Updated at 3:40 p.m. ET: Soil tests indicate that no human remains are buried beneath a shed in Roseville, Mich., where authorities were investigating the possibility that the late Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa might have been buried, officials said.

Scientists at Michigan State University tested two samples from a home in Roseville, a suburb of Detroit, after an unidentified tipster told authorities that he witnessed a body being buried there the day after Hoffa disappeared in July 1975. 

Those tests came up negative for human remains, Roseville police said Tuesday.

---

The lead appears to be yet another dead end in the search for Hoffa, who ran the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the country's biggest labor union, from 1957 to 1971. It joins a long line of false leads that have fueled conspiracy theories for years.

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Investigators and other experts had said that they doubted that Hoffa was at the site.

Andy Arena, the former FBI special agent in charge for Detroit, said that while his "gut feeling is that this person saw something," it defies common sense to believe that the Mafia would have buried the body in broad daylight in a busy suburban area.

"If this guy was standing there watching this, and it was Jimmy Hoffa, he would have been in the hole with him," Arena said.

1976 FBI memo on Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance (.pdf)

Dan Moldea, author of "The Hoffa Wars" and numerous other books on organized crime, also said he "never thought that Hoffa was here, ever."

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The FBI and local police in Michigan plan to take soil samples from the backyard of a house in the Detroit suburb of Roseville on Friday, acting on a dying man's tip that the body of former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa might be buried there.

Authorities have chased down hundreds of would-be leads since Hoffa disappeared 37 years ago after he met with two top Mafia operatives at a restaurant in Bloomfield Township, another Detroit suburb, in July 1975. All have led to dead ends, but authorities said this lead could be different.

NBC station WDIV-TV of Detroit reported that an unidentified man who is dying from cancer told Roseville police that he saw men moving a black bag at the garage of the house just hours after Hoffa went missing. Acting on the tip, authorities ran radar tests last week that picked up an image of something buried beneath a cement slab in the backyard.

Roseville Police Chief James Berlin confirmed that investigators had received the tip, telling the Detroit Free Press that "the information seemed credible, so we decided to follow up on it."

---

The newspaper reported that the house is in the 18700 block of Florida Street in northern Roseville, about 20 miles northeast of Detroit.

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The disappearance of Hoffa — who ran the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the country's biggest labor union, from 1957 to 1971 — has long fueled conspiracy theories. At various times, his body was posited to have been buried under Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.; beneath General Motors headquarters at Detroit's Renaissance Center; on a farm in Hartland Township, Mich.; in a field in Milford, Mich.; and even on the grounds of the White House. 

What is known is that Hoffa, who was then 62, was chafing at restrictions on his activity in the Teamsters that President Richard Nixon imposed when he commuted Hoffa's 1967 federal prison sentence for fraud and jury tampering in 1971 (he continued to run the union from his prison cell). On July 30, 1975, Hoffa was scheduled to meet with Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone, capo of the Detroit Mafia, and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, a former Teamsters vice president who was also a captain in the Genovese crime family, at a restaurant called the Machus Red Fox in Bloomfield Township.

In a 1976 "here we stand" memo published several years later, the FBI speculated that Hoffa reluctantly agreed to the meeting to try to smooth over differences with Provenzano and Giacalone, who were reportedly perturbed that Hoffa was trying to get back into the Teamsters' leadership, That, presumably, would have lessened the mob's control over the union.

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"It is believed that the hit, if there was one, would have been approved at very highest levels within the Organized Crime structure," the FBI concluded. "If this be the case, it would tend to lend credence to the evidence that PROVENZANO or certainly someone at his level, both within the Teamsters Union and (Mafia), was responsible."

Read the 1976 FBI memo (.pdf)

Hoffa's body has never been found. Provenzano was later convicted of an unrelated murder and died in 1988; Giacalone, who was imprisoned for tax fraud, died in 2001.

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Updated at 10:27 p.m. ET: Two former Navy SEALs were identified Thursday as the third and fourth victims of the attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya this week that also killed the U.S. ambassador.

U.S. officials and family members identified the men as Glen Doherty, 42, a native of Winchester, Mass., and Tyrone S. Woods, 41. Details of how they died haven't been made public.

