Appeals court upholds Crawford’s
conviction
A federal appeals panel on Tuesday upheld the conviction of the
former director of student counseling at UCLA.
Jane Crawford was sentenced in 1999 to five months in prison for
stealing a valuable oil painting from her employer and selling it
to a New York City art gallery for $200,000 in 1994.
She was also ordered to spend five months in a halfway house
following her release and told to pay $41,280 restitution to the
Spanierman Gallery.
The painting, a landscape titled “Frost Flowers, Ipswich
1889,” is the work of Arthur Wesley Dow, a mentor to Georgia
O’Keeffe.
Dow’s widow donated “Frost Flowers” and eight
more of his paintings in 1928 to an association affiliated with
UCLA’s art department. The association was later dissolved,
and prosecutors and the school said the paintings became the
university’s property by default.
On appeal, Crawford contended the government did not prove UCLA
owned the painting, so she could not be convicted of stealing it. A
three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said
Crawford knew the painting was not hers so the claim was
meritless.
Davis student’s death still under
investigation
Police still don’t know if the death of a University of
California, Davis, student found stabbed in his fraternity room was
homicide or suicide.
The death of Andrew Wieman, 20, is still being investigated by
university police, the Yolo County coroner and the state Department
of Justice, campus police Chief Rita Spaur said Tuesday.
The state DOJ found that fingerprints on the knife and the note
found in Wieman’s room were his, she said.
His body was found in the bedroom of his Kappa Sigma fraternity
house on Jan. 4 by students concerned that he did not attend
classes on the first day after vacation. He was stabbed in the neck
and chest.
Police are trying to determine where Wieman was between 1 a.m.
on Jan. 2 and 1 p.m. on Jan. 4, Spaur said.
Anyone with information can call the campus police Tip Line at
(530) 752-9944.
The student’s father, Wes Wieman of Eureka, is offering a
$10,000 reward for information about his son’s death. He says
his son was upbeat and gave no indication he might be
depressed.
Molecular imaging center launched
Jonsson Cancer Center researchers launched a $9.8 million
molecular imaging center Jan. 17, seeking ways to see gene-based
therapies at work in the human body.
The new center, called the UCLA Center for In Vivo Imaging in
Cancer Biology, is funded from a five-year grant from the National
Cancer Institute. It is the first such molecular imaging center to
open on the West Coast.
Dr. Judith Gasson, director of the Jonsson Cancer Center, said
discoveries in the imaging center hold tremendous potential for
cancer research and care.
“In the long run, we expect that the discoveries we make
at UCLA’s new imaging center will hasten development of safe,
effective treatments for patients by allowing researchers to more
rapidly and thoroughly evaluate the benefits and limitations of
certain experimental therapies,” Gasson said.
A major obstacle in cancer research lies in a physician’s
inability to know whether gene therapy and other gene-based
treatments reach targeted cells and work as they should, Herschman
said.
Compiled from Daily Bruin wire reports.