A lone dolphin that has spent the past five days swimming in the Bolsa Chica wetlands in Southern California may be the victim of bullying, NBCLosAngeles.com reported.  

The dolphin may have been prevented from leaving the Huntington Beach nature preserve by other dolphins, Peter Wallerstein, director of Marine Animal Rescue told the Register. This would be a rare occurrence, as dolphins are social creatures that typically travel in a pod.

NBCLosAngeles.com: Dolphin chooses to stay in Bolsa Chica wetlands

“He was scared, he was intimidated, he was bullied,” Wallerstein told the Los Angeles Times. Dolphins "can be very aggressive toward each other. They’re not the sweet, loving, gentle animals portrayed by the movies and the cartoons. They do have a dark side.”

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On Saturday, Wallerstein and officers from the state Department of Fish and Game used paddle boards to shoo the dolphin back to the ocean. When two other dolphins emerged, apparently blocking the lone dolphin's path back to the ocean, it dove under the paddle boards and swam back to the wetlands.

But Dennis Kelly, who has studied dolphins and marine life for 34 years, told the Orange County Register that he doubted the dolphin is being bullied.

“Maybe the others are angry,” Kelly, an instructor of Orange Coast College, said. “‘You’re lagging behind, you moron.’ Maybe they were going whack it. ‘You’re not paying attention. Slap! OK, we’re leaving.’”

On Monday, the 7-foot dolphin stayed put and fed on fish. Observers said the dolphin could figure out on its own how to return to the ocean via the narrow channel.

For now, marine life experts are adopting a hands-off approach while watching the dolphin around the clock.

Meantime, crowds have gathered and are beginning to name the dolphin, even if they don’t know its sex. Contenders are Fred and Bolsa Chica Bob.

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Updated at 9:13 a.m. ET: After the dramatic nighttime escape of Chen Guangcheng from house arrest in his Chinese village, one of the first people to know that the blind lawyer was safe in Beijing was thousands of miles away — in Midland, Texas.

Pastor Bob Fu, 44, says he knew of Chen’s escape three days before the security guards surrounding the house discovered it. He says he was among the first to receive and post a 15-minute video of Chen, made in hiding, appealing to Chinese President Wen Jiabao to bring to justice the local officials who illegally imprisoned him and his family for months. Fu says he also had a hand in preparing U.S. officials for Chen’s escape and arrival at the U.S. Embassy, while also helping lay the groundwork for alternatives, the details of which he says he cannot divulge.

Fu knows China’s security apparatus from personal experience. He made his own escape from China, arriving in the United States as a refugee with his wife and newborn son 16 years ago.

Now, through his Midland-based nonprofit China Aid, Fu is one of the leading voices on behalf of religious freedom in China, connected with activists in his home country and respected on Capitol Hill.

"Bob Fu is one of the most credible people you’ll ever find about what is going on in China," said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who chairs the Human Rights Subcommittee within the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. "He’s very well connected and knows people inside of China who are the agents of reform — people like Chen who (take action) because they want a better China."

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According to tax documents, China Aid has raised several million dollars to fund legal counsel for "house church Christians," financial support for the families of jailed dissidents and publicity for human rights cases in China. In extreme cases, China Aid has helped fund "logistics" for an underground railway, Fu says.

In China, worship is allowed only in state-sanctioned churches, mosques and synagogues. Evangelizing outside those sites and worshipping in independent churches, often called "house churches," is prohibited.

China censors 'Shawshank' as Clinton heads to Beijing amid dissident drama

Fu’s activism goes back to the Tiananmen protests of 1989, when he led a group of fellow students from Liaocheng University in Shandong province to join the massive rallies in the capital. After the crackdown on demonstrators he was one of many student activists required to attend special political study sessions and write self-criticism day after day. He worried that he would be forced to leave his hard-won position at the university.

During this time, Fu said, he read a book given to him by American missionaries who were teaching English in China. It was the story of a famous Chinese intellectual who was addicted to opium in the early 1900s, but was able to shake the drug after he converted to Christianity.

"I was really, really struck by the story," Fu said, in an interview with msnbc.com. "I came to the realization if you want to change China, the first thing you need to do is change people’s hearts. And if you want to change other people’s hearts, you first you have to change yourself."

Fu and his wife, Heidi Cai, began holding underground worship services and Bible studies, he said. At the same time, he was teaching English at the Communist Party School in Beijing.

"I was God’s double-agent," he said, chuckling.

In 1996, they were arrested and held in jail for two months, and then placed under house arrest, Fu said. Then they received word that they soon would be jailed again, he said, in the “sweep” that preceded China’s Oct. 10 National Day.

By this time, Fu’s wife was pregnant with their first child, he said, but without the necessary permission from the government, which controls when a woman is allowed to have her one child. If she had been found out, she would be forced to have an abortion, Fu said.

So in the dark of night, Fu escaped through a second-story bathroom window and Cai left in disguise, he said. They fled to the countryside, Fu said, where they were protected by "house church brothers and sisters."

Fu said that with the shelter of this network, the help of a Christian policeman and travel documents obtained by a highly placed businessman, they were able to join a tour that went to Thailand and then Hong Kong, which was still under British control. Just three days before the territory was transferred to Chinese sovereignty, Fu and his wife were give refugee status, and flew to the United States.

NBC sources: Blind activist is under US protection

Fu and Cai lived in a suburb of Philadelphia, where he started China Aid in his garage while attending Westminster Theological Seminary. They later moved to Midland, Texas, where they are raising their three children.

What prompted Fu to set up China Aid was a 2002 crackdown on a group of Christians in a house church in Hubei province that led to many arrests, among them five people who were sentenced to death, he said.

Fu and a group of contacts in the Christian, dissident and exile communities started publicizing the case and raising money, he said. Ultimately, Fu said, they used the funds to pay for 58 lawyers to defend the accused. They contacted the media, making the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

"That year, all the five death sentences were overturned," Fu said. "It was a major legal victory, and even the 'evil cult' charge was removed."

A group of activists who came of age as he did during the Tiananmen movement, are now human rights lawyers, many of them Christian, he said. Fu said he taps into this network, and links them to Washington by picking up the phone.

'Little ants'
Fu compares himself and fellow human rights activists to "little ants" forcing "one case after another into courts, moving around and mobilizing and going through all the technical procedures" in place under China’s laws, but often not observed or even taken seriously by officials. 

"We want to move the pile of dirt with 1 million ants," he said.

"I had never envisioned or wanted to establish (a nonprofit) like this," he said, but now that China Aid is nearly 10 years old, Fu is gratified by some success. "We can help the persecuted, and we did advance rule of law," he said.

China Aid is doggedly following and publicizing many human rights cases around China, Fu said.

"You can write to imprisoned Christians to encourage them and to let them know that you are praying for them," through China Aid, the website says.

Video reveals blind Chinese activist's plight

Fu’s group also prints and distributes Bibles in China.

For Fu, the escape of Chen was a major triumph, but it also has generated new concerns — for the wife and daughter of Chen, and for those who helped get Chen to safety.

In an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Monday, Fu calls out the bravery of one such supporter, He "Pearl" Peirong, who drove Chen the 300 miles to Beijing after he escaped over a compound wall in Shandong.

"I am awed by the courage of those who helped Chen escape. Pearl told me she is willing to die with Chen because he is such a 'pure-hearted courageous person'," Fu wrote. "I was talking to her last week when she said 'guobao laile,'— that state security had arrived."

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Dan Savage, the "Savage Love" sex advice columnist, has apologized for lashing out at high school students who walked out of a lecture he gave in Seattle two weeks ago, during which he said that anti-gay passages in the Bible should be ignored.

“We can learn to ignore the bullsh-- in the Bible about gay people,” Savage said, “the same way we have learned to ignore the bullsh-- about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullsh-- in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.”

