Duke University today canceled the rest of the season for its men’s lacrosse team, and the team’s coach resigned, after police investigators released the text of an e-mail message in which one of the players wrote that he wanted to hire strippers, kill them, and skin them, the Associated Press reported. The player sent the message, which may have been intended as a joke, less than an hour after the end of a party at which a stripper was allegedly assaulted by three team members—a scandal that has dominated the Duke campus and made national headlines for the last week (The Chronicle, March 29 and April 7). Local authorities are expected to announce within the next few days whether DNA tests of the players match samples taken from the woman who was assaulted.

A longer report on this news will appear tomorrow on this Web site.