Jodi Arias resumes testimony Monday in her Arizona murder trial after the start of a withering cross-examination last week by a prosecutor working to poke holes in her numerous stories.

She is charged in the June 2008 stabbing and shooting death of her lover in his suburban Phoenix home. Arias claims self-defense, while authorities say she planned the attack on Travis Alexander in a jealous rage. Testimony has been ongoing since early January.

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Arias, 32, lost a bid last week aimed at getting a reprieve from a potential death sentence if convicted of first-degree murder after the Arizona Supreme Court swiftly denied her motion that claimed a detective committed perjury in the case. Her attorneys have filed multiple motions for mistrials, all of which have been denied.

She was set to resume testimony Monday for her 10th day on the witness stand.

Last week, prosecutor Juan Martinez hammered Arias with intense questioning about her inability to recall crucial details in the case, yet noted it was puzzling that she can remember "what kind of coffee you bought at Starbucks sometime back in 2008."

Arias smirked at times while Martinez stammered in frustration, and the judge admonished both to stop talking over each other as the questioning grew heated and the two traded barbs.

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Martinez resumes his cross-examination Monday likely continuing to focus on Arias' repeated lies.

Arias first told authorities she knew nothing about Alexander's death, then later blamed it on masked intruders before eventually settling on self-defense.

She said she was scared of being arrested, had been contemplating suicide and didn't want to sully Alexander's name with accounts of his violent behavior and lurid details of their sexual relationship, given his public persona as a devout Mormon who was saving himself for marriage.

Of the day she killed Alexander, Arias says she remembers him in a rage, body slamming her and chasing her around his home.

She said she grabbed a gun from his closet, and fired it as they tussled, but didn't know if she hit him. She had no explanation for the 27 stab and slash wounds he suffered, or his slit throat, or how he ended up stuffed in his shower.

According to court records, however, she previously told police before her trial began that Alexander was unconscious after she shot him, but then "crawled around and was stabbed."

She says she remembers putting a knife in the dishwasher and disposing of the gun in the desert as she drove from Arizona on her way to Utah. And she immediately began planning an alibi.

Arias' grandparents reported a .25 caliber handgun stolen from their Northern California house about a week before the killing — the same caliber used to shoot Alexander — but Arias claims to know nothing about the burglary. She says she brought no weapons to Alexander's home on the day she killed him, undercutting the prosecution's theory of premeditation.

It may be called weed, but marijuana is legendarily hard to grow.

Now that the drug has been made legal in Washington and Colorado, growers face a dilemma. State-sanctioned gardening coaches can help folks cultivate tomatoes or zucchini, but both states have instructed them not to show people the best way to grow marijuana. The situation is similar in more than a dozen additional states that allow people to grow the drug with medical permission.

That's leaving some would-be marijuana gardeners looking to the private sector for help raising the temperamental plant.

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"We can't go there," said Brian Clark, a spokesman for Washington State University in Pullman, which runs the state's extension services for gardening and agriculture. "It violates federal law, and we are a federally funded organization."

The issue came up because people are starting to ask master gardeners for help in growing cannabis, Clark said. Master gardeners are volunteers who work through state university systems to provide horticultural tips in their communities.

Related: Colorado, Washington approve recreational marijuana use

The situation is the same in Colorado, where Colorado State University in Fort Collins recently added a marijuana policy to its extension office, warning that any employee who provides growing assistance acts outside the scope of his or her job and "assumes personal liability for such action."

The growing predicament is just the latest quandary for these states that last year flouted federal drug law by removing criminal penalties for adults over 21 with small amounts of pot. In Washington, home-growing is banned, but it will be legal to grow pot commercially once state officials establish rules and regulations.

In Colorado, adults are allowed to grow up to six marijuana plants in their own homes, so long as they're in a locked location out of public view.

At least two Colorado entrepreneurs are taking advantage of that aspect of the law; they're offering growing classes that have attracted wannabe professional growers, current users looking to save money by growing their own pot and a few baby boomers who haven't grown pot in decades and don't feel comfortable going to a marijuana dispensary.

"We've been doing this on our own, but I wanted to learn to grow better," said Ginger Grinder, a medical marijuana patient from Portales, N.M., who drove to Denver for a "Marijuana 101" class she saw advertised online.

