New York

TV actress Jean Stapleton dies at 90 of natural causes

NEW YORK – Jean Stapleton, the stage-trained character actress who played Archie Bunker’s far better half, the sweetly naive Edith, in TV’s groundbreaking 1970s comedy “All in the Family,” has died. She was 90.

Stapleton died Friday of natural causes at her New York City home surrounded by friends and family, her children said Saturday.

Little known to the public before “All In the Family,” she co-starred with Carroll O’Connor in the top-rated CBS sitcom about an unrepentant bigot and the wife he churlishly but fondly called “Dingbat.”

Stapleton received eight Emmy nominations and won three times during her eight-year tenure with “All in the Family.”

Fridge with morbid history being auctioned on eBay

NEW YORK – It’s a fridge big enough for a family of four.

New York’s Office of General Services has turned to eBay in an attempt to sell off a huge, steel morgue refrigerator now located at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital.

Bidding on Saturday afternoon was up to $475 for the four-drawer unit, but that price doesn’t include delivery. Buyers have to be willing to remove the fridge themselves from the Manhattan Psychiatric Center.

The auction runs through June 6.

Pennsylvania

Health secretary seeks review of lung-transplant policy

PHILADELPHIA – Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is calling for a review of policies affecting patients needing lung transplants as a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl whose parents say she’s been denied the life-saving surgery because of her age remains hospitalized on a ventilator.

Sebelius asks that the review particularly consider changes that would make more transplants available to children.

Sarah Murnaghan’s parents say the Newtown Square girl has end-stage cystic fibrosis. Under existing policy, adults in the region with her blood type will be offered the lungs first, even those not as severely ill.

New Hampshire

Memorial held for mother of Newtown shooter

KINGSTON, N.H. – More than 100 family and friends gathered at a church in a small New Hampshire town Saturday to remember the woman whose son massacred 20 first-graders and six educators last year at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

The mourners and a few musicians filed into the white clapboarded First Congregational Church in Kingston for the memorial of Nancy Lanza, the first victim of her 20-year-old son Adam’s rampage.

California

Lutheran assembly elects first openly gay bishop

LOS ANGELES – The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America elected its first openly gay bishop to a six-year term Friday at an annual assembly in Southern California, officials said.

The election of the Rev. R. Guy Erwin comes after the church’s controversial rule change in 2009 that allowed gays and lesbians to be ordained in the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination. More than 600 congregations have left the denomination since the change.

Erwin, a resident of the Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles, currently serves as a pastor at Faith Lutheran Church and a professor of Lutheran Confessional Theology at California Lutheran University.

Associated Press