While many cheered, dozens of students and advisers walked out of the auditorium at the National High School Journalism Convention on April 13. Savage, co-founder of the anti-bullying It Gets Better Project, called their walk-out “pansyass.”

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Savage, the editorial director of the Stranger, an alternative news weekly in Seattle, took to the paper’s blog on Sunday to apologize.  

“I wasn't calling the handful of students who left pansies (2,800+ students, most of them Christian, stayed and listened), just the walkout itself,” he said.

“I was not attacking the faith in which I was raised,” he added. “I was attacking the argument that gay people must be discriminated against—and anti-bullying programs that address anti-gay bullying should be blocked (or exceptions should be made for bullying “motivated by faith”)—because it says right there in the Bible that being gay is wrong.”

Organizers from the National Scholastic Press Association, which organized the convention, issued a statement criticizing Savage's lecture: "In his attempt to denounce bullying, Mr. Savage belittled the faith of others – an action that we do not support. Ridicule of others’ faith has no place in our programs, any more than ridicule of the LGBT community would."

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GREENSBORO, N.C. — The wife of the star prosecution witness broke down on the stand Monday morning while recounting how former Sen. John Edwards wanted her husband to falsely claim paternity for the child of his mistress, Rielle Hunter.

Cheri Young testified that when her husband, former Edwards aide Andrew Young, told her about Edwards' request, her first thought was "how in the world could Mr. Edwards ask one more thing of me of us?"

Full trial coverage on msnbc.com

Analysis by Hampton Dellinger

"Of course, I said absolutely not," Young testified, saying she screamed and cursed at her husband.

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Cheri Young took the witness stand after her husband spent last week describing how nearly $1 million in money from supporters of Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign was funneled to support Hunter and the Youngs after rumors of the Edwards-Hunter affair surfaced. She is also key to the prosecution's campaign finance case because she was asked to countersign checks from one of the donors, which were routed through her decorator.

 

 

Young recounted a four-way call among her, her husband, Hunter and Edwards in which "Mr. Edwards was trying to get everyone on board."

"'This is it; this is our time; we're going great; we've gotten this far,'" Young quoted Edwards as having said. She said she "didn't want the responsibility of knowing that because I didn't go along with this ... that the campaign would explode and it would be my fault."

"So I ultimately agreed to go along with the lie," she said, sobbing.

Young said Edwards seemed determined that his own wife, Elizabeth — who later died of cancer — must not learn about the affair with Hunter, a videographer for the presidential campaign.

"He didn't want her to find out at that point because she was going to die soon," Young said.

Before leaving court early because of a migraine headache, Young made it clear that she resented Edwards and Hunter, who moved in with the Youngs after The National Enquirer began trying to photograph her at her New Jersey home. 

"She took a big spin and said, 'I'm here!'" said Young, who said it was intimidating to have "a presidential candidate's pregnant mistress coming to my house that night, last minute."

Some of the donors' money helped pay for Hunter's "spiritual adviser," Young testified, adding that Hunter once called the adviser when the wrong sauce arrived on her Reuben sandwich.

On another occasion, she said, Hunter rejected a hotel room because it didn't have "good energy."

After the Enquirer published pictures of Hunter and confronted Edwards about the affair, Young said, her immediate reaction was "Oh, my God. ... Well, i wanted to say 'I told you so,' but I didn't."

Steven Friedland, a professor at the Elon University School of Law in Elon, N.C., said Young succeeded in "personalizing this whole situation for the Youngs and showing that it's not really about the Youngs."

Instead, Friedland said, she showed that "it was about John Edwards" and how the Youngs "sacrificed for him and his presidential aspirations." 

Michael Austin and Stacey Klein of NBC News and M. Alex Johnson of msnbc.com contributed to this report. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

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White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan on Monday spoke openly -- and at great length -- about what has long been one of the government’s most controversial official secrets:  the use of remotely piloted drones to kill suspected terrorists.

In doing so, he became the first U.S. government official to acknowledge that the drone strikes sometimes kill innocent people, though he characterized such deaths as  “exceedingly rare.” But a new analysis by an independent Washington think tank estimates that more than 300 civilians have been killed by drones since President Barack Obama took office.

In a major speech on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death during a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs, Brennan proclaimed that al-Qaida is now "on the path to its destruction."  But the headline was what he had to say about the drone program — long a forbidden subject for senior U.S. officials  — and how the U.S. government uses it.

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“The United States conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones,” said Brennan, in his speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington, D.C., foreign policy think tank.  

While it has been openly reported in the press for years, the use by the CIA of pilotless drones to kill members of al-Qaida has long been officially classified,  prompting government officials to talk obliquely about “lethal operations” and “removal” of terrorists. They have done so even as Obama has dramatically escalated the number of such attacks and made them the central component of the administration’s counterterrorism efforts.

One U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told NBC News that the speech represents “a pretty big sea change for us” in terms of what officials will now be permitted to talk about. But the official said that while Brennan’s speech had been carefully vetted throughout the U.S. intelligence and national security community, there had been no formal declassification of the drone program. “The president can declassify anything he wants,” said the official, adding that Brennan – as the representative of the president — can speak about anything his boss wants him to discuss.   

Under Obama, there have been an estimated 250 drone strikes in northwest Pakistan that have killed as many as 2,345 people, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank that closely tracks the program. Such strikes have generated a storm of protest in Pakistan and stepped up demands by the Pakistani government to halt them.   

In what he described as an effort to be more open with the American people, Brennan on Monday described an elaborate process under which senior government officials select targets for drone strikes. They must first determine whether a prospective target is a bona fide member of al-Qaida or “associated forces” and poses a “significant threat” to U.S. interests.  The “lethal action” strikes are not used for “punishing terrorists for past crimes” or “seeking vengeance.” Instead, they are used to “stop plots” and “prevent future attacks,” citing as one example, targeting individuals  who possess “unique operational skills.”

Read more reporting by Michael Isikoff in 'The Isikoff Files'

Brennan  said the use of drones gives U.S. intelligence agencies the ability to use “laser-like” precision against the terrorists. But he acknowledged that "innocent civilians have been killed in these strikes." He said such instances have been "exceedingly rare, but it has happened.

“When it does, it pains us and we regret it deeply, as we do any time innocents are killed in war," he added. 

That passage of his speech alone was significant. In June 2011, Brennan said that in the previous year of operations in the government’s then-unspecified program to eliminate al-Qaida members, “There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”   

Brennan later changed that statement in response to questions by the New York Times, spurred in part by  reports about a May 6 strike in Pakistan that  hit a religious school, an adjourning restaurant and a house, killing 18 people. Although 12 militants were allegedly killed, British and Pakistani journalists on the scene reported that six civilians also died in the strike.

In Brennan’s adjusted statement last year, he said, “Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq.”

Brennan did not give any details on Monday about how rare civilian deaths have been. But according to the analysis by the New America Foundation, which relies heavily on local media and other reports from observers in Pakistan, about 17 percent of those who have been killed by drones since the program effectively began in 2004 were “non-militants.”  The foundation estimated that the  “non-military fatality rate” has since dropped to about 13 percent under Obama – as drone strikes have become more frequent and more precise.

Those numbers translate to 471 civilian deaths, including 309 under Obama.

Human rights groups — who have challenged the administration to be more open about its drone program — were not satisfied with the new details provided by Brennan’s speech.

“It is not enough that care is taken to avoid harm to innocent civilians,” said Raha Wala, an official with Human Rights First. “Brennan's assertion that any 'member' of al-Qaida or 'associated forces' is legally targetable is wrong. Under the laws of armed conflict, only members of the enemy's armed forces, or those directly participating in hostilities or who perform a continuous combat function, may be targeted.”

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A Boy Scouts of America board member and third-generation Eagle Scout has resigned in support of an Ohio scouts leader ousted because of her sexual orientation. 

