What We've Found: SCOTUS debates cross, faith-healing Philadelphians, French prurience, effects of the Pill, the coming Austenites and female German author wins Nobel

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What We've Found: SCOTUS debates cross, faith-healing Philadelphians, French prurience, effects of the Pill, the coming Austenites and female German author wins Nobel

POSTED: Thursday, October 8, 2009, 4:27 PM
Filed Under: What We've Found

Julia Harte with your mid-morning fix.

The U.S. Supreme Court was debating whether a cross erected in the Mojave National Preserve to honor fallen soldiers violated the First Amendment's ban on governmental establishment of religion.

A Northeast Philadelphia couple was on trial for attempting to faith-heal their two-year-old son rather than seek medical treatment. The boy died of bacterial pneumonia in January.

France's Culture Minister, Frederic Mitterand, was facing intense pressure to resign over his defense of Roman Polanski as well as an autobiography in which Mitterand stated that "the abundance of very attractive and immediately available young boys" in Thailand "put me in a state of desire."

A new study suggested that the birth control pill, by suppressing hormone levels, has made women more likely to seek a responsible, long-term mate rather than lusting after the men with most sex appeal.

More than 600 Jane Austen fans were preparing to descend on Philadelphia for the the 31st-annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America.

The German author Herta Mueller, whose novels and stories about political alienation have been periodically censored in her birthland of Romania, won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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