National News

NPR | A generation ago, young people vowed never to trust anyone over 30. But as it turns out, those under 30 today are actually more trusting of the government of all age groups, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

FOX | A group of teens beat a 73-year-old man and his friend repeatedly. A surveillance camera helped catch some of the teens, but police are still looking for two suspects.

MSNBC | It was just a simple sales transaction set up via Craigslist, the Internet classified ads site. The item being offered was valuable — a 1.07-carat diamond ring, with an asking price of $1,050 — but James Sanders, a trusting man, felt there was nothing to fear.

CBS | Two former county judges discussed receiving kickbacks and plotted perjury with the owner of a private juvenile detention facility, who recorded the conversations, prosecutors said.  Prosecutors on Tuesday filed a brief including transcripts of conversations they say were between attorney Robert Powell and former Luzerne County judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella.

CNN | The Billings, Montana, City Council will take up the issue of regulating medical marijuana on Monday night in a meeting expected to be intense in the wake of the firebombings of two of the city's medical marijuana storefronts in the last two days.

Philly.com | In a city that has seen more than its share of police killings in recent years, the department's leaders were grimly prepared. Sometime after 4 a.m. on April 5, after Sgt. Robert Ralston was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania with a shoulder wound, the department's top brass rushed to his side, including Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey, who was sick with a stomach virus.

AOL News | A new analysis of a 40-year-old audio recording reveals that someone ordered National Guard troops to prepare to fire on students during a deadly Vietnam War protest at Kent State University in 1970, two forensics experts said.

Chicago Breaking News | Had Lora Hunt been eating a sandwich or dialing her cell phone instead of polishing her nails when she struck and killed a motorcyclist, she would not now stand convicted of reckless homicide, her lawyer contends.

Cryptogon | Firefighters knocked on the neighbor’s door but he refused to let them in. They called police, who broke down the door of the penthouse just as the man inside was escaping through a back window and down a fire escape carrying duffel bags.

Reboot the Republic | Martin Luther King’s family and his attorney, William F. Pepper, won a civil trial that found US government agencies guilty in the wrongful death of Martin Luther King. The 1999 trial, King Family versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators, is the only trial ever conducted on the assassination of Dr. King.

Future of Freedom Foundation | Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism.” Although the Left frequently exaggerates and overemphasizes the evils of corporate America, proponents of the free market often find themselves in the awkward position of defending the status quo of state capitalism, which is in fact a common adversary of the free marketer and the anti-corporate leftist, even if the latter misdiagnoses the problem and proposes the wrong solutions.

Chicago Breaking News | For more than two years, the families of two young men killed in a Thanksgiving Day collision with an off-duty Chicago police officer have fought to prove the officer was drunk and responsible for the deaths.

Examiner | This afternoon a local radio talk show host reported that he had been in contact with a member of the military.  This military source stated that the armed forces have been alerted to the strong possibility that civil unrest may occur in the United States this summer, prior to the midterm elections of 2010.

Judicial Watch | The assistant chief counsel for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Constantine Kallas) had already been indicted by a grand jury with 75 counts, including bribery, money laundering, federal worker’s compensation fraud and a series of other serious crimes related to accepting hefty cash bribes from dozens of foreigners seeking documents to stay in the U.S.

Tampa Bay Online | An Oregon jury's decision to award a man $18.5 million in punitive damages in his case against the Boy Scouts of America will likely be the first of many financial hits the Scouts will take as it prepares to defend itself against a series of sex abuse lawsuits.

Associated Press | Nearly 4 million Americans — the vast majority of them middle class — will have to pay a penalty if they don't get insurance when President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law kicks in, according to congressional estimates released Thursday.

Information Liberation | A Fox News hit piece against Jesse Ventura and the 9/11 truth movement written by former Washington D.C. prosecutor Jeffrey Scott Shapiro inadvertently reveals a shocking truth, that World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein, who collected nearly $500 million dollars in insurance as a result of the collapse of Building 7, a 47-story structure that was not hit by a plane but collapsed within seven seconds on September 11, was on the phone to his insurance carrier attempting to convince them that the building should be brought down via controlled demolition.

CBS | Authorities say Gerard M. Shaffer and his son, also named Gerard, were arrested Monday in connection to the incident that occurred on April 8 at 7:30 p.m. near Knights Road and Fairdale Avenue.

CBS News | A U.S. federal air marshal was arrested Saturday, accused of raping a woman at gunpoint inside a Seattle hotel room while on a layover for his job.  Lecheton "Omar" Settles, 30, has been charged with rape in the first degree and is being held at the King County jail with bail set at $250,000.

Seattle PI | Rachner also hired Seattle attorney Cleveland Stockmeyer to look at his case and probably others where arrests might have been illegal or where police claimed to have destroyed valuable arrest videos that weren't, in fact, erased.

MSNBC | NEW YORK - A reputed boss of the Gambino organized crime family and 13 other people were charged on Tuesday with an array of crimes, including what prosecutors called new territory for the mob: sex trafficking of a minor.

WJZ | Suzanne Collins reports Ramkissoon pleaded guilty to child abuse resulting in the death of her son, Javon Thompson, but was given a more lenient sentence than the other cult members convicted of murder.

Reuters | The Obama administration, facing a subpoena threat from Congress, will not share information that could compromise its prosecution of the suspected gunman in last year's Fort Hood shooting, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Friday.

Washington Post | Nearly 80 percent of Americans say they do not trust the U.S. government to do what is right, expressing the highest level of distrust in Washington in half a century, according to a public opinion survey.