West Virginia lawyer David J. Sims resigned on Friday from the Ohio River Valley Council of the Boy Scouts of America in Wheeling, W. Va., in support of Jennifer Tyrrell, a 32-year-old Ohio mom whose membership was revoked in April 10 because she is a lesbian.

“I had not been aware of what was going on and when I did, I felt that it was not a decision that was fair and not one that I necessarily agreed with,” Sims told msnbc.com on Monday. “I think the policy is wrong.”

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Confirming the resignation, the Boy Scouts of America on Monday maintained it has the right to ban gays and atheists from its service organization, a stance upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000. A scouts official also defended the organization's actions against Tyrrell.

Story: Gay mom upset after dismissal from Boy Scouts

“Scouting, and the majority of parents it serves, does not believe it is the right forum for children to become aware of the issue of sexual orientation, or engage in discussions about being gay,” Boy Scouts spokesman Deron Smith said in an email to msnbc.com. “Rather, such complex matters should be discussed with parents, caregivers, or spiritual advisers, at the appropriate time and in the right setting.”

“We fully understand and appreciate that not everyone will agree with any one position or policy. To disagree does not mean to disrespect and we respect everyone's right to have and express a different opinion. Scouting will continue to teach our members to treat everyone with courtesy and respect,” Smith said in the email.

Watch the Top Videos on msnbc.com

Sims said he could not in good faith carry on his duties with the scouts, a post he has held for four months, and had to take a stand.

A copy of his resignation letter was also emailed to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation on Monday.

“It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I write to you today to inform you that I am resigning as a member of the Board of Directors of the Ohio River Valley Council of the Boy Scouts of America,” Sims wrote in his letter, according to the gay-rights advocacy group.

Sims continued: “My grandfather was an Eagle scout, my father was an Eagle scout and I am an Eagle Scout. Other than his family and his Christian faith, the most important thing in my father’s life was the Boy Scouts. He lived and breathed scouting. That is what makes this decision so exceedingly difficult and emotional. However, I know that my father would support my decision.”

Tyrrell said the support has been overwhelming, adding that her petition for the scouts to change policy has gained more than 250,000 signatures.

“I’ve been touched by the long list of supporters who, like me, believe that discrimination should not be a part of the Boy Scouts of America’s policies,” she said.

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The lawyer for George Zimmerman, the Florida man charged in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has launched an all-out social media blitz seeking to tell Zimmerman's side of the story, msnbc.com's Suzanne Choney reports.

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The Mark O'Mara Law Group confirmed that the website at the heart of the effort, titled George Zimmerman Legal Case, is its production, NBC station WESH-TV of Orlando reported. There are also Twitter and Facebook accounts.

"We understand that it is unusual for a legal defense to maintain a social media presence on behalf of a defendant, but we also acknowledge that this is a very unusual case," O'Mara says on the website.

But Stephen A. Saltzburg, former chairman of the American Bar Association's criminal justice section, told msnbc.com that "generally speaking, lawyers are not supposed to be making public statements that could compromise a fair trial." 

Read the full story on Technolog

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May Day protests may disrupt the morning commute in major U.S. cities Tuesday as labor, immigration and Occupy activists rally support on the international workers' holiday.

Demonstrations, strikes and acts of civil disobedience are being planned around the country, including the most visible organizing effort by anti-Wall Street groups since Occupy encampments came down in the fall.

While protesters are backing away from a call to block San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, bridge district ferry workers said they'll strike Tuesday morning to shut down ferry service, which brings commuters from Marin County to the city. Ferry workers have been in contract negotiations for a year and have been working without a contract since July 2011 in a dispute over health care coverage, the Inlandboatmen's Union said.

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A coalition of bridge and bus workers said they will honor the picket line, which may target an area near the bridge's toll plaza. Occupy activists from San Francisco and Oakland are expected to join the rally.

"We ask supporters to stand with us at strike picket lines on May Day and to keep the bridge open," said Alex Tonisson, an organizer and co-chair of the Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition.

Police say they are working with other area law enforcement agencies and have a plan in place for potential disruptions. They would not discuss specifics.

Across the bay in Oakland, where police and Occupy protesters have often clashed, officers are preparing for a long day as hundreds of "General Strike" signs have sprouted across town.

In New York City, where the first Occupy camp was set up and where large protests brought some of the earliest attention — and mass arrests — to the movement, leaders plan a variety of events, including picketing, a march through Manhattan and other "creative disruptions against the corporations who rule our city."

Organizers have called for protesters to block one or more bridges or tunnels connecting Manhattan, the city's economic engine, to New Jersey and other parts of the city.

The Occupy movement began in September with a small camp in a lower Manhattan plaza that quickly grew to include hundreds of protesters using the tent city as their home base. More than 700 people were arrested Oct. 1 as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge.

The city broke the camp up in November, citing sanitary and other concerns, but the movement has held smaller events and protests periodically since then.

Elsewhere on the West Coast, Occupy Seattle has called for people to rally at a park near downtown Tuesday. Mayor Mike McGinn has warned residents there could be traffic delays and has said city officials have evidence — including graffiti and posters — that some groups plan to "commit violence, damage property and disrupt peaceful free speech activity."

In Los Angeles, demonstrators are planning to take to the streets to champion immigrant rights.

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ORLANDO -- Some bomb-sniffing dogs trained to help fight terrorism are turning their olfactory attention toward a different scourge: Burmese pythons in Florida's Everglades National Park.

The dogs are members of "EcoDogs," a three-year-old collaboration at Alabama's Auburn University between the science departments and the school's Canine Detection Research Institute, which trains dogs to detect explosives.

"The dogs are really, really good," said Christina Romagosa, a biologist at Auburn.

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She said in a test of python detection in south Florida, the dogs could cover a search area 2.5 times faster than a person.

"People can only see that the snake is there if they can see the snake. The dogs can smell the snake even if it's not visually apparent to us," she said.

Todd Steury, an Auburn conservation biologist and co-founder of the project, said many of the EcoDogs were found temperamentally unsuitable for indoor explosives work but thrive outdoors searching for ecological targets.

Steury estimated training a new dog to detect a scent takes six to 10 weeks. Training for each additional scent takes "about 10 minutes. You can do it by accident if you're not careful," he said, by inadvertently rewarding the dog for something you weren't looking for, which then becomes part of the dog's repertoire.

Two black Labrador retrievers from EcoDogs, Ivy and Jake, went on assignment in 2010 to demonstrate to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers their potential usefulness in battling the python problem in the 2,358-square-mile Everglades park.

Environmentalists fear the pythons are upsetting the native ecological balance of South Florida. The invasion is generally attributed to both irresponsible pet owners dumping their snakes and 1992's Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed an adjacent exotic snake warehouse.

In controlled experiments, the EcoDogs success rate in finding pythons at the park was 75-92 percent, Romagosa said. The dogs helped researchers trap 19 pythons, including a pregnant snake with 19 eggs, according to an EcoDog report.

Linda Friar, spokeswoman for the Everglades National Park, said the snakes are so thoroughly adapted to the Everglades, and the park is so wild and inaccessible that there is no expectation of eradicating them, even with the dogs' help. The best hope is to prevent the pythons from spreading and be prepared for future invasions of new exotics, she said.

Romagosa said analysis is underway to determine whether the dogs can play a role in a rapid response team and whether funding their role, in a cost-cutting era is possible.

"The dogs would be useful in a scenario where we might not be sure the python has moved on beyond a certain range. The dogs can give us an idea of whether the species is present or not," she said.

Meanwhile, Ivy retired and was adopted, Steury said. Jake switched to a new project assessing the deer population in Alabama, looking for fawns and deer antlers.