The men were working as private security specialists for the U.S. government when militants attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on Tuesday night. In all, four Americans were killed; the others were previously identified as the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and Sean Smith, an information management officer.

---

Libyan authorities said Thursday that they had arrested four men in connection with the attack but gave no further details.

In a statement Thursday evening, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Woods was known to his family and friends as "Rone" that and they they relied on "his courage and skill, honed over two decades as a Navy SEAL."

Woods, who was also a registered nurse and certified paramedic, served several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and had been protecting U.S. diplomatic personnel in dangerous posts from Central America to the Middle East, Clinton said.

He was married to a dentist named Dorothy and had three sons: Tyrone, Jr., Hunter and Kai, who was several months old.

Defense Department records listed Wood's residence as Portland, Ore., but NBC station KNSD of San Diego and numerous other reports from the area said he lived in Imperial Beach, Calif., where he settled after leaving the Navy and for a time owned a pub called the Salty Frog.

His death was confirmed by his ex-wife, Patty So of San Diego, who was notified by the U.S. government.

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"He was the greatest Navy SEAL. Nobody was more skilled than him," said So, the mother of Woods' two teenage sons. "He loved being a SEAL more than life itself."

Doherty — known to friends and family as "Bub," according to Clinton — was described as a highly trained marksman and security expert who "lived life to the fullest." He was also an experienced paramedic.

"Glen lived his life to the fullest. He was my brother, but if you asked his friends, he was their brother, as well," his sister, Katie Quigley of Marblehead, Mass., said Thursday.

Doherty joined the Navy in his late 20s after having attended flight school and worked as a ski instructor. A skilled pilot, master marksman and medical corpsman, Doherty was a member of the elite Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) special operations corps for nine years before he left the Navy in 2005.

Kokoro Camp Trainer of Encinitas, Calif., where Doherty worked as a fitness trainer, said that as a civilian, Doherty continued to take assignments in security and intelligence for various U.S. government agencies, serving in Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as Libya.

In Libya, Doherty "was protecting the ambassador and also helping the wounded" when he was killed, Quigley said.

Doherty co-wrote the book "21st Century Sniper: A Complete Practical Guide" with another former SEAL, Brandon Webb, who called him "one of the finest human beings I've ever known."

"He died serving with men he respected, protecting the freedoms we enjoy as Americans and doing something he loved," Webb said.

In 2009, Doherty was featured in an episode of the NBC-TV reality series "The Wanted," in which intelligence and military experts and investigative journalists sought to track down suspected terrorists.

In the episode, Scott Tyler, a fellow former SEAL, endorses Doherty's marksmanship and describes him as "highly recommended from people I trust in my community."

Doherty and other operatives hunted a suspected terrorist in Norway for extradition to Iraq. Doherty devised the surveillance plan, using miniature cameras hidden outside the suspect's home in Oslo.

Doherty was interviewed on screen discussing surveillance techniques and the importance of maintaining focus in a dangerous situation.

It's "a good thing to just read all of the people in the neighborhood and just try to be hyperaware of what's happening," he said. "It's not like you see on TV ... You focus on the mission. That's it."

Quigley said the attack on the consulate had to have been extremely violent and well-coordinated, because "Glen was highly trained. He was the best of the best."

"This was serious, well-planned, well-executed," she told NBC station KNSD-TV of San Diego. "He was very good at what he did."

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Most social media users approve of the Supreme Court's health care ruling last week but believe it will help Republicans in the November election, according to msnbc.com's computer-assisted analysis of tens of thousands of posts on Twitter and Facebook.

The court upheld nearly all of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on a 5-4 vote Thursday. The consensus in news reports and among political pundits was that the ruling was a major victory for President Barack Obama.

But among people who use social networking sites, 56 percent of those who stated a clear opinion on the decision's political impact said they thought it was more likely to energize Republican voters in November. Forty-four percent said it was likely to be more helpful for Democrats.

---

(Msnbc.com analyzed 175,000 Twitter and Facebook posts mentioning the ruling from midday Thursday through midday Monday. The analysis uses a tool called ForSight, a data platform developed by Crimson Hexagon Inc., which is used by many media and research organizations to gauge public opinion in new media. Crimson Hexagon reports a 3-percentage-point margin of sampling error for this type of online sentiment analysis.)