Grinder, a stay-at-home mom who suffers from lupus and fibromyalgia, joined about 20 other students earlier this month for a daylong crash course in growing the finicky marijuana plant.

Taught in a rented room at a public university, the course had students practicing on tomato plants because pot is prohibited on campus. The group took notes on fertilizer and fancy hydroponic growing systems, and snipped pieces of tomato plants to practice cloning, a common practice for nascent pot growers to start raising weed from a "mother" marijuana plant.

Related: Recreational marijuana users could get pot from vending machines, company says

Ted Smith, a longtime instructor at an indoor gardening shop, led the class, and warned these gardeners that their task won't be easy. Marijuana is fickle, he said. It's prone to mildews and molds, picky about temperature and pH level, intolerant to tap water.

A precise schedule is also a must, Smith warned, with set light and dark cycles and watering at the same time each day. Unlike many house plants, Smith warned, marijuana left alone for a long weekend can curl and die.

"Just like the military ... they need to know when they're getting their water and chow," Smith said of the plants.

The class was the brainchild of Matt Jones, a 24-year-old Web developer who wanted to get into the marijuana business without raising or selling it himself. As a teenager, Jones once tried to grow pot himself in empty Home Depot paint buckets. He used tap water and overwatered, and the marijuana wilted and died.

"It was a disaster," he recalled. Jones organized the class and an online "THC University" for home growers, but his own thumb isn't green. Jones said he'll be buying his marijuana from professional growers.

The course showed would-be grower Cael Nodd, a 34-year-old stagehand in Denver, that marijuana gardening can be an intimidating prospect.

"It seems like there's going to be a sizable investment," he said. "I want something that really tastes good. Doesn't seem like it will be that easy."

NEW YORK — Charities in New York state have collectively raised more than $400 million for Hurricane Sandy relief efforts, the state's attorney general said Thursday.

A survey of 88 nonprofit groups by Eric Schneiderman's office found that as of mid-December, the fundraising for storm victims had been dominated by five charities, led by the American Red Cross, which had raised $188 million, the Robin Hood Foundation, which had taken in $67 million and The Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City, which collected $45 million.

The Empire State Relief Fund raised another $15.4 million and The Salvation Army's eastern U.S. division raised $14.3 million.

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Obama calls on Congress to act on Hurricane Sandy relief

Donors can log on to the attorney general's website to see how those organizations and 83 others say they intend to spend that money.

Schneiderman said regulators will be following up with the groups to get more information about the services they have provided.

"The generosity of the public and the hard work of charities in response to Hurricane Sandy is inspiring. As we continue to monitor charitable activities related to Sandy relief, it is essential that nonprofit organizations operate in the most transparent way possible," he said in a statement.

The list of groups that responded to the survey included small groups who recruit volunteers to gut damaged homes, food banks and agencies that distribute medication.

NJ voters displaced by Sandy will get chance to vote by email

The Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, named for a firefighter killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, said it had raised $4 million as of Dec. 5, and anticipated spending $2.5 million of that money giving home supply store gift cards to people with damaged homes.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which had been involved in rescuing animals from flooded neighborhoods, and then boarding hundreds of displaced animals, said donors had given it $1.3 million by the end of November.

Red Cross officials told the attorney general that as of Dec. 10, the organization had distributed more than 8.7 million meals and snacks in the disaster zone, provided 81,000 shelter stays and distributed $30 million in relief supplies. The Red Cross said it anticipated that it would have spent $110 million on the storm response by the end of December.

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Potential candidates for New York City mayor are taking stands on the police department’s surveillance of Muslim students, ranging from support to worry that the police department may be violating civil liberties, the Associated Press has reported.

The NYPD used undercover officers and informants to infiltrate Muslim student groups at colleges across the Northeast. The monitoring was part of the department's anti-terrorism efforts. Officers tracked student websites and blogs, monitoring who was communicating with the groups. On one occasion, an undercover officer was sent on a whitewater rafting trip with students from the City College of New York.

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The AP’s investigation has triggered an uproar among civil liberties activists, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who leaves office after the 2013 election, has said that he finds "worrisome" the idea that his successor might abandon NYPD policies that have kept New Yorkers safe.

New York City Comptroller John C. Liu, who is