Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his Manhattan apartment, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday (Feb. 2).

The 46-year-old actor’s cause of death has yet to be determined but the New York Police Department is investigating and a law-enforcement official confirmed to WSJ that the Academy Award-winning actor died in his 35 Bethune St., West Village home.

The New York Post reports that Hoffman was found dead on his bathroom floor of an apparent drug overdose by a friend at 11:30 a.m. According to the New York Times, the friend visited Hoffman’s home after he could not get a hold of the actor and grew concerned. WSJ criminal justice reporter Pervaiz Shallwani tweeted that Hoffman was alone at the time of his death and the man who found him was screenwriter David Katz, with whom Hoffman had recently been working on a project.

Only the snarkiest would not be open to the likable life story of Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Eastern Washington politician who gave the “official” Republican response to the president’s State of the Union speech. She’s a farm girl from a big empty county just north of here, first in her family to attend college, mother of three, a rare woman in the retrograde men’s club of her party’s leadership.

Her district, poorer than the west side of the state, with much of the broken-family, broken-promise poverty of white rural America, is in real trouble. But the policy prescriptions of McMorris Rodgers have nothing to offer these people. Through her, you can see what happens when biography trumps substance in politics.

Passengers aboard a cruise ship on which hundreds fell ill recalled days of misery holed up in their rooms as it returned to its home port Wednesday from a Caribbean trip cut short by what is suspected to be among the largest such norovirus outbreaks in the last 20 years.

Travelers aboard the Explorer of the Seas recounted hundreds throwing up, and stricken passengers having food brought to their rooms. Others were served from covered buffets by crew members wearing gloves and masks during an outbreak that sickened nearly 700 passengers and crew on the ship operated by Royal Caribbean.

Kim Waite, 50, of London, England, was on the cruise with her husband, Fred, to celebrate the end of her cancer treatments. She got severely ill, and barely saw her husband the whole trip.

Disrupted sleep could accelerate cancer growth due to its negative effects on the immune system, according to new research in mice.

In the study, published in the journal Cancer Research, researchers split mice into two groups. One group of mice was allowed to sleep peacefully during the day (mice are nocturnal and typically sleep in the daytime), while the other mice had their sleep disturbed every two minutes with a motorized brush that swept through their cages; these mice were forced to wake up and go back to sleep.

The mice experienced these settings for seven days before being injected with cells from one of two different kinds of tumors. After being injected, all the mice went on to develop tumors within nine to 12 days; the researchers examined the tumors four weeks later.