More social media analysis from NBCPolitics.com

Overall, 60 percent of online commenters approved of the decision, with many of them telling stories about how it would have an immediate impact on their families.

Supreme Court upholds health care law
Health care ruling could leave poorest Americans at greatest risk

Writing on Facebook, Cathy Weller of Cocoa Beach, Fla., described herself as "a fiscal conservative, libertarian leaning, social progressive." She wrote of losing her health insurance when she lost her job and the difficulty she had insuring herself because of her pre-existing condition — cancer:

All of a sudden I found myself researching health insurance options. Imagine my surprise to find there were none. None. Not a few expensive ones, but none. It didn't matter if I was willing to pay $10,000 a month for health insurance, it was just not available to me, anywhere for any amount of money. This was the first time I personally came up against the issue of health insurance availability having worked constantly up to that point and always having employer offered insurance.

Of opponents of the act, Weller wrote: "I wonder at their sense of security. Do they really imagine themselves to be invulnerable to what so many fellow citizens are going through?"

Nearly a quarter of those supporting the decision stressed its impact on ending what they see as a bias against women in the current health care system.

Among them was Lisa Kitinoja of Eugene, Ore., who administers a nonprofit organization:

Many opponents complained that the act would make health care more expensive, including Darren Perkins of Kansas City, Mo.:

Others saw it as unconstitutionally giving the federal government too much control over people's lives, like Andrew Hastings, an engineer in San Diego:

The 60 percent-to-40 percent split among social media users in favor of the ruling runs counter to public opinion surveys, which generally indicate that a slight majority opposes the health care act. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sunday put support at 48 percent.

The social media results, however, could be a reflection of rising support since the Supreme Court ruling. The Reuters/Ipsos poll, for example, found that before Thursday, support was only 43 percent before rising to 48 percent. (Support in msnbc.com's analysis also showed support trending up since the ruling, hitting 62 percent Monday.)

They also may be explained by the demographics of the social media audience. The Pew Internet & American Life Project, which uses ForSight in its statistical analysis of social media, reported in March that people who identify themselves as liberal are more likely to use social networking sites than are people who self identify as conservatives.

Even so, commenters concluded that Republicans would benefit from the ruling politically more than Democrats, by 56 percent to 44 percent.

Mike Wasylik, a lawyer in Tampa, Fla., wrote:

Chris Twining, a computer consultant in Wildomar, Calif., explained on Facebook:

And Michael Gorka of Newport News, Va., said:

Real-world evidence may support that analysis — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's campaign reported that Friday was its biggest fundraising day from individual donors so far.

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Updated at 7:04 p.m. ET: Now that the Supreme Court has upheld President Barack Obama's health care initiative, will Congress have to rewrite it from scratch?

It's not a paradoxical question. The court signed off on nearly all of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but it struck down one provision, and in doing so — whether it knew it or not — it may have put the poorest Americans at the greatest risk of being left without any health insurance.

Chief Justice John Roberts said as part of the 5-4 decision that states can't be penalized for refusing to join the law's expansion of Medicaid eligibility. Health law experts said that had the practical effect of flipping an all but mandatory program into one a state can choose not to join.

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Here's the problem: The ACA creates state health insurance "exchanges," providing tax credits to eligible residents to buy affordable, state-certified health insurance. But the poorest Americans aren't in that eligible pool, because the law assumes they'll be covered by the expansion of Medicaid, which is no longer a given. 

In states that reject the expansion, poor residents could be left without either form of coverage — as many as 15 million if all 50 states opt out, a circumstance that former Medicaid director Donald Berwick said was highly unlikely.

The White House didn't address the issue in a long Q&A it issued on the court's decision. The statement touted every provision of the act but one: Medicaid expansion.

Medicaid currently covers only some low-income people, primarily parents with children, pregnant women, people with severe disabilities and senior citizens. Adults without disabilities or children, in other words, aren't generally covered. That's the group the Medicaid expansion was supposed to help the most.

