school’s decision to ban a gay student group.

The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., said Dr. John Nelson likened the ban at New York Medical College to Brigham Young University’s decision to suspend four former football players accused of rape, and with the Mormon school’s refusal to allow caffeinated soft drinks on campus.

Joel Ginsberg, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Assn., said Nelson’s comparison criminalized and trivialized homosexuality, and prompted dozens of complaints to his organization.

Nelson issued a statement Thursday saying his views “were grossly misrepresented” by the Feb. 12 article.

CynDee Royle, the newspaper’s senior managing editor, said the reporter taped the interview and that neither Nelson nor the AMA had requested a correction.

New Jersey

Casino cocktail servers face weight limits

The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa has told cocktail servers if they pack on too many pounds, they’ll get an unpaid suspension to lose the weight — or be fired.

The policy will apply to anyone gaining more than 7 percent of their body weight; weight gain related to pregnancy or a medical condition will be exempt, casino officials said. The company will pay to put the offender through a weight-loss program during the up-to-90-day suspension. The policy was laid out in a letter to employees last week.

The casino, whose edgy marketing themes and sexy accents have helped bowl over the competition since opening in July 2003, contends there’s nothing wrong with setting weight limits for its 210 costumed beverage servers — 160 servers dubbed Borgata Babes and 50 other male and female bartenders.

St. Louis

Government halts election monitoring

The government has ended its monitoring of city elections, five years after finding that hundreds of people couldn’t vote because of insufficient staff and equipment at the polls, the city said Thursday.

The Justice Department said voting in St. Louis had produced only minor glitches since the 2000 general election, eliminating the need to extend federal supervision of the city’s election board beyond last month’s expiration date.