Wall Street Journal | Arizona lawmakers on Tuesday passed one of the toughest pieces of immigration-enforcement legislation in the country, which would make it a violation of state law to be in the U.S. without proper documentation.

Australian Conservative | “The FBI confirms that a file was maintained on Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham,” states Cliff Kincaid, the journalist who runs the public policy group, America’s Survival, Inc. (ASI). “This is a troubling development in the effort to understand the Marxism that drives Obama’s policies as president today.”

Exiled Online | On February 17, 1967, the news about a new investigation into JFK’s assassination, headed by a New Orleans DA named Jim Garrison, who began to question the “lone gunman” theory laying all the blame on Lee Harvey Oswald.

Huffington Post | Maryland would join 14 other states in legalizing medical marijuana. The neighboring District of Columbia legalized it in a 1998 referendum that was only recently allowed by Congress to go into effect. The District's city council is writing rules to establish the city's medical marijuana policy.

World Net Daily | A federal court case that argues President Obama probably is not even a U.S. citizen, much less a "natural born citizen" as required by the U.S. Constitution of the chief executive officer, has been scheduled by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for June 29.

USA Today | When the sheriff's department in Ashtabula County, Ohio, was cut from 112 to 49 deputies, just one vehicle was left to patrol the 720-square-mile county.

Denver Post | The 18th Judicial District Attorney keeps hounding Sanchez even though new evidence filed by the defense makes it increasingly questionable whether she's prosecuting the right man for an attack that terrified Douglas County's Stonegate neighborhood last summer.

Independent | The internet, video games and late-night TV are depriving a generation of proper rest – and the price is high, from depression to poor exam results.

National Post | On March 31, RCMP officers from the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean Detachment (with assistance of the Surete du Quebec) searched a residence in Roberval, Que., which led to the discovery and seizure of "hundreds of counterfeit video games and the arrest of one suspect," according to an RCMP statement.

Journal Sentinel | A district attorney is telling Juneau County schools to abandon their sex education courses, saying a new curriculum law could lead to criminal charges against teachers for contributing to the delinquency of minors.

Gawker | Basically the school district canceled the prom when everyone got upset about a gay person being gay at it, but then a little bit later — after much international scrutiny and ACLU lawsuit stuff — the school district's attorney announced that a parent-sponsored prom was being held and invited McMillen.

NPR | Transylvania was not only home to the world's most popular vampire; it was also the name of the area that today makes up Kentucky state. It existed for about a year until Congress voted against making it America's 14th colony.

Tenth Amendment Center | The bill’s primary sponsor, Dick Harwood, told the House that the Idaho Attorney General opined that the bill is unconstitutional, but he said the intent is to force a Supreme Court case that backers hope will limit the scope of the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Prison Planet | A family in Williamson County, Austin have lost custody of their 7-year-old son as part of a Child Protective Services investigation because the parents taught their children to mistrust the government, an action that deemed them to be “unsuitable parents,” according to charges leveled by police officers in CPS documents.

Times Online | They are known as the Danziger Seven, a brotherhood of police officers bonded by a shameful secret but protected by a “blue code” of silence. Only now, four and a half years after they shot dead two innocent people during the anarchy that came after Hurricane Katrina, has the deceit by New Orleans police officers begun to unravel after three cracked under the pressure of a federal investigation.

AJC | Sheriff Terrell said Schaefer left a four-page suicide note at the couple's home near Clarkesville. He also left several letters addressed to family members. There  may be indications that finances played a role in the case, Terrell said, but nothing he has seen so far establishes a clear motive.

New York Times | When Paul Culkin came home to New Mexico after serving with an Army bomb squad in Iraq, he tried counseling and medications offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs to cope with his post traumatic stress disorder.

Associated Press | President Barack Obama stepped carefully when talking for the first time about the conservative tea party movement, acknowledging it has legitimate concerns about federal reach and spending, but he contended the core of the loose anti-government network is "on the fringe."

CNN | Rove, who served as senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President Bush, was at the Saban Theater to discuss his new book, "Courage and Consequences: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight," to an audience of about 100 people who paid up to $40 to hear him.

Newsmax | Fed up with federal ownership of more than half the land in Utah, Republican Gov. Gary Herbert on Saturday authorized the use of eminent domain to take some of the U.S. government's most valuable parcels.

New York Daily News | "All of a sudden I heard these tremendous bangs, like thunder," said Richard Spatafora, a nurse who lives in the area. "I looked up and stuff was pouring down out of the sky. Big, big chunks of the side of the building. ... I jumped under an awning to save myself."

Politico | This came after Rep. Tom Perriello’s (D-Va.) brother’s gas lines were cut, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) received death threats and Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) received a message saying snipers were being deployed to kill children of those who voted for health care overhaul.

Washington Post | These were the words of Mike Vanderboegh, a 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama, who took to his blog urging people who opposed the historic health-care reform legislation -- he calls it "Nancy Pelosi's Intolerable Act" -- to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic offices nationwide.

Huffingtont Post | Marijuana was prohibited in 1937 before most Americans had ever heard of it. Today the U.S. leads the world in marijuana consumption. Nearly 26 million Americans used marijuana last year and more than 100 million have tried it in their lifetimes.

CNN | FBI investigating Perriello incident in Virginia.  Days after his address was posted online by a Virginia Tea Party activist, the FBI and local law enforcement officials are investigating a "suspicious incident" at the home of Rep. Tom Perriello's brother.

Washington Post | Jackson shot the photograph for an exhibit depicting the Stations of the Cross, but the show's organizers rejected it, sparking a controversy some say is overshadowing remembrance of Jesus' final hours during the season of Lent.