Leave it to CNN to find a new and charming tidbit on the single piece of summer Ivy League news everyone is already sick of hearing about. Apparently, Henry Louis Gates sent a bouquet of roses to neighbor Lucia Whalen as an “expression of gratitude” for calling the police, albeit mistakenly. Perhaps Gates felt a little guilty for all the racial and political brouhaha he and the Cambridge Police stirred up. After the incident, Whalen was accused by the media of racism and received multiple threats to her personal safety. At the recent press conference she held on July 29 to clarify what had been written in the police report, she defended herself by saying that she did not assume the two men in front of Gates’ house were black before she dialed 911. Cambridge Police spokesman Frank Pasquarello lauded Whalen for her actions:

She did the right thing. I applaud her. She did what we tell people to do: call when you see something suspicious. She did her civic duty.

Obama himself felt a little remorseful about the entire stupid situation, so–as everyone on and below Earth is aware of by now–he invited Gates and his arresting officer James Crowley to a beer summit at the White House last Thursday to promote better race relations. But perhaps in another poor act of judgment, Whalen remained the only person in the controversy uninvited to the reconciliation picnic hosted by the Commander-in-Chief. After being asked about the gathering, which has the entire American beer industry questioning its legitimacy/promoting their products, Whalen’s lawyer Wendy Murphy responded that her client “doesn’t like beer anyways.”

Is a gender discrimination debate heating up to add to the racial profiling fire?

In the news conference that preempted Wipeout last night, the Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times asked President Obama about Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s arrest and what it says about race relations in America. Here is his response (in text here):

Two minutes later, fat people were getting knocked around by giant bouncy balls. Read the rest of this entry »

Wife-killer and cross-dresser Richard Sharpe made one final round of headlines this morning after hanging himself in his Norfolk, Mass. jail cell. The former Harvard Medical School professor and millionaire was nearly eight years into his life sentence for killing his wife Karen in 2000. To be more specific, Sharpe shot the mother of his three children in the chest with a hunting rifle in the foyer of their home while her family watched.

But wait—there’s more.  Not only did Sharpe enjoy the occasional stroll in fishnets and heels, he also stole his wife’s birth control pills in an attempt to grow bigger breasts. The cross-dressing seems innocent compared to the brutal murder, but Sharpe lost all sense of humanity after allegedly plotting to kill the district attorney who convicted him in 2001. (The nutty professor was acquitted of these charges in 2007 after a jury decided that Sharpe’s rapist cellmate wasn’t the most trustworthy witness.)

The case is old news now having run the true-crime gamut from a Court TV special to a pulpy paperback entitled Twisted. Each detail—from Sharpe’s abusive father to Harvard’s knack for psychopaths—reveals the story to be both frightening and tragic. It’s only a matter of time until Lifetime options the book for their library of can’t-stop-watching movies.

Scott Ward, former Penn marketing professor and huge kiddie porn monger (and former domestic partner of Wharton Dean Thomas S. Robertson), is expected to plead guilty at his November 17 hearing to “inducing a minor to engage in sex to create photos or video.”

Ward has been locked in prison since May 2007 when he was sentenced to fifteen years for “producing child pornography for importation to the United States.” The trouble started in summer 2006 when Ward tried to secure a visa for a 16 year-old Brazilian boy to come live with him in Cape Cod. Maybe this raised some red flags, because Ward was arrested August 9, 2006 at Dulles airport with a suitcase full of child porn (DVDs and whatever was on his laptop).

But what about the dramatic raid of his Penn office in search of more child porn?

Police, in fact, searched his Huntsman Hall office after the August 9 arrest and found more incriminating material, which in turn led to more charges.