Other EcoDogs are rooting out a tree fungus damaging forests in the state, and locating various skunk, bear and other animal populations based on their scat, or droppings.

"Pretty much a dog can be trained to find anything," Romagosa said.

Three years of working with the dogs disproved a common misconception that a smart dog is best, added Steury.

"The worst dog is a really smart but kinda lazy dog. Because that dog is always trying to figure out how he can cheat. Once you reward him for cheating, he's done. He'll never work again. The best dogs are the ones that are kind of dumb but just work really hard. We can train those dogs to work all day long and they're the best detection dogs," Steury said.

And the dogs enjoy the work so much that ones like Kasey, who searches for weasel, bobcat and gray fox scat, eventually lose interest in the reward, he said.

"She finds a scat, you'll give her the ball, she plays with it for a really short time, then she's back to the search. She likes the search," Steury said.

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A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit against author Greg Mortenson, calling claims "flimsy and speculative" that the humanitarian and his publisher lied in his best-selling "Three Cups of Tea" and "Stones Into Schools" to boost book sales.

The civil lawsuit by four people who bought Mortenson's books said they were cheated out of about $15 each because the books were labeled as nonfiction accounts of how Mortenson came to build schools in Central Asia.

The lawsuit by four readers from Montana, California and Illinois was filed after "60 Minutes" and author Jon Krakauer reported last year that Mortenson fabricated parts of those books.

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The plaintiffs said Mortenson, co-author David Oliver Relin, Penguin and Central Asia Institute were involved in a fraud and racketeering conspiracy to build Mortenson into a false hero to sell books and raise money for CAI, the charity Mortenson co-founded.

Haddon wrote in his ruling that their racketeering allegations "are fraught with shortcomings" and the plaintiffs' "overly broad" claims that they bought the books because they were supposed to be true aren't supported in the lawsuit.

The ruling is good news for Mortenson and his charity after the Montana attorney general earlier in April announced a $1 million agreement to settle claims that Mortenson mismanaged the institute and misspent its funds. The agreement removes Mortenson from any financial oversight and overhauls the charity's structure, but did not address the books' contents.

"He stands by his books," said Anne Beyersdorfer, the charity's interim executive director, of Haddon's ruling.

Mortenson was on his way to Pakistan on Monday and could not immediately comment, she said.

"Three Cups of Tea," which has sold about 4 million copies since being published in 2006, was conceived as a way to raise money and tell the story of his institute, founded by Mortenson in 1996.

The book and promotion of the charity by Mortenson, who appeared at more than 500 speaking engagements in four years, resulted in tens of millions of dollars in donations.

The book recounts how Mortenson lost his way after a failed mountaineering expedition and was nursed back to health in a Pakistani village. Based on the villagers' kindness and the poverty he saw, he resolved to build a school for them.

The lawsuit claimed, as did the Krakauer and "60 Minutes" report, that Mortenson fabricated that story and others in the book and its sequel, "Stones Into Schools."

Morentson has denied any wrongdoing, though he has acknowledged some of the events in "Three Cups of Tea" were compressed over different periods of time.

The judge did not address allegations of fabrications, but wrote that the plaintiffs can't simply rely on general allegations of lies in making a claim.

In fact, many of the items that the lawsuit lists as lies the defendants made after the books were written, such as CAI paying for Mortenson's expenses and purchasing his books, "do not actually appear to be untruthful or illegal, and are overly vague," Haddon wrote.

Haddon also ruled that the plaintiffs can't rewrite their complaint to address those shortcomings, noting that the case has been pending for nearly a year and the lawsuit already has been changed five times.

"The imprecise, in part flimsy, and speculative nature of the claims and theories advanced underscore the necessary conclusion that further amendment would be futile," Haddon wrote.

Plaintiffs' attorney Zander Blewett did not immediately return a call for comment.

The plaintiffs had asked Haddon to order Penguin to account for all the money collected from book sales and refund that money to people who bought the books, with the rest going to a humanitarian organization.

The yearlong Montana attorney general investigation found that Mortenson's poor record keeping and personnel management resulted in unknown amounts of cash spent overseas or for management costs without receipts or documentation. CAI's two other board members were Mortenson loyalists who generally did not challenge Mortenson, and he resisted or ignored CAI employees who questioned his practices, the investigative report said.

Mortenson also reaped financial benefits at the charity's expense, including the free promotion of his books, and the royalties from thousands of copies the organization bought to donate to libraries, schools, churches and military personnel, the report said.

The organization spent more than $2 million on Mortenson's charter flights to speaking engagements, and Mortenson and his family also charged personal items to the charity, according to the report.

Beyersdorfer has said Mortenson will remain the face of the charity, but it won't be as executive director and he is barred from being a voting member of the board of directors as long as he still draws a paycheck from CAI.

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They were dubbed the "Dougherty Gang," or "Bonnie and Clyde and Clyde" -- three Florida siblings who embarked on a cross-country crime spree last summer in an attempt to flee to Belize, where they dreamed of living for the rest of their lives.

 

It was not, Lee-Grace Dougherty acknowledged in court on Monday, a well-thought out plan. Lee-Grace, 29, was sentenced by a Colorado court to 24 years in prison on Monday. She pleaded guilty to one count of attempted first-degree assault and two counts of felony menacing.  

"I didn't set out to harm anyone," Lee-Grace said, according to 9News.com, an NBC affiliate in Denver, Colo. "My only thought was to get my brother to another country and help him start another life."

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Her younger brother, Dylan Dougherty, 27, was sentenced to 32 years.

The youngest of the trio, Ryan Dougherty, 22, was the one the older two siblings wanted to save from probation and from having to register as a sex offender. He was sentenced to 18 years.

In August, the Dougherty siblings drove from Florida to Colorado, outrunning a police trooper and shooting his tires. They have also been charged with robbing $5,200 from a bank in Valdosta, Ga. and will stand trial there in May. They also face charges in Florida.

They were eventually caught on Aug. 11.

Dylan Dougherty was described as the "trigger man," according to 9News.com. Prosecutors say he fired multiple times at troopers.

Said Assistant District Attorney Clay McKisson, according to 9News.com: Dylan fired, "not once or twice, but 11 times that we know of at the troopers chasing him, without regard for the lives of the officers."

Friends told GQ magazine, however, that if Dylan had wanted to hit the troopers, he would have.

"I can shoot a running rabbit with a $3 pistol," Dylan told the FBI, according to GQ.

According to a feature in GQ, the Doughertys (pronounced dock-erty) hatched their plan to leave the country after Ryan Dougherty was told he would not be allowed, legally, to live with his unborn son because of his status as a sex offender -- when he was 19 he got into trouble for texting a girl he thought was 13, but who was really 11.

He would also have to wear an ankle bracelet, which would cost him $240 a month.

That afternoon, he and his siblings wrote on a piece of paper, worried that the ankle bracelet also captured audio and would reveal their plan.

The next morning, the three siblings loaded up a Subaru with 10 guns and 2,000 rounds of ammunition and a plastic jug of water, according to GQ. Ten days later, law enforcement caught up with them.

In the courtroom in Colorado on Monday, Dylan Dougherty told a judge that he never tried to hurt anybody. He wore a yellow jumpsuit and wore his hair in a ponytail.

"I wish I had done things differently," Dougherty said, according to 9News. "Not sure what I would've done differently. Actions I did take were not my character."

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A father is in custody, accused of attempting to sacrifice his own son in a San Diego area cemetery.

Joseph Ramirez, 30, took his family to Mount Hope Cemetery Saturday afternoon and told them his dead grandmother told him to sacrifice the 8-year-old boy, according to San Diego police.

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Officers released a report stating Ramirez had brought candles to the cemetery. When one of the candles broke, he used a piece of the broken glass to slash open his son's forearms.

For more, visit NBCSanDiego.com

Ramirez then slashed his own forearms.

