Roberts helped fight anti-gay law

Denver

A decade ago, John Roberts played a valuable role helping attorneys overturn a law that would have allowed discrimination against gays – pro bono work the Supreme Court nominee didn’t mention in a questionnaire he filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The revelation could dent his popularity among conservative groups and quell some of the opposition of liberal groups fearful he could help overturn landmark decisions such as Roe v. Wade, which guarantees a right to an abortion.

An attorney who worked with Roberts cautioned against making guesses about his personal views based on his involvement in the Colorado case, which gay rights advocates consider one of their most important legal victories.

“It may be that John and others didn’t see this case as a gay-rights case,” said Walter Smith, who was in charge of pro bono work at Roberts’ former Washington law firm, Hogan & Hartson.

Smith said Roberts may instead have viewed the case as a broader question, of whether the constitutional guarantee of equal protection prohibited singling out a particular group of people that wouldn’t be protected by an anti-discrimination law.

The case involved Amendment 2, a constitutional amendment approved by Colorado voters in 1992 that would have barred laws, ordinances or regulations protecting gays from discrimination by landlords, employers or public agencies such as school districts.

Gay rights groups sued, and the law was declared unconstitutional in a 6-3 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996.

U.S. to keep going in North Korea nuclear talks

Beijing

Nuclear negotiators said today they had no plans to suspend North Korean disarmament talks despite a lack of progress, and Washington and Pyongyang scheduled a meeting to discuss how to speed up the process.

The Americans will stay “as long as we make progress,” U.S. envoy Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said as delegates prepared to start a 12th straight day of talks. However, he warned, “If we’re not going to make progress we’re not going to be here.”

Hill said the 11th day of talks on Friday was “rather excruciating” and produced little.

“We got some things done, but it’s not as much as I’d like and it’s not going to get us there in the time span that we think we ought to get there,” Hill told reporters.

He expressed hope that the meeting today with the North and China would help speed up the process.

Diplomats say the talks are deadlocked over the North’s insistence on retaining a peaceful nuclear program and the question of what it would receive in exchange for disarming.

Toronto jet landed too far down runway

Toronto

The Air France jet that skidded off the runway and burst into flames this week landed farther down the runway than it should have, but it is too soon to know if that was the reason for the crash, aviation investigators said Friday.

All 309 people on board escaped with their lives after Flight 358 from Paris crashed at Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson International Airport Tuesday afternoon. The flight data and voice recorders were recovered the next day.

Real Levasseur, chief of the Transportation Safety Board team investigating the craft, said officials in France who have been downloading data from the cockpit voice recorders – the so-called black boxes – announced Friday most of the indicators from the boxes appeared intact and were not destroyed in the fire.

“I’m very happy to report we have good, solid data that will allow us to start removing wreckage from the site much earlier than we would have anticipated,” Levasseur said.

Man sentenced to crocheting in abuse case

Harlingen, Texas

An ex-convict who pleaded no contest to sexually abusing his daughter was sentenced to 320 hours of community service crocheting blankets.

Despite an outcry over the seemingly lenient sentence, the prosecutor said he had been ready to dismiss the case against Robert Wayne Thompson for lack of evidence.

The charges surfaced during a dispute over custody of the child, when Thompson’s ex-wife accused him of sexually abusing their 8-year-old daughter and filed civil and criminal complaints against him. Thompson had earlier served five years in a Virginia prison for sexual assault.

The criminal case became shaky after the girl told the judge in the civil case that her mother had told her to say Thompson abused her.

So state District Judge Rose Guerra Reyna, in the criminal case, agreed last week to a plea bargain that requires Thompson to register as a sex offender, be under probation – and spend 320 hours crocheting afghans.

Thompson is disabled with a heart condition and can’t do anything strenuous, but he can crochet and has made numerous blankets for nursing home patients, the prosecutor said in explaining the sentence.

Dianne Clements of the victims rights group Justice for All told CNN, “The judge lost her mind,” and local newspaper received letters complaining about the sentence.

The judicial code prohibits Guerra Reyna from publicly responding to the critics. But a colleague, retired state District Judge Fernando Mancias, said she considered it fair because no one could prove the allegations against Thompson.

India’s prime minister to act to save tigers

New Delhi

India’s prime minister on Friday took charge of a nationwide program to save the endangered Bengal tiger, the national animal that experts say is threatened by poachers and angry villagers.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will take over as head of the committee controlling Project Tiger, said his spokesman Sanjaya Baru.

Conservationists believe official estimates that 3,500 to 3,700 tigers remain in the wild in India are grossly exaggerated and that the true figure may be closer to 2,000. Many wildlife wardens are accused of inflating tiger census figures for years, even as the animals died in their preserves.

Singh on Friday also accepted recommendations of a panel set up following reports that all the tigers at Sariska, one of the country’s main reserves, had disappeared, said Sunita Narain, the panel’s chairman. Among them are the creation of a wildlife crime bureau, establishment of a new methodology for the next tiger census, and sharing the benefits of wildlife tourism with local communities. The panel has also recommended moving tens of thousands of villagers from 1,500 villages in the region to make way for more tiger habitat, a plan that has angered the affected people.