GOP warns Iran on nuclear deal

GOP warns Iran on nuclear deal

WASHINGTON

Republican lawmakers warned the leaders of Iran on Monday that any nuclear deal they cut with President Barack Obama could expire the day he leaves office. The White House denounced the GOP’s latest effort to undercut the international negotiations as a “rush to war.”

Monday’s open letter from 47 GOP senators marked an unusually public and aggressive attempt to undermine Obama and five world powers as negotiators try to strike an initial deal by the end of March to limit Iran’s nuclear programs.

Republicans say a deal would be insufficient and unenforceable, and they have made a series of proposals to undercut or block it — from requiring Senate say-so on any agreement to ordering new penalty sanctions against Iran or even making a pre-emptive declaration of war.

S. Korean leader visits US envoy

SEOUL, South Korea

South Korea’s president visited injured U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert on Monday amid an outpouring of public sympathy and support for the envoy, who is recovering from an attack by a knife-wielding man.

Lippert has been hospitalized since Thursday at Seoul’s Severance Hospital, where President Park Geun-hye also received treatment in 2006 when she was knifed by a man with a box cutter during an election rally. Park was then an opposition party leader.

Poll: Ownership of guns is declining

WASHINGTON

The number of Americans who live in a household with at least one gun is lower than it’s ever been, according to a major American trend survey that finds the decline in gun ownership is paralleled by a reduction in the number of Americans who hunt.

According to the latest General Social Survey, 32 percent of Americans either own a firearm themselves or live with someone who does, which ties a record low set in 2010. That’s a significant decline since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when about half of Americans told researchers there was a gun in their household.

Murder conviction in buttocks-shot trial

PHILADELPHIA

A former madam who bragged of doing black-market “body sculpting” on thousands of women was convicted Monday of murder in the death of a dancer whose heart stopped after nearly half a gallon of silicone was injected into her buttocks.

Padge-Victoria Windslowe’s colorful testimony during her Philadelphia trial included claims that she was “the Michelangelo of buttocks injections” and that model Amber Rose was “a walking billboard” for her work. Yet Windslowe had no medical training, other than tips she said she picked up from overseas doctors who performed her sex-change operation and a physician-client of her escort service who became her lover.

Study: Vegetarians run lowest risk of colorectal cancer

Colorectal cancers kill more Americans than any other cancer except lung cancer, but a new study suggests you can reduce your risk of the disease by laying off the cheeseburgers and pastramis and opting for a large salad or broiled salmon instead.

After tracking 77,659 Americans and Canadians for an average of more than seven years, researchers from Loma Linda University in Southern California found that vegetarians were 22 percent less likely than meat-eaters to be diagnosed with colon cancer or rectal cancer. The results were published Monday by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Combined dispatches