In the News, June 3rd, 2008

Senator Edward M. Kennedy is recovering at Duke University Medical Center. On Monday he underwent risky surgery that experts said was designed to reduce his brain tumor and give chemotherapy and radiation treatments a chance to work.
The senator is expected to stay at the hospital for about a week and then return home to Massachusetts for further treatment.

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Chinese police dragged away more than 100 parents Tuesday while they were protesting the deaths of their children in poorly constructed schools that collapsed in last month's earthquake.
The parents, many holding pictures of their dead children, were pulled down the street away from a courthouse in Dujiangyan, a resort city northwest of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu.

AP Photo:

"Why?" some of them yelled. "Tell us something," they said as black-suited police wearing riot helmets yanked at them.
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A spokesman for Kelsey Grammer says the "Frasier" star is recovering in a Hawaii hospital after a mild heart attack this weekend.
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Tatum O'Neal has told the New York Post, in an exclusive phone interview. a that she was distraught over the loss of her dog when she went looking to buy drugs from a Manhattan street dealer last weekend.

She spoke to the Post via telephone. She entered no plea after being arraigned on a charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance.

Excerpts from the conversation;
I'm still sober!" she announced "Just when I was about to change that and wreck my life, the cops came and saved me!"

"I was saved by the bell, by the guys in the Seventh Precinct."

"There's no excuse for what I did," Tatum told me.

"I lost my Scottish terrier, Lena," three weeks ago. "That seemed to set me off."

"I couldn't get out of it. I was going to my psychiatrist. I was doing everything I could do. I have the disease of alcoholism. It's lifelong. I treat it every day by going to my 12-step program."

But the loss of her 16-year-old pooch was too much. "It triggered that my mother passed away [from addiction] in '98. My father [actor Ryan O'Neal] and I are estranged."