Corey Granberry, a medical assistant, was visiting her godson's grave when she saw a woman, clothes covered in blood, calling for help. Granberry jumped in to help along with her best friend Jaymisha Pires.

"Out of all these people were passing her by, she almost got hit by a car, all these people that were just passing her by," Granberry said.

She said somehow Pires was able to convince Ramirez to let the child go.

Granberry's medical training kicked in.

"I grabbed the little boy sat him down on the curb grabbed a shirt and wrapped it up on his arm," she said.

When officers arrived, they transported Ramirez to a nearby hospital for treatment. Once he's released, officers say Ramirez will be booked into county jail on charges of child abuse and assault with a deadly weapon.

The boy was taken to Rady Children's Hospital for treatment.

Granberry said she was inspired earlier in the week by a group of construction workers who jumped in to help a family injured in a rollover crash.

"I think sometimes people are put in places. And honestly, we were at the right place at the right time," she said.

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A federal judge on Monday blocked a Texas rule that would have excluded Planned Parenthood from participating in the state's women's health program.

In a win for Planned Parenthood, U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel ruled Monday there was sufficient evidence the state rule barring Planned Parenthood is unconstitutional. He imposed a temporary injunction against enforcing it until he can hear full arguments.

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The rule forbids state agencies from providing funds to an organization affiliated with abortion providers. It was set to go into effect on Tuesday.

In response to the new rule, eight Planned Parenthood clinics that don't provide abortions sued the state. The clinics say the law unconstitutionally restricts their freedom of speech and association.

In granting the preliminary injunction, Planned Parenthood can continue to serve women, and getting reimbursed by the state, according to the Austin Statesman.

"The court is particularly influenced by the potential for immediate loss of access to necessary medical services by several thousand Texas women," Yeakel said in a 24-page ruling.

The preliminary injunction is a big win for Planned Parenthood, which has been under siege in several states by abortion opponents. In the past year alone, states including Wisconsin, North Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana, in addition to Texas, have all moved to block Planned Parenthood from receiving taxpayer money.

"For many women, we are the only doctor's visit they will have this year," Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. "This ruling affirms what women have known all along: politics simply doesn't have a place in women's health."

The state Health and Human Services Commission will comply with the order and will work with the state attorney general to determine its next steps, spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman said.

"We remain confident that federal law gives states the right to establish criteria for Medicaid providers," Goodman said.

Texas Governor Rick Perry and some Republican lawmakers have said they would rather eliminate the women's healthcare program entirely than direct money to Planned Parenthood clinics.

The Texas program, which is part of the federal-state Medicaid program, provides cancer screenings, birth control and other health services to more than 100,000 low-income women.

The program does not pay for abortions or allow abortion providers to participate in the program. The new Texas state rule would ban program money from going to affiliates of abortion providers.

State law has included that ban on affiliates since the program began in 2007, but the state did not enforce it. Texas notified the federal government last year that it intended to begin enforcing the ban, effectively excluding Planned Parenthood from the program.
According to Planned Parenthood, about 49 percent of the women who received services through the program in 2010 obtained some services through a Planned Parenthood provider. Planned Parenthood said it would lose about $13.5 million of annual funding for preventive care and family planning if the rule is applied, forcing it to close clinics and lay off staff.

Texas has already made deep cuts in other family-planning programs. As a result, state subsidies that once provided low-cost birth control to 220,000 women a year now cover fewer than 60,000 women a year.

The federal government pays for 90 percent of the cost of the Texas Women's Health Program, which serves low-income women of reproductive age who do not qualify for regular Medicaid coverage. Texas puts up just $4 million a year.

Critics object to Planned Parenthood receiving taxpayer money, which cannot be used to provide abortions, arguing that a steady stream of government grants provide an indirect subsidy by helping pay utility bills and keep doctors on staff.

Planned Parenthood is the nation's largest abortion provider, terminating about 330,000 pregnancies a year.

It gets about a third of its revenue -- $360 million in 2009 -- from government grants to provide birth control, gynecological exams and care for sexually transmitted diseases to low-income women.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Five wild animals will soon be returned to the widow of a man who released them into the Ohio countryside last year, state officials said on Monday, raising concerns of a repeat of the panic that gripped the state when dozens of beasts including lions, tigers and bears roamed free.

Seven months after Terry Thompson released 56 exotic animals near Zanesville, Ohio, and then committed suicide, the Ohio legislature still is struggling to draft regulations on wild animal ownership. Ohio is one of only a handful of states with no restrictions on exotic animal ownership.

The state Agriculture Department said on Monday it had no legal way to prevent the five remaining animals - a spotted leopard, a black leopard, two Celebes Macaque monkeys and a brown bear - from being given back to Thompson's widow, Marilyn.

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She has said she will take them back to the farm and put them in the cages they fled last October.

"This raises concerns, as she has indicated the cages have not been repaired, and has repeatedly refused to allow animal welfare experts to evaluate if conditions are safe for the animals and sufficient to prevent them from escaping and endangering the community," the Agriculture Department said.

The agency said the only hope of preventing their return to the Thompson family within 24 hours from the Columbus Zoo is for the county Humane Society to seek a court order to inspect the farm.

"Until then we can only hope that local officials choose to act to prevent another tragedy," the Agriculture Department said.

The local Humane Society could not immediately be reached for comment.

After Thompson, who had been charged with animal cruelty 11 times since 2004, released the lions, tigers and other wild animals last October, law enforcement officials had to go on a big game hunt. Authorities warned residents to stay inside while they killed 49 of the 56 animals.

Six were captured and sent to the Columbus Zoo but one spotted leopard later died there. Another animal was presumed eaten by others and was never accounted for.

The surviving animals have been held at the Columbus Zoo.

The state Senate passed a bill last week that would ban Ohio residents from buying lions, tigers, bears, elephants, wolves, alligators, crocodiles, and certain kinds of monkeys as pets, unless they follow strict guidelines.

Existing owners of wild animals can keep them if they follow the new rules, which include permit fees, registration and constructing proper facilities. The Ohio House may not vote on the measure until the end of May.

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Saying he had become a distraction, a senior Environmental Protection Agency official who used the word "crucify" to describe how the EPA enforced laws in the oil industry resigned on Monday.

"My continued service will distract you and the agency," Al Armendariz said in his resignation letter to EPA chief Lisa Jackson.

"I regret comments I made several years ago that do not in any way reflect my work as regional administrator," Armendariz said in his letter.

Armendariz, who was head of the EPA's South Central office, came under fire from Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who was informed of the two-year-old video last week and launched an inquiry.

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Inhofe on Monday welcomed the resignation but said the EPA's "crucifixion philosophy" continues.

"His choice of words revealed the truth about the war that EPA has been waging on American energy producers under President Obama," Inhofe said in a statement.

The EPA, in response to a request from msnbc.com, said that Jackson had accepted the resignation. "I respect the difficult decision he made and his wish to avoid distracting from the important work of the agency," Jackson said in a statement.

In the video, Armendariz answers a question about enforcement policies. In the Middle Ages, he told the audience, the Romans conquered a village by taking "the first five guys they saw and they'd crucify them."

He added that the EPA, similarly, makes "examples out of people who are not complying with the law ... you make examples out of them, use it as a deterrent method.

"Companies that are smart see that and they don't want to play that, and they decide at that point that it's time to clean up," he added.

Armendariz had been speaking to residents of Dish, Texas, a town where some are concerned about potential environmental impacts from a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

A senior Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, told The Associated Press that Armendariz has received death threats since the video surfaced.

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A hiker who returned to the trail where she took a survival course 40 years ago almost didn't make it out alive. Victoria Grover, 59, nearly died of hypothermia in the high desert of southern Utah over the weekend.

Grover told reporters from her hospital bed on Sunday that while she didn't have food she did have water, and figured that could keep her going for days. "The thing I was worried about was hypothermia -- that that was going to kill me," she said.

