Midday Roundup: Cruz vows to cut ties with Canada

Not my country. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said late yesterday that if he really does have dual citizenship in the United States and Canada, he would renounce his Canadian claim. The Dallas Morning News reported on Sunday that Cruz’s birth in Canada to an American mother automatically gave him dual citizenship. Cruz has always maintained that he only had U.S. citizenship. He has never had a Canadian passport. But the ambiguity was sure to come up during future political campaigns, especially if Cruz decides to run for president in 2016, as most pundits expect. Some legal experts say that while Cruz’s American citizenship is not in question, the U.S. Constitution is not clear on whether someone with dual citizenship could run for president.

Senseless. A small Oklahoma college town is reeling after three teens shot and killed a popular baseball player “for the fun of it.” The boys, aged 17, 15, and 16, decided to murder Christopher Lane because they were bored, one of them allegedly told investigators. Lane, a native of Australia, played catcher for East Central University. He was out for a jog while visiting his girlfriend’s family in Duncan, Okla., a town of about 24,000, when he passed by the house where the teens were staying. They followed him in a car and shot him in the back as they drove past.

Discrimination? An Oklahoma judge on Monday blocked a new state law that would have restricted access to so-called “morning after” emergency contraception. The law, passed earlier this year, requires all women buying the drug, sold under the brand name Plan B, to show identification and prevents girls younger than 17 from buying it without a prescription. The Food and Drug Administration has approved one version of the drug for sale over the counter, without restrictions. The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights and the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice filed suit against the Oklahoma statute, saying it is unconstitutional and discriminates against women. The bill passed both houses of the state legislature by wide margins.

Scott free. A Pakistani judge has dismissed charges against a Muslim cleric who falsely accused a Christian teen of burning pages from the Quran. The judge on Saturday ruled the prosecution had not brought forward sufficient evidence to convict Khalid Chishti, an imam in a neighborhood of Christian and Muslim families just outside Islamabad. Chishti originally claimed someone brought him a plastic bag containing the burned pages and said the girl had been carrying them around with her. Officials arrested Rimsha Masih and jailed her for three weeks, despite conflicting evidence about her age and mental capacity. After her acquittal, Masih’s family fled to Canada. Most of the other Christian families in the neighborhood fled to other parts of the country, fearing retribution from their Muslim neighbors.

Bad leak. Japanese officials say 300 tons of contaminated water have leaked from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on Japan’s Pacific Coast, prompting fears of ongoing fallout from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the site. Although workers rushed to place sandbags around the leak, a spokesman for plan operator Tokyo Electric Power acknowledged much of the water likely leaked into the soil and could eventually end up in the ocean.