Becky Brown (Yale Sports Publicity photo/Sam Rubin)
What better time than the eve of The Game to tell a happy story about a different Yale sport?
Becky Brown, a junior forward who led the women’s soccer team in scoring, is the 2009 Ivy League Player of the Year. Freshman Kristen Forster is co-winner of the league’s Rookie of the Year Award. The team finished the season with a 10-6 record and a second-place 5-2 Ivy League tally.
David Hamilton
After eight months in limbo, David Hamilton ’83JD won confirmation Tuesday to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. President Barack Obama’s very first judicial nominee — way back in March — Hamilton faced fierce opposition for his rulings in favor of abortion rights and church-state separation. (One Christian group tagged him as a “judicial anarchist.”)
Paul Anastas
Other Yalie Obamanees still await Senate confirmation votes. One is Hamilton’s sister-in-law, Dawn Johnsen ’83, ’86JD, named to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Another, “Father of Green Chemistry” Paul Anastas, was pegged in May to run the Environmental Protection Agency’s R&D office. He, too, remains on the sidelines, allegedly blocked by the formaldehyde industry.
New Haven Independent photo
More than 650 Yale students and employees signed a petition urging Senator Joe Lieberman ’64, ’67LLB, to support health care reform with a so-called public option, the Huffington Post reports. In a second letter, fifteen Yale student groups told Lieberman they were “surprised, disappointed, and truly disheartened by your recent suggestion you would not allow a vote on health care reform that includes a strong public option.”
As Yale freshman Mira Vale headed into midterms this fall, some students in rural Cambodia were just starting school. For the first time.
There’s a connection. As a high school sophomore, Vale — saddened by the deaths of students and alumni at her Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts — hit on a novel idea for commemorating them: “What if L-S could help build a school as a means of healing our own?”
More than two years and $13,000 worth of bake sales and benefit concerts later, the Lincoln-Sudbury Memorial School opened in Cambodia’s Battambang province. “It amazes me,” Vale told the Lincoln Journal, “that thousands of miles away, there is a school with our name on it, one that our love and community built, which is providing opportunities for a better life for people who wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to go to school.”
The Why Not guys, Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, have come up with a bittersweet proposal for boosting federal revenues. The bitter pill: crank up IRS audits. Every dollar spent on auditing produces $58 in revenue, law prof/econohead Ayres (left in photo) and SOM prof/entrepreneur Nalebuff write in Forbes. Yet the IRS has discontinued the “extreme audits” that used to generate data that let it target regular audits most effectively. The Why Not spoonful of sugar: pay people for their time and trouble when their returns are scrutinized. Pretty soon taxpayers will be lining up at the IRS, begging for an audit . . .
Yale accidentally added three extra zeroes to its stock holdings on this year’s first two quarterly SEC filings, reporting $60 billion of stock in an endowment worth $17 billion. Business Insider has the scoop.
A blog post about a blogger who was mentioned in the New York Times for not attending an online writers’ powwow with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner?
Well, James Kwak is special. A Yale Law School student with a history PhD from UC Berkeley, he blogs at The Baseline Scenario, where one of his co-authors is an MIT professor and former IMF chief economist. Moyers (”most informative”) and Krugman (”a must read”) praise Baseline Scenario, so it’s about time we add it to our Yalie blogroll.
Early applications to Yale College are down 5 percent from last year’s record high, the Yale Daily News reports. The YDN speculates that economic uncertainty is prompting high school students — and their parents — to wait and see what schools they can afford.
Two years ago on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, I looked out my front window upon a line of cars as far as I could see. I live up the street from the Yale Bowl, and traffic bound for the Harvard game — or the parking-lot tailgates — had clotted the quiet Westville neighborhood.
This year, officials hope to mitigate the motorized madness with a strict new parking plan. To park at the Bowl, you need to buy a $15 pass in advance, and you also need to buy two tickets to The Game itself. (Turns out that while 55,000 fans attended The Game in 2007, another 40,000 just sat outside and partied.) Order parking passes at 203.432.1400 during business hours; visit the Yale website for more official info on The Game.
The alternatives: park in a downtown garage for $3 and catch a free Yale shuttle to the Bowl; park downtown and hoof it; or brave the Westville traffic and pay to park in somebody’s front yard. But not mine. Like Walter in The Big Lebowski, I don’t roll on Shabbos.
The lab technician accused of killing a 24-year-old Yale graduate student tried to hide and clean up evidence of the crime while police were investigating the scene, according to court papers released this morning.
The arrest warrant affidavit for technician Raymond Clark III says police found Clark’s DNA on evidence found with Annie Le’s strangled body and on blood-stained items hidden elsewhere in the lab building where she died September 8.
The arrest warrant affidavit publicly lays out detailed evidence against Clark for the first time. It had been sealed since his arrest on September 17. Connecticut judge Roland Fasano released the document at the request of several news organizations, but blacked out two sections of the document dealing with the discovery of Le’s body on September 13.
Le, a PhD student in pharmacology, disappeared on September 8. The affidavit shows that she used her Yale ID to swipe into a lab building at 10 Amistad Street at 10:09 that morning. At 10:11, she swiped into a secure basement lab area. That was the last time she used her card. Her roommate reported her missing late that night.
The last room that Le swiped into was lab room G-13. When police arrived to investigate there, the affidavit says, Clark let himself into the room and tried to obscure from view a blood-spattered box of wipes that were sitting on a cart. Tests later showed Le’s DNA — obtained from personal items at her apartment — matched the blood spatter on the box of wipes.
Police also found evidence containing “blood-like stains” hidden above a drop ceiling in a hallway outside the lab area: a white sock, work boots, and a scrub shirt. “Video surveillance revealed a similar type shirt worn by Clark,” the affidavit says — and the boots were labeled “Ray-C.” In a recycling box, investigators found a a size-XL lab coat with red-colored stains. Lab tests found a mixture of Clark’s and Le’s DNA on the sock.
Police finally located Le’s body behind a wall in a utility compartment behind a locker room toilet, also in the lab basement. With her body were a sock that matched the one found above the ceiling, and a pen with green ink. A blood stain on the pen contained Le’s DNA, and Clark’s DNA was found elsewhere on the pen.
While police were investigating the scene on September 10, Clark made numerous apparent attempts to throw them off the trail, the affidavit suggests. In addition to trying to hide the bloody box of wipes, he scrubbed areas of the floor that were already clean; changed his clothes at least once; and approached a Yale police officer, saying that he knew Le and that she had left the building in the early afternoon of September 8, the affidavit says.
The arrest warrant affidavit, along with those for two search warrants, were sealed at the request of prosecutors — speaking for Le’s family — and Clark’s defense lawyers. The search warrant documents are scheduled for release on November 17. Clark is being held on $3 million bond and has yet to enter a plea.
NOTE: Originally posted at 10:48 a.m. on Friday, November 13. A technical problem caused the post to disappear Friday afternoon; this is a verbatim repost.