A physician's assistant from Wade, Maine, Grover had gone to the trail in Dixie National Forest where she took a survival course at Brigham Young University 40 years ago.

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What was supposed to be a six-mile day hike turned into a four-day, three-night ordeal that began when it got too dark for Grover to find her way back.

The next day she broke her leg after jumping a four-foot ledge.

"I really wasn't scared until I stopped shivering," she said, "because that was the point where I thought, 'If somebody doesn't find me pretty soon I'm going to die of hypothermia.'"

The lodge where she was staying alerted the local sheriff when she didn't check out as planned, and a search team found her two days later -- suffering from hypothermia.

So what went through her mind during those cold nights where the temperature dipped into the low 30s and the only warmth she had came from a light poncho?

Besides praying, she also "was dreaming of oranges, which is one of my favorite foods," the Associated Press quoted her as saying. "But there are people who can go for weeks and weeks without food in this world. We have it easy in America."

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Two teen girls were struck by a car after they dozed off while sunbathing on a rural road in Pennsylvania on Sunday afternoon, family members told NBC station WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh.

The girls, both 13, were taken by helicopter to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, where they were expected to recover.

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Andrea Kunicky, a spokeswoman for the hospital, told msnbc.com on Monday that the girls were in good condition.

Police told WTAE-TV that Samantha Schermanhorn and Kaylie George were sunbathing on the road when a 19-year-old male cousin of Schermanhorn made a turn at a stop sign and hit the girls. The name of the driver has not been released.

Though he was questioned by police, it was unclear if he would be charged. Economy Borough police were investigating the case. The sergeant in charge of the investigation was not immediately available for comment to msnbc.com.

Nicole and Nicholas Beck, who identified their brother as the driver, told WTAE that it was “just an accident.”

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The girl was last seen around 11 p.m. on April 20 as she was getting ready for bed. Her father reported her missing the next morning, when he noticed Isabel was not in her bedroom at 8 a.m. and saw the window was open and the screen had been removed.

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The New Jersey teacher who says she was out of the room when school staffers were caught on a recording device making inappropriate comments around students was placed on paid leave Friday, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

"I wanted to be proactive rather than reactive," Cherry Hill superintendent Maureen Reusche told the newspaper. "My primary focus is the instructional environment in the building."

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The teacher's lawyer said his client, Kelly Altenburg, did not call the boy "a bastard" or make other harsh comments that were secretly recorded by the child's father.

Lawyer: Autistic boy's teacher didn't call him 'bastard'

Stuart Chaifetz, 44, put a recording device on his son Akian, 10, and captured audio of staff in his class at Horace Mann Elementary School in Cherry Hill calling him names, laughing at him, and discussing a hangover. Chaifetz said he was trying to get to the bottom of why teaching staff said his son was acting out in class. He later posted the audio on YouTube after what he described as inaction by the school board.

Shortly after Chaifetz posted the video, it went viral. As on Monday, it had garnered more than 4 million views.

A statement released by the superintendent read that the school's investigation into the incident continues, adding: "We do not condone this type of behavior in any form, in any place, by any person associated with our district."

The statement went on to say all employees working in the classroom on Feb. 17 -- the date of the recording -- have been placed on leave "to minimize disruption to our schools" or no longer work for the school district.

The superintendent added that according to New Jersey law, tenured employees are protected against immediate dismissal.

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MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- When deadly twisters chewed through the South and Midwest in 2011, thousands of people in the killers' paths had nowhere to hide. Now many of those families are taking an unusual extra step to be ready next time: adding tornado shelters to their homes.

A year after the storms, sales of small residential shelters known as safe rooms are surging across much of the nation, especially in hard-hit communities such as Montgomery and Tuscaloosa in Alabama and in Joplin, Mo., where twisters laid waste to entire neighborhoods.

Manufacturers can barely keep up with demand, and some states are offering grants and other financial incentives to help pay for the added protection and peace of mind.

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Tom Cook didn't need convincing. When a 2008 tornado barreled toward his home in rural southwest Missouri, Cook, his wife and their teenage daughter sought refuge in a bathroom. It wasn't enough. His wife was killed.

Cook moved to nearby Joplin to rebuild, never imaging he would confront another monster twister. But he had a safe room installed in the garage just in case.

On May 22, Cook and his daughter huddled inside the small steel enclosure while an EF-5 tornado roared outside. They emerged unharmed, although the new house was gone.

"It was blown away completely — again," he said. "The only thing standing was that storm room."

Generations ago, homes across America's Tornado Alley often came equipped with storm cellars, usually a small concrete bunker buried in the backyard. Although some of those remain, they are largely relics of a bygone era. And basements are less common than they used to be, leaving many people with no refuge except maybe a bathtub or a room deep inside the house.

The renewed interest in shelters was stirred by last year's staggering death toll — 358 killed in the South and 161 dead in Joplin. So far this year, more than 60 people have perished in U.S. twisters.

Safe rooms feature thick steel walls and doors that can withstand winds up to 250 mph. They are typically windowless, with no light fixtures and no electricity — just a small, reinforced place to ride out the storm. Costs generally range from $3,500 to $6,000.

Sizes vary, but most hold only a few people. They can be bolted to the floor of a garage or custom-fitted to squeeze into a small space, even a closet. Some are so small occupants have to crawl inside. A few are buried in the yard like the old storm shelters of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Before the twister devastated Joplin, the Neosho, Mo., safe room manufacturer called Twister Safe had four employees. Now it has 20.

"Business has probably quadrupled, at least," owner Enos Davis said. "We're selling 400 to 500 a year now, compared to maybe 100 before."

Twister Safe's spike in business is even more impressive in Missouri, which does not offer grant money for safe rooms, opting to use its share of federal disaster money for community shelters.

Missouri's choice spotlights a debate in states seeking better tornado protection: Is disaster aid better spent on safe rooms in individual homes or on larger public shelters designed to protect hundreds or thousands of people?

The downside of public shelters is getting there. Even with improvements in twister prediction, venturing out into a rapidly brewing storm is perilous.

"I wouldn't get my family into a car and run that risk," Joplin Assistant City Manager Sam Anselm said. "If you have the opportunity to put something in your house, that's what we would encourage folks to do."

In January, more than 50 people sought safety in a dome-shaped public shelter as a tornado ripped through Maplesville, Ala. No one was hurt.

"The shelter did what it was supposed to do," Mayor Aubrey Latham said.

Since 2005, 31 community shelters have been built in Missouri using FEMA funds, and nine others are under construction, according to Mike O'Connell of the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency.

That number is about to grow. Joplin voters earlier this month approved a $62 million bond issue that will be combined with insurance money and federal aid to build storm shelters at every school. The shelters will double as gyms, classrooms or kitchens.

After more than five dozen tornadoes struck Alabama on April 27, 2011, FEMA gave the state $17 million for safe rooms. More than 4,300 people filed applications for grants. Of those, nearly half have been approved. The others are still being reviewed.

"They absolutely save lives," said Art Faulkner, director of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

Alabama is also using $49 million in FEMA money for community shelters.

Following the 2011 tornadoes, nearly 6,200 applications were submitted to Mississippi's "A Safe Place to Go" program, which also uses FEMA funds. That was more requests than the program's $8 million could fund.

Among those who received money were Renee and Larry Seales of Smithville, Miss., where 16 people died in a 2011 twister, including both of Renee's parents. They built a dome-shaped bunker buried in their yard.

"I don't know how many have been put in Smithville, but it seems like every house has one," Renee Seales said.

Since 2009, nearly 16,000 people in Arkansas have received rebates of up to $1,000 to add residential safe rooms.

In Joplin, the state's preference for community shelters leaves residents to pay for safe rooms out of pocket. But for many, the cost is well worth it.