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Full ruling from the court

If their states opt out, young working adults below the poverty line could be in a Catch-22, because "they may not get Medicaid, and they may not be eligible to purchase insurance through the exchange," said Christina S. Ho of the Rutgers University School of Law, who was a member of President Bill Clinton's Domestic Policy Council. 

It works this way:

The insurance tax credits are targeted at people with incomes between 100 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line as determined by the U.S. Census Bureau. Congress sought to compel the states to cover everyone under the line through Medicaid.

The federal government promised to fully cover all expenses for the expanded coverage before eventually pulling back to cover 90 percent after a few years. The states would have to pick up the extra 10 percent eventually.

States aren't required to take part, but if they don't, the law as enacted would have turned off the flow of all Medicaid funding from Washington. 

That enforcement mechanism is what the court invalidated Thursday, meaning there's no penalty for a state that says, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Twitter reactions to the ruling

Because states haven't had time to consider yet whether they will opt in or out. it's difficult to say how many people could be affected. 

But about half of the nearly 50 million uninsured Americans have incomes below the new eligibility thresholds, according to the latest report, in October, from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. And about 6 in 10 of them are adults without dependent children — the primary beneficiaries of the program's expansion.

If you do the math, roughly 15 million Americans could be in the newly created gray area. In 2010, when the act was passed, the Commonwealth Fund, an independent health care policy foundation, similarly calculated that the Medicaid expansion would benefit 12 million of the 15 million uninsured Americans under the poverty line. 

Donald Berwick, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers the two programs, said few states were likely to take that risk.

"Those people are still living in your state, They're still poor. They're going to come to your emergency room. They're going to be operated on, and they're going to have diseases that get worse, and you're going to have to pay for that. That will come from the state — free care pools and charity in the state," Berwick said in an interview on MSNBC-TV. 

"I think what's going to happen is the states are going to be under pressure from providers of care who say: 'Why are you leaving this money on the table? Let's join in with the federal dollars.'"

But Judy Solomon, vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, agreed with Ho that the decision means low-income adults could lose the promise of Medicaid coverage "even while people with somewhat higher incomes will be eligible for premium tax credits." 

Writing on the center's policy blog, Solomon said: "The poorest adults — primarily parents and other adults working for low wages — will be left out in the cold."

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Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET: While it upheld most of President Barack Obama's health care reform program Thursday, the Supreme Court took away the stick the White House had hoped to use to force states to expand Medicaid coverage for millions of poor Americans.

The court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, said states can't be penalized for refusing to join the Medicaid expansion by losing all of their federal Medicaid funds. That leaves cash-poor states in the position of deciding during an election year whether the benefits of the expansion outweigh the potential downsides — both financial and political.

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First, some background. Medicaid currently covers many families that are at or below about 63 percent of the poverty line, with some categories — such as children under age 6 — covered up to 133 percent. But most states don't cover lower-income adults.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act sought to compel states to expand coverage to nearly everyone up to the 133 percent threshold — income of about $30,000 a year for a family of four — which would add about 17 million people to the Medicaid rolls.

The carrot was the federal government's promise to cover all of the states' Medicaid expenses for the new enrollees through 2016, gradually dropping to 90 percent by 2019. The stick was that states that refused to sign on would lose all of their federal Medicaid funding.

Christina S. Ho of the Rutgers University School of Law told msnbc.com that the decision could leave the poorest residents of states that decline the money in a particularly vulnerable situation.

Another provision of the law the so-called state health insurance exchanges, extends subsidies to people between 100 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line to buy coverage. But if you're below the poverty line, you're not eligible — because the law assumes you'll get the new Medicaid benefit.

So if a state rejects the expansion of Medicaid, "there are some people that may not be able to get coverage at all," said Ho, who was a member of President Bill Clinton's Domestic Policy Council. "They may not get Medicaid, and they may not be eligible to purchase insurance through the exchange."

States charge plan was blackmail
Twenty-six states filed a petition with the court arguing that the provision was unconstitutional, saying it amounted to blackmail: Either they accept the added funding for a few years, with its increased burden on state coffers in later years, or they lose all of their billions of dollars of federal Medicaid distributions.

That would be a crippling financial blow, because states can't opt out of Medicaid itself. Currently they pay about 40 percent of those expenses; without any federal funding, they would have to come up with the remaining 60 percent themselves.

