In the news

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

President Barack Obama signed into law legislation to give doctors temporary relief from a flawed Medicare payment formula that threatened them with a 24 percent cut in their fees.

Kwasi Enin, 17, of Shirley, N.Y., who scored 2,250 out of 2,400 on the SAT, applied to and was accepted at all eight Ivy League schools and is waiting to see what kind of financial aid he is offered before deciding among Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

C-Murder, 43, the rapper whose real name is Corey Miller and who is nearly five years into a life sentence for killing a teenager at a Harvey, La., nightclub, is challenging his conviction, citing irregularities during the jury’s deliberations.

Usah Zachau, a spokesman for the Safia association, a German group primarily for elderly lesbians, said a 4,300-square-foot area of the Lutheran Georgen Parochial cemetery, established in 1814 in central Berlin, will be reserved for up to 80 lesbians.

Elbert Guillory, a Republican Louisiana state senator, came out in opposition to a bill that would close loopholes in a state cockfighting ban, saying the bill threatens the legitimate, less bloody sport of “chicken boxing.”

James Valentine, 21, is recovering after the tree trimmer was rushed to a Pittsburgh hospital with a chain-saw blade embedded in his neck, with doctors saying the saw missed major arteries.

James Paul Harris, 29, pleaded innocent in Kansas to premeditated first-degree murder, accused of garroting 49-year-old James Gerety of Topeka in 2011 and keeping Gerety’s head for some religious reason.

Fred Allen Thomas III, 36, a convicted sex offender caught umpiring a girls softball league, is free on $30,000 bond, said officials in Jefferson County, Ala.

Phil Bryant, the Republican governor of Mississippi, said he looks forward to signing a bill that would ban abortion at 20 weeks, the midpoint of a full-term pregnancy.

Eric Holder, the attorney general, congratulated the trial team that successfully prosecuted al-Qaida spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith in New York, but said that outcome won’t lead to a new effort to send Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, to New York for trial.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/02/2014