NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- As police charged a Yale animal lab technician with murdering a graduate student who worked in his building, a portrait began to emerge Thursday of an unpleasant stickler for the rules who often clashed with researchers and considered the mice cages his personal fiefdom.
Police charged 24-year-old Raymond Clark III with murder, arresting him at a motel a day after taking hair, fingernail and saliva samples to compare with evidence from the grisly crime scene at Yale's medical school.
Bond was set at $3 million for Clark, who is charged in the death of 24-year-old Annie Le, a pharmacology doctoral student at Yale who vanished Sept. 8. Her body was discovered five days later -- her wedding day -- stuffed into a utility compartment behind a wall in the basement of the research building where she and Clark worked.
House denying ACORN funds
WASHINGTON -- The House voted Thursday to deny all federal funds for ACORN in a GOP-led strike against the scandal-tainted community organizing group that comes just three days after the Senate took similar action.
"ACORN has violated serious federal laws, and today the House voted to ensure that taxpayer dollars would no longer be used to fund this corrupt organization," said second-ranked House Republican Eric Cantor of Virginia.
The vote, on a provision attached to a student aid bill, was 345-75, with Democrats supplying all the "no" votes.
Mass. House OKs successor bill
BOSTON -- The Massachusetts House of Representatives has approved a bill allowing Gov. Deval Patrick to name an interim appointment to the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Edward Kennedy.
The House voted 95-58 in favor of the bill Thursday evening. The bill now moves to the Massachusetts Senate.
House Speaker Robert DeLeo, a Democrat, said the change is needed to ensure Massachusetts continues to be represented by two senators until voters can choose a replacement during a Jan. 19 special election.
Republicans, who number just 16 in the House, oppose the bill.
They point out that Democrats changed the succession law in 2004 to create a special election and block then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, from naming a temporary replacement if Sen. John Kerry had won his presidential bid.
To change the law now that there is a Democrat in the governor's office smacks of hypocrisy, they said.
Kennedy died of brain cancer on Aug. 25.
Dogs find scent in Garridos' yard
ANTIOCH, Calif. -- Authorities investigating two missing girl cases say that cadaver dogs have picked up a scent that may indicate there are buried remains in the backyard of a Northern California couple already charged in a kidnapping.
Alameda County Sheriff's Department spokesman Sgt. J.D. Nelson said Thursday two dogs alerted at a site in the backyard of Phillip and Nancy Garrido.
The couple is charged with the 1991 kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard.
Their Antioch home has become a focal point of investigators reviewing outstanding kidnapping cases in the San Francisco Bay area.
-- From wire reports