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Full ruling from the court

Roberts upheld the constitutionality of the expansion itself, in essence saying the carrot was fine but the stick was illegal.

"Nothing in our opinion precludes Congress from offering funds under the Affordable Care Act to expand the availability of health care, and requiring that States accepting such funds comply with the conditions on their use," he wrote. "What Congress is not free to do is to penalize states that choose not to participate in that new program by taking away their existing Medicaid funding." 

Twitter reactions to the ruling

"The states claim that this threat serves no purpose other than to force unwilling states to sign up for the dramatic expansion in the health care coverage effected by the act," he added. "Given the nature of the threat and the programs at issue here, we must agree.”

While it might be fair to say the ruling turned a virtually mandatory program into a voluntary one, few if any states are likely to reject the increased coverage for so many more of their residents, said Katherine Hayes, a lawyer who is an associate research professor for the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services.

"I think, to the extent that they do, it will be largely for political reasons rather than financial or policy reasons," Hayes told msnbc.com. In an election year, it might be useful for some conservative lawmakers "to say you oppose quote-unquote Obamacare," she said.

Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and economist at the Stanford University Center for Health Policy, disagreed, saying some state budgets are so stretched that state officials might "consider this option since they will ultimately be on the hook for financing at least a portion of this expansion."

"If enough states decide to deny the Medicaid expansion, this may substantially reduce the ability of ACA to expand insurance coverage," Bhattacharya wrote on the center's health policy blog.

Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell predicted that would happen, saying that once the federal contribution begins dropping, states will still be left with a large "unfunded mandate" — $2.2 billion over 10 years in his state, he said.

"We've already had Medicaid grow from 5 percent to 21 percent of our budget in the last 30 years, and for every governor, these mandates are crushing expenditures to endure," McDonnell, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said in an interview on MSNBC-TV. "So this is a real hardship."

But Hayes said that in practical terms, the incentives for states to sign on are too big to turn down: They can provide hundreds of thousands of residents with health care coverage at no cost for a few years, and even in the outlying years (when the federal government will pick up only 90 percent of the bill), they can work on strategies to mitigate the reduction, such as seeking waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services.

"I don't know what more the federal government or (Health and Human Services) could do" to bring reluctant states on board, she said.

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Doctors, patients, politicians and legal scholars are eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court's decision on President Barack Obama's health care program on Thursday. But there's one group that is really on pins and needles: accountants and other number crunchers.

If the court overturns the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, they're the ones who'll have to figure out what's going to happen to the $1 billion the federal government has already handed out to states and territories to establish state-regulated health care plans to help find public or private insurance for Americans eligible for federal subsidies.

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The court has three main options — it can uphold the entire law, strike down the entire law or strike down parts of it.

Some justices appeared to signal during arguments in March that they were skeptical of the law, especially the so-called individual mandate, the provision requiring people to buy insurance or pay a fine. Because of the mandate, the Obama administration insisted on provisions directing the states to set up the insurance plans, called health insurance exchanges, to find discounted coverage for uninsured or hard-to-insure people.

Among them was Chief Justice John Roberts, who questioned whether the government can compel people to buy any product.

"Can the government require you to buy a cell phone because that would facilitate responding when you need emergency services?" he asked.

Justice Antonin Scalia drew a similar analogy.

"Everybody has to buy food sooner or later. So you define the market as food, therefore everybody is in the market," he said during the March arguments. "Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli."

What's worrying for supporters of the law is that it appears likely that Roberts will personally craft the ruling, said Tom Goldstein, the publisher of SCOTUSblog— SCOTUS is shorthand for Supreme Court of the United States.

"John Roberts hasn't done anything, really, in major cases in March and April, at the end of the term, which means it's very likely that he assigned that decision to himself," Goldstein told NBC News.

If that part of the law is upheld, the insurance plans must be in operation by 2014. But what if it isn't?

No one really knows.

That includes the White House, which has consistently said it expects the law to be upheld and is moving ahead accordingly.

"Once that decision is rendered, we will make decisions about what to say about it," press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday.