Last May, Debbie and Darrell Nichols hunched inside their safe room in the garage as soon as the tornado sirens began blaring. The roof of their neighbor's home came crashing through their kitchen, and it probably would have killed them. Inside the reinforced room, they were unhurt.

"We were holding hands and holding onto each other," Debbie Nichols said. "Then you hear the glass breaking and the roar, and your ears begin to pop. We walked out, and it was like a scene from 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

Betty Harryman was in a Joplin hospital about to have open-heart surgery when the twister hit. Her bad heart probably saved her life: Her home was leveled.

So when Harryman rebuilt, she added a small safe room where she keeps bottled water and a battery-operated light, fan and radio.

"After what happened," she said, "we thought it would be stupid not to have a safe room."

 

One World Trade Center, the giant monolith being built to replace the twin towers destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, laid claim to the title of New York City's tallest skyscraper on Monday. Workers erected steel columns that made its unfinished skeleton a little over 1,250 feet high, just enough to peak over the roof of the observation deck on the Empire State Building.

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The milestone is a preliminary one. Workers are still adding floors to the so-called "Freedom Tower" and it isn't expected to reach its full height for at least another year, at which point it is likely to be declared the tallest building in the U.S., and third tallest in the world.

Those bragging rights, though, will carry an asterisk.

Crowning the world's tallest buildings is a little like picking the heavyweight champion in boxing. There is often disagreement about who deserves the belt.

In this case, the issue involves the 408-foot-tall needle that will sit on the tower's roof.

Count it, and the World Trade Center is back on top. Otherwise, it will have to settle for No. 2, after the Willis Tower in Chicago.

"Height is complicated," said Nathaniel Hollister, a spokesman for The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats, a Chicago-based organization considered an authority on such records.

Experts and architects have long disagreed about where to stop measuring super-tall buildings outfitted with masts, spires and antennas that extend far above the roof.

Consider the case of the Empire State Building: Measured from the sidewalk to the tip of its needle-like antenna, the granddaddy of all super-tall skyscrapers actually stands 1,454 feet high, well above the mark being surpassed by One World Trade Center on Monday.

Purists, though, say antennas shouldn't count when determining building height.

View 180 degree panoramic image from the 69th floor of the WTC

An antenna, they say, is more like furniture than a piece of architecture. Like a chair sitting on a rooftop, an antenna can be attached or removed. The Empire State Building didn't even get its distinctive antenna until 1952. The record books, as the argument goes, shouldn't change every time someone installs a new satellite dish.

Excluding the antenna brings the Empire State Building's total height to 1,250 feet. That was still high enough to make the skyscraper the world's tallest from 1931 until 1972.

From that height, the Empire State seems to tower over the second tallest completed building in New York, the Bank of America Tower.

Yet, in many record books, the two skyscrapers are separated by just 50 feet.

That's because the tall, thin mast on top of the Bank of America building isn't an antenna, but a decorative spire.

Unlike antennas, record-keepers like spires. It's a tradition that harkens back to a time when the tallest buildings in many European cities were cathedrals. Groups like the Council on Tall Buildings, and Emporis, a building data provider in Germany, both count spires when measuring the total height of a building, even if that spire happens to look exactly like an antenna.

This quirk in the record books has benefited buildings like Chicago's recently opened Trump International Hotel and Tower. It is routinely listed as being between 119 to 139 feet taller than the Empire State Building, thanks to the antenna-like mast that sits on its roof, even though the average person, looking at the two buildings side by side, would probably judge the New York skyscraper to be taller.

The same factors apply to measuring the height of One World Trade Center.

Designs call for the tower's roof to stand at 1,368 feet — the same height as the north tower of the original World Trade Center. The building's roof will be topped with a 408-foot, cable-stayed mast, making the total height of the structure a symbolic 1,776 feet.

So is that needle an antenna or a spire?

"Not sure," wrote Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the building.

The needle will, indeed, function as a broadcast antenna. It is described on the Port Authority's website as an antenna. On the other hand, the structure will have more meat to it than your average antenna, with external cladding encasing the broadcast mast.

Without that spire, One World Trade Center would still be smaller than the Willis Tower in Chicago, formerly known as the Sears Tower, which tops out at 1,451 feet (not including its own antennas).

Debate over which of those buildings can truly claim to be the tallest in the U.S. has been raging for years on Internet message boards frequented by skyscraper enthusiasts.

As for the Council on Tall Buildings, it is leaning toward giving One World Trade the benefit of the doubt.

"This is something we have discussed with the architect," Hollister said. "As we understand it, the needle is an architectural spire which happens to enclose an antenna. We would thus count it as part of the architectural height."

But, he noted, the organization has also chosen to sidestep these types of disputes, somewhat, by recognizing three types of height records: tallest occupied floor, architectural top, and height to the tip.

Hollister also pointed out that, technically speaking, One World Trade Center isn't a record-holder in any category yet, as it is still unfinished.

"A project is not considered a building until it is topped out, fully clad, and open for business or at least occupiable," he said.

The debate doesn't quite end there.

Neither of the Willis Tower nor One World Trade are as high as the CN Tower, in Toronto, which stands at 1,815 feet. That structure, however, isn't considered a building at all by most record-keepers, because it is predominantly a television broadcast antenna and observation platform with very little interior space. The tallest manmade structure in the Western Hemisphere will continue to be the 2,063-foot-tall KVLY-TV antenna in Blanchard, N.D.

As for the world's tallest building, the undisputed champion is the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, which opened in 2010 and reaches 2,717 feet.

Not counting about 5 feet of aircraft lights and other equipment perched on top, of course.

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Updated at 1:21 p.m. --Three generations of a family died in a crash  just a few miles from home when the SUV they were traveling in plunged more than 50 feet off a highway overpass and into a ravine on the grounds of the Bronx Zoo, killing all seven aboard, including three children. 

Authorities were trying to determine what caused Sunday's accident that killed Jacob Nunez, 85, and Ana Julia Martinez, 81, both from the Dominican Republic, their daughters, Maria Gonzalez, 45, and Maria Nunez, 39, and three grandchildren. Police say Gonzalez was driving.

Her husband of 22 years, Juan Gonzalez, said in the five years Maria had her license she never had any incidents behind the wheel. The last time he spoke to his 10-year-old daughter, Jazlyn, one of the three children who died in the accident, she asked him to bring home milk, he said.

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"I don't want to live anymore. I want to die," Juan Gonzalez said.

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The other children who died were identified as Niely Rosario, 7, and Marly Rosario, 3, both daughters of Nunez.

Nunez's husband, Juan Ramon Rosario, said in Spanish Monday that he was numb. 

His cousin, who translated, quoted him as saying, "He can't think, he can't feel ... It's like death."

'Horrific'
The 2004 Honda Pilot was headed south on the Bronx River Parkway when it bounced off the median, crossed three southbound lanes and hit the curb, causing the vehicle to become airborne, continue over the guardrail and plunge 59 feet, police said.

Relatives said the grandparents had arrived from the Dominican Republic three days earlier. They had 13 children, six of whom live in the United States. They were headed to a family party when the accident occurred.

"Sometimes you come upon events that are horrific and this is one of them," FDNY deputy Chief Ronald Werner said shortly after the crash. 

The cause of the crash, which happened around 12:30 p.m. Sunday, was unclear. A city official said the guardrail's height would be one of the safety issues investigated. 

"Obviously, the vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed," Werner said. "It hit something that caused it to become airborne."

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The SUV landed in a wooded area on the edge of zoo property that's closed to the public and far from any animal exhibits, zoo spokeswoman Mary Dixon said. The vehicle lay mangled hours later, its right doors ripped off and strewn amid the trees along with items from the car. Next to the heavily wooded area are subway tracks and a train yard.

