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SACRAMENTO — A majority of California voters oppose a ballot initiative to ban gay marriage, though they are evenly split on the practice itself, according to a poll released Wednesday.

The ballot question essentially will ask voters to prohibit the practice of same-sex marriage, which was approved this year by the California Supreme Court.

The discrepancy between voters' general attitudes against gay marriage and their position on banning it could be explained by a hesitancy to remove a constitutional right, said Mark Baldassare, president and chief executive of the Public Policy Institute of California, which conducted the poll.

A majority of likely voters, 54 percent, oppose ending gay marriage, compared with 40 percent who support it, the poll said.

But when it comes to general attitudes about gay marriage, voters in the Public Policy Institute poll are evenly split, at 47 percent for and against — as they have been for three years.

SAN FRANCISCO — Pioneering lesbian-rights activist Del Martin, who married her longtime partner in June on the first day same-sex couples in California gained that right, died Wednesday. She was 87.

Martin died at a hospital two weeks after a broken arm exacerbated health problems, said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Her wife, Phyllis Lyon, was with her.

Along with six other women, they founded a San Francisco social club for lesbians in 1955. The group evolved into the nation's first lesbian advocacy organization.

LOS ANGELES — A blogger suspected of streaming songs from the unreleased Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy" on his Web site was arrested Wednesday and appeared in court, where his bail was set at $10,000.

FBI agents arrested 27-year-old Kevin Cogill on Wednesday morning on suspicion of violating federal copyright laws.

Federal authorities say Cogill posted nine unreleased Guns N' Roses songs on his Web site in June.

The songs were later removed.

LOS ANGELES — Former teen star Mackenzie Phillips has been arrested on suspicion of possessing a controlled substance after she allegedly was found carrying drugs at Los Angeles International Airport.

Airport police Sgt. Jim Holcomb said the co-star of the old sitcom "One Day At a Time" was arrested Wednesday.

The 48-year-old Phillips was heading to New York when she failed to pass a security screening and a secondary search turned up a small amount of cocaine and heroin in her possession, he said.

Phillips is the daughter of John Phillips, the late leader of the singing group the Mamas and the Papas. She has struggled with drug addiction in the past and was fired from "One Day At a Time," which ran from 1975 to 1984, for drug-related causes.

She went on to star in the Disney Channel series "So Weird" and has made intermittent TV appearances in recent years.

BOSTON — A measure that would decriminalize minor marijuana-possession cases is on the ballot in Massachusetts largely because of one man: billionaire financier and liberal activist George Soros.

Of the $429,000 collected last year by the group advancing the measure, $400,000 came from Soros.

The Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy needed about $315,000 of that just to collect the more than 100,000 signatures that secured a spot on the ballot, according to campaign finance reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

If the measure is approved in November, Massachusetts would become the 13th state to lift or ease criminal penalties on marijuana possession. The proposal would make having an ounce or less of the drug a civil offense punishable by a $100 fine.

ANCHORAGE — Alaska's Republican old guard talked tough Wednesday after a bruising primary, sounding confident they can prevail in the November general election despite criminal probes.

U.S. Rep. Don Young, under federal investigation for ties to a corrupt Alaska businessman, was locked in a virtual dead heat with Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell for Alaska's sole House seat, which Young has held for 35 years.

Sen. Ted Stevens, the Senate's longest-serving Republican, breezed to a primary win Tuesday, gaining 63 percent of the vote against six GOP challengers. But 33,000 GOP primary voters went against him, more than four times the number that did so in his last primary in 2002.

Two formidable opponents still stand in the way of Stevens' seventh full term: federal prosecutors who next month will try to prove he's a felon, and the energetic mayor of Anchorage, Mark Begich, a Democrat receiving strong national party support.

NEW YORK — New data show New York City residents are contracting the virus that causes AIDS at three times the national rate.

The city health department said Wednesday that almost 4,800 New Yorkers were infected with HIV in 2006. That number represents 72 of every 100,000 residents, compared with a national rate of 23 per 100,000.

The figures pinpoint when people became infected with the virus, not when they were diagnosed.

Health officials attribute the city's relatively high rate of new infections to its large populations of gay men, blacks and other groups on whom HIV has historically taken a heavy toll.

BOISE — A longtime sex offender was sentenced to death Wednesday for the 2005 kidnapping, torture and murder of a 9-year-old northern Idaho boy after federal jurors who watched video of some of the brutality deliberated just three hours.

U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge thanked the jurors, dismissed them and then sentenced Joseph Edward Duncan III.

Relatives of the victim, Dylan Groene, remained somber as the jury's decision was announced. Duncan murdered Dylan's mother, older brother and his mother's fiance to kidnap him and his younger sister.