KNIVES OUT: Alycia Lane Sues KYW’s Ass
A fired Philadelphia newscaster sued her former employer Thursday, alleging that the television station maliciously damaged her reputation and contributed to a number of her embarrassing off-camera episodes. Alycia Lane sued KYW-TV in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, alleging the station and its management deliberately got her personal life into the news in order to get free publicity. She is seeking unspecified damages. Lane was fired in January, a month after being arrested in New York City following a late-night scuffle with plainclothes police. In her lawsuit, she said she believed she was witnessing an assault on her boyfriend. The lawsuit says the station told Lane to interview TV psychologist Phil McGraw in 2004 and suggested that she talk about some of her past relationships. She said she understood that inappropriate personal elements would be removed and was mortified when footage of her crying about her divorce was included. She said that she did not want to appear on McGraw’s show a second time, but that the station ordered her to do so. The suit says that because of those decisions, Lane ”was branded in the press as someone who sought to make herself the news, rather than to merely report the news.” [via NEW YORK TIMES]
DUMB & DUMBER: 17 High Schoolers Knocked Up In Pregnancy Pact
As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there’s been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, “some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head. [via TIME]
LIFE ON MARS: Cold Drinks Will Not Be A Problem On Angry Red Planet
Scientists believe NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander exposed bits of ice while digging in the soil of the Martian arctic in recent days. Principal investigator Peter Smith said Thursday that crumbs of bright material seen in the trench have since vanished. He says that means it must have been frozen water that vaporized after being exposed. Scientists had also considered whether the specks might be salt. Smith points out that salt wouldn’t have vaporized. The lander is on a mission to discover whether the polar environment could be favorable for primitive life to emerge. [via ASSOCIATED PRESS]