Werner said that it doesn't appear that any other vehicles were involved in the accident. 

Police said all the victims were wearing seat belts. 

The medical examiner's office said it expected to release the victims' causes of death on Monday. 

The accident was the second in the past year where a car fell off the same stretch of the Bronx River Parkway. Last June, the driver of an SUV heading north lost control and the SUV hit a divider, bounced through two lanes of traffic and fell 20 feet over a guardrail, landing on a truck in a parking lot. The two people in the SUV were injured.

The wreck was the deadliest in New York City since the driver of a tour bus returning from a Connecticut casino in March 2011 lost control and slammed into a pole that sheared the bus nearly end to end, killing 14 passengers. 

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ENSENADA, Mexico - Eric Lamb was doing safety patrol on a 124-mile yacht race when he spotted a boat that appeared too close to Mexico's Coronado Islands. He never got there.

As his twin-engine boat neared the uninhabited islands just south of San Diego, he stumbled on sailboat shards that were mostly no more than six inches long strewn over about two square miles. He saw a small refrigerator, a white seat cushion and empty containers of yogurt and soy milk.

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Over several hours, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter directed him in his search and led him to two dead bodies floating with their backs up, badly scraped and bruised. The Coast Guard recovered a third body and the fourth member of the crew was missing early Monday in California's second deadly accident this month involving an ocean race.

Lamb, 62, said the 37-foot yacht looked like it "had gone through a blender."

"It was real obvious it had been hit just because the debris was so small," he said Sunday.

Three sailors were killed in the accident and a fourth was missing, officials said. The Coast Guard, Mexican navy and civilian vessels scoured the waters off the shore of both countries for the fourth sailor before suspending their search Sunday evening.

Hundreds of race participants held a moment of silence at the Newport Ocean Sailing Association's award ceremony, many of them stunned and puzzled. Skies were clear and winds were light when the boat went missing on the course from Newport Beach, Calif., to Ensenada.

3 dead, 1 missing in accident during Newport-Ensenada sailing race

A GPS race tracking system indicated the Aegean disappeared about 1:30 a.m. PT (4:30 a.m. ET) Saturday, said Rich Roberts, a spokesman for the race organizer. Race organizers weren't closely monitoring the race at that hour but a disappearing signal is no cause for alarm because receivers occasionally suffer glitches, he said.

"Somebody may have thought the thing was broken," Roberts said.

Lamb, who has been patrolling the race for eight years as captain for a private company, saw the debris nine hours later, called the Coast Guard, and searched for identifying information. He and a partner found a life raft with a registration number and a panel with the ship's name.

'Horrified'
The Coast Guard said conditions were fine for sailing, with good visibility and moderate ocean swells of 6-to-8 feet. Officials have not determined the cause of the accident, and would not speculate on what ship, if any, might have collided with the sailboat.

Race officials said they had few explanations for what may have happened to the Aegean other than it must have collided with a ship like a freighter or tanker that did not see the smaller vessel.

The episode immediately sparked a debate over safety of ocean races.

"Quite honestly, I'm amazed it hasn't happened before," said Lamb. "You get 200 boats out there, they lose their way, and they're just bobbing around."

Gary Jobson, president of the U.S. Sailing Association, said his group will appoint an independent panel to investigate.

"I'm horrified. I've done a lot of sailboat racing and I've hit logs in the water, and I've seen a man go overboard, but this takes the whole thing to a new level," Jobson said. "We need to take a step back and take a deep breath with what we're doing. Something is going wrong here."

Chuck Iverson, commodore of the sailing association, said the collision was a "fluke," noting how common night races are along Mexico's Baja California coast.

Shipping lanes crossed
The race goes through shipping lanes and it's possible for a large ship to hit a sailboat and not even know it, especially at night, said Roberts, the race spokesman. Two race participants who were in the area at the time the Aegean vanished told The Associated Press they saw or heard a freighter.

The deaths are the first fatalities in the race's 65 years. The race attracted 675 boats at its peak in 1983 before falling on hard times several years ago amid fears of Mexico's drug-fueled violence.

Participation has picked up recently, reaching 213 boats this year. The winner, Robert Lane of Long Beach Yacht Club, finished Saturday in 23 hours, 26 minutes, 40 seconds.

The race attracts sailors of all skills, including some who are new to long distances. The Aegean competed in one of the lower categories, which allows participants to use their motors when winds drop to a certain level.

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Two of the dead were William Reed Johnson Jr., 57, of Torrance, Calif., and Joseph Lester Stewart, 64, of Bradenton, Fla. The San Diego County Medical Examiner's office was withholding the name of the third sailor pending notification of relatives.

The Aegean is registered to Theo Mavromatis, 49, of Redondo Beach, Calif. The race sponsor didn't know if he was aboard but Gary Gilpin at Marina Sailing, which rents out the Aegean when Mavromatis isn't using it, said the 49-year-old skipper took the yacht out earlier in the week for the competition.

Gilpin said Mavromatis, an engineer, was an experienced sailor who had won the Newport to Ensenada race in the past.

The deaths come two weeks after five sailors died in the waters off Northern California when their 38-foot yacht was hit by powerful waves, smashed into rocks and capsized during a race. Three sailors survived the wreck and the body of another was quickly recovered. Four remained missing until one body was recovered Thursday.

The accident near the Farallon Islands, about 27 miles west of San Francisco, prompted the Coast Guard to temporarily stop races in ocean waters outside San Francisco Bay. The Coast Guard said the suspension will allow it and the offshore racing community to study the accident and race procedures to determine whether changes are needed to improve safety. U.S. Sailing, the governing body of yacht racing, is leading the safety review, which is expected to be completed within the next month.

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Update: A man sentenced to life in prison for the rape and killing of a Colorado woman was freed on Monday based on advanced DNA testing that exonerated him.

Robert "Rider" Dewey, 51, who had been imprisoned since his 1996 conviction, appeared before a Colorado judge on Monday in Grand Junction for a post-conviction hearing in his case. He was ordered released shortly after that hearing.

"I kind of want to kick back, ride my bike and be with my family," Dewey said after he was freed. "I always knew of my innocence and proclaimed my innocence."

---

Dewey was convicted and sentenced to life without parole for the rape and murder of Jacie Taylor, 19, in the western Colorado town of Palisade. Taylor's partially clothed body was found in her bathtub in June 1994. She had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled with a dog leash.

 

"I don't believe the prosecution established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," she said. "The jury wanted to convict somebody."

Stephen Laiche, one of two attorneys who defended Dewey at his trial in 1996, praised Mesa County District Attorney Pete Hautzinger's office, The Daily Sentinel reported. 

"They could have fought us on this thing, but they realized they had an innocent man," he told the newspaper.  "It makes me wonder what we could have done differently."

Advanced techniques
Dewey's lawyers submitted his case to the Colorado Justice Review Project, a program established in 2009 with a $1.2 million federal government grant that allows convicted felons to apply for DNA testing in their cases.

The program is administered by the office of Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, who lauded it as a way for advanced DNA techniques to affirm convictions or clear the innocent.

Questions arose during his trial about whether blood on his shirt belonged to the victim, according to local news accounts. A defense expert disputed the prosecution's contention that the blood matched Taylor's, the reports said.

The semen found on the victim did not match Dewey at the time of his conviction, but no other suspect was ever arrested for the crimes.

'Still a killer out there'
Under Colorado law, a first-degree murder conviction carries an automatic life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Dewey consistently maintained his innocence.

 At Dewey's original  sentencing, then-Mesa County District Judge Charles Buss was quoted in local media as telling the defendant that, "I am happy to impose it (a life sentence) on you."

Dewey replied: "There's still a killer out there."

Post-conviction DNA testing has exonerated nearly 290 people in the United States since 1989, according to the Innocence Project, which works to reverse wrongful convictions.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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