Former Rutgers student guilty
Former Rutgers student guilty
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. (AP) — A former Rutgers University student convicted Friday in the webcam spying episode that ended in his gay roommate’s suicide could be headed off to prison in a case experts say stands as a tragic lesson for young people about casual cruelties and unintended consequences in the Internet age.
Dharun Ravi was found guilty of all 15 charges against him, including invasion of privacy and anti-gay intimidation. The jury decided that he not only spied on Tyler Clementi and another man as they were kissing but also singled out Clementi because he was gay.
Ravi, 20, could get up to 10 years in prison by some estimates and could be deported to his native India even though he has lived legally in the U.S. since he was a little boy.
The case stirred a national conversation about anti-gay bullying and teen suicide. It also illustrated the dangers of technology in the hands of people who have grown up with the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
“They don’t feel like they’re spying. It’s just their own iPhone they’re using, their own laptop,” said Annemarie McAvoy, an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School in New York. “Hopefully, parents will use this as an example for their children.”
On the Rutgers campus, student Melvin Ways said: “I think the lesson here isnot everything is meant to be publicized to the entire world, especially private matters and things that are personal to people.”
Prosecutors said Ravi set up his webcam in his dorm room and watched Clementi kissing another man on Sept. 19, 2010, then tweeted about it and excitedly tried to catch Clementi in the act again two days later. A half-dozen students were believed to have seen the live video of the kissing; no video was taken in the second instance.
Plan unveiled on birth control
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration signaled Friday it’s willing to help insurance companies offset the cost of providing free birth control to women working at church-affiliated institutions like hospitals and colleges.
By finding a way to make the middlemen whole, the administration may be able to extricate itself from an unexpected political furor over birth control that has mobilized partisans across the political spectrum a half-century after the advent of the pill.
A 32-page regulatory proposal unveiled Friday offered options for providing free birth control to women whose employers object to contraception on religious grounds. The government now classifies birth control as preventive care, and President Barack Obama’s health care law requires health plans to cover prevention at no cost to the consumer.
Churches, synagogues, mosques and other institutions whose primary purpose is to propagate faith are exempt from the mandate. But when the administration sought to impose the requirement on religious nonprofits serving the public, it triggered a backlash. That forced President Barack Obama himself to offer a compromise: insurers, not the religious employers would bear the responsibility.
Friday’s proposal lists options for carrying out the president’s compromise without forcing insurers to bear the whole cost or tempting them to engineer backdoor maneuvers to recoup money from religious institutions that object to birth control.
Budget deficit to top predictions
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new analysis of President Barack Obama’s budget for next year says the deficit scenario for next year isn’t as rosy as the White House figured last month.
Friday’s Congressional Budget Office report said Obama’s budget would produce a $977 billion deficit next year — $75 billion more than predicted by the White House.
Over the coming decade, CBO says Obama’s policies would result in deficits totaling $6.4 trillion. Deficits would be even higher were it not for Obama’s proposals to raise taxes on higher-income people.
The White House seized on the figures as validation of its claims that Obama’s budget brings the deficit under control at least when measured against the economy, the measure used by most economists in evaluating the deficit.
“CBO found that by 2016 deficits as a share of the economy would be below 3 percent a key milestone of fiscal sustainability,” said White House budget office acting director Jeffrey Zients. “Debt held by the public will decrease and then stabilize as a share of the economy.”