If the law is overturned, there's nothing to stop the federal government from trying to recoup the money it has already distributed for the exchanges — a total of $1.015 billion to 49 states and a multistate planning project, according to an msnbc.com analysis of state disbursement figures provided by the Department of Health and Human Services.

"If the whole thing really is unconstitutional, that has to mean that it is illegal to spend the money that way under current law," Joseph Antos, a health care analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington policy institute, told Kaiser Health News.

Kaiser adds:

Retrieving unspent funds might be possible, but collecting money that's already been spent could prove problematic, especially for cash-strapped states still dealing with a weak economy.

"My sense would be they would not recover the money. How do you recover the money? If it's spent, what do you do?" said Steven Lieberman, the president of Lieberman Consulting Inc. and the former deputy executive director for policy at the National Governors Association.

Nor is it clear what the states would do. Nineteen states have put their plans on hold pending the Supreme Court ruling, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities(.pdf), but others — among them New York, Massachusetts and California — have signaled that they'll try to implement exchanges anyway.

Another is Utah, where 30 percent of the people getting insurance under the exchange are doing so for the first time, said Patty Conner, director of the insurance exchange in Utah.

That makes the plan "a good value to the state," Conner said, as reported by the Deseret News of Salt Lake City.

And private insurers have indicated that they'll also go ahead with some of the law's provisions if it's struck down.

Three of the nation's largest carriers — United Healthcare, Aetna and Humana — said this month that they would continue to let parents keep their children on their policies up to age 26, one of the most popular provisions of the entire plan, and would continue offering preventive services without copayments.

United Healthcare and Humana (but not Aetna) also promised not to reinstate lifetime limits on coverage or cancel policies retroactively, two other provisions widely welcomed by analysts and patients' advocates.

Even so, the picture is complicated by the fact that there's nothing to stop lawmakers from trying again to reform the health-care system if the law falls.

"If this goes away, we still have to start dealing with the problem," Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., a member of the Ways and Means Committee, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

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ST. ELMO, Ala. — Vern Phdsamay, a Buddhist monk, sits quietly not in his temple along Alabama's Gulf Coast but in a Mobile County jail cell. He's charged with murder, accused of having beaten the temple's chief monk to death last month before calmly washing up and eating dinner.

Once again, the peace at Wat Buddharaksa Temple has been shattered.

In 2008, a fire that was ruled an accident destroyed the temple. It took two years to rebuild.

In 2010, the BP oil spill devastated the economy of the local Laotian and Thai communities served by the temple.

Now it is without its spiritual leader of a dozen years. Prosecutors say Chaiwat Moleechate, 45 — the head monk, who led the work to rebuild the temple — was bludgeoned to death during an argument May 11.

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Phdsamay, 32, was quickly arrested and charged with murder. At his bond hearing last month, Assistant District Attorney Jo Beth Murphree said Phdsamay smashed Moleechate on the head at least 12 times with a foot-long wooden pestle. Then, "He went back to his living quarters, showered and washed his clothes, and he went back and ate," she said.

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Phdsamay (pronounced PIT-suh-my) was bound over to a grand jury Monday. Penniless because he has sworn a vow of poverty, his lawyer says, he remains in Mobile County Metro Jail on $50,000 bond.

It's not clear exactly when Phdsamay, who speaks no English, joined Wat Buddharaksa. Authorities say he is a legal resident of the U.S., having immigrated from Laos and settled in the area in 2005.

What is clear is that for at least the last three months, Phdsamay had been troubled. He stopped talking and refused to join his fellow monks for meals, and Moleechate (pronounced MOLE-uh-shayt) had been trying to help him, temple members said.

A doctor was brought in to see Phdsamay, but he refused to take any medicine, temple members said. That was when Moleechate began making plans to send him off the grounds for treatment, said Bouasanouuong, a member of the temple's governing committee who, as is customary in some Thai communities, uses one name.

For some time, she said, it seemed that Phdsamay had been "kind of a little bit mental." But no one thought he might be capable of murder.

On May 11, a Friday, Phdsamay and Moleechate had an argument, and at some point Phdsamay's meal was thrown away, prosecutors said. Witnesses said Phdsamay began beating Moleechate with a long stick, later identified as the foot-long wooden pestle.

Chaiwat ended up dead, and Phdsamay — whose jailhouse booking photo shows him with long, red scratch on his neck — ended up in custody on murder charges.

Neil Handley, Phdsamay's attorney, said his client claimed that he got the scratch defending himself from Chaiwat, who he said "came at him" first.

That doesn't square with how temple members remember Reverend Chaiwat, as he was known.

Moleechate was "a very kind person," temple member Steve Chatahuane said. "He helped everyone that needs help."

"Sometimes I ask myself, do good people always go first?" Chatahuane said. "He was one of the good people that I knew."

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Updated at 6:15 p.m. ET: A Mississippi legislator and Baptist minister says he and his family have received death threats after he posted comments that some activists said endorsed the killing of gay men.

The comments were posted on the Facebook page of state Rep. Andy Gipson, R-Braxton, setting off fierce discussion that eventually went national.

(Gipson's Facebook page disappeared Monday, but he told msnbc.com that he hadn't deleted it. Facebook disabled the page for "suspicious activity," apparently because someone tried to hack his or her way into the account, he said. He said he was working to get the page back up.)

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The controversy began May 10, when Gipson posted this after President Barack Obama told ABC News he personally believed gay men and lesbians should be allowed to marry:

Been a lot of press on Obama's opinion on "homosexual marriage." The only opinion that counts is God's: see Romans 1:26-28 and Leviticus 20:13. Anyway you slice it, it is sin. Not to mention horrific social policy.

The Leviticus verse is one of the bedrocks of conservative Christian opposition to homosexuality. It reads:

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

The posting drew little national attention until Gipson responded to an online petition posted by Change.org, which called on him to apologize and to meet with representatives of gay and lesbian organizations in Mississippi.

On Friday, Gipson posted: "I do not, cannot, and will not apologize for the inspired truth of God's Word."

That caught the eyes of national groups and publications, including the Huffington Post, which highlighted the controversy under the  headline "Andy Gipson, Mississippi GOP Lawmaker, Blasts Gays, Cites Bible Passage Calling For Their Death."

Gipson said he had received threats by phone and email, as well as a death threat against his family, which he reported to authorities.

In a statement (.pdf) he issued Monday to NBC station WLBT of Jackson, Miss., Gipson objected to coverage of the story, especially by the Huffington Post, which he called a "well-known radical liberal blog."

"I have never publicly or privately called for the killing of any people," Gipson said in the statement. "I believe all people are created in the image of God and I stand firmly for the sanctity of all human life."

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Online reaction to President Barack Obama's endorsement of same-sex marriage is running 3-to-1 in his favor, but commenters are sharply divided over whether it will help him or hurt him in November, according to a computer-assisted analysis of hundreds of thousands of social media posts in the first 24 hours after the announcement.

The analysis examined 532,000 posts on Twitter and Facebook, about 300,000 of which expressed a clear opinion about Obama's statement. Of those, 72 percent approved of the announcement.

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(The analysis — which ran from 3 p.m. ET Wednesday, when ABC News broadcast its interview with Obama, through 3 p.m. ET Thursday — used a tool called ForSight, a natural-language data platform developed by Crimson Hexagon Inc. For this type of sentiment analysis, Crimson Hexagon reports a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points among the self-selected social media audience. Click here for a detailed explanation.)

More social media analysis from NBCPolitics.com

While Obama won widespread praise online, a significant proportion of it was grudging.

Many supporters of same-sex marriage criticized the president for not having announced his position until now, 3½ years into his presidency. Fully a third of those agreeing with the decision did so while asking, in essence, "What took you so long?" 

A further 18 percent of those agreeing with the announcement complained that the president hadn't gone far enough, with some noting that he stopped short of taking any concrete action, such as proposing legislation or issuing an executive order to have federal agencies recognize same-sex marriages.

By contrast, opponents of Obama's announcement strongly indicated that they believed it was a politically cynical move.
Nearly half of those opposing the move — 47 percent — expressed sentiments like these:

Interestingly, about a fifth of the sample — well more than 100,000 people — chose to analyze the announcement not so much on its merits but on whom it would benefit in the general election. And by 52 percent to 48 percent, a slim majority of those thought it would likely help Obama and other Democrats.

The social media analysis is also notable for its variance from public opinion at large. Recent polls generally indicate that only about half of Americans believe same-sex marriages should be legal; the most recent Gallup Poll, taken May 3-6, for example, showed a 50 percent to 48 percent split.

Following Obama's support of gay marriage, a flood of emotions

A possible explanation lies in the makeup of the social media audience. 

The Pew Internet & American Life Project, which uses ForSight in its statistical analysis of social media, reported in March that people who identify themselves as liberal are more likely to use social networking sites than are people who identify as conservatives.

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Moreover, marketing surveys indicate that people who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered are more frequent users of social media than the population as a whole.

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Viewing child pornography online isn't a crime, the New York Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday in the case of a college professor whose work computer was found to have stored more than a hundred illegal images in its Web cache.

The court dismissed one of the two counts of promoting a sexual performance of a child and one of the dozens of counts of possession of child pornography on which James D. Kent was convicted. The court upheld the other counts against Kent, an assistant professor of public administration at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Kent — who said at his sentencing that he "abhorred" child pornography and argued that someone else at Marist must have placed the images on his computer — was sentenced to one to three years in state prison in August 2009.

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The decision rests on whether accessing and viewing something on the Internet is the same as possessing it, and whether possessing it means you had to procure it. In essence, the court said no to the first question and yes to the second.

"Merely viewing Web images of child pornography does not, absent other proof, constitute either possession or procurement within the meaning of our Penal Law," Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote for a majority of four of the six judges. 

"Rather, some affirmative act is required (printing, saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised dominion and control over the images that were on his screen," Ciparick wrote. "To hold otherwise, would extend the reach of (state law) to conduct — viewing — that our Legislature has not deemed criminal."

Read the full appeals court ruling (.pdf)

In other words, "the purposeful viewing of child pornography on the internet is now legal in New York," Judge Victoria A. Graffeo wrote in one of two concurring opinions that agreed with the result but not with the majority's reasoning.

Kent's attorney, Nathan Z. Dershowitz, told msnbc.com that he hadn't yet had a chance to talk to his client, so he couldn't discuss what they would do next. But he agreed with Graffeo that the ruling means that "in New York, there is no crime" in simply viewing child pornography. 

All of the judges agreed that child pornography is an abomination, but they disagreed whether it was necessary to "criminalize all use of child pornography to the maximum extent possible," as Ciparick wrote in the majority opinion. The majority said that was up to the Legislature, not the courts, to decide. 

Judge throws out child porn charge against Washington man

The technical details revolve around copies of deleted files that remained in the cache of Kent's Web browser, which were the basis of the two counts that were dismissed. They were discovered, along with other materials, during a virus scan that Kent had requested because his computer was running slowly.

To demonstrate possession of the images in the cache, "the defendant's conduct must exceed mere viewing," Ciparick wrote, adding that "the mere existence of an image automatically stored in a cache" isn't enough.

Furthermore, the prosecution failed to prove that Kent even knew his Web browser had a cache in the first place, writing, "A defendant cannot knowingly acquire or possess that which he or she does not know exists."

Dershowitz said the "real problem here is that legislation is not keeping up with technology," arguing that federal courts also haven't fully addressed the legal standing of images stored only in a browser cache.

The federal statute outlawing possession of child pornography — 18 USC 2252A — doesn't mention browser caches. The few cases that have examined the issue at the federal level — notably a 2002 federal appeals case involving a Utah man and a 2006 federal appeals case involving a visitor to Las Vegas — generally conclude that cached images alone can establish possession if the defendant knows about the browser's caching function.

Both courts noted that it was hypothetically possible for the defendants to be innocent if they were ignorant of the cache function. 

"Those statutes are probably not quite as incomprehensible, but they are anything but clear," Dershowitz said.

Kent's convictions on the other counts rested on other evidence, including a folder on his machine that stored about 13,000 saved images of girls whom investigators estimated to be 8 or 9 years old and four messages to an unidentified third party discussing a research project into the regulation of child pornography.

"I don't even think I can mail the disk to you, or anyone else, without committing a separate crime. So I'll probably just go ahead and wipe them," one of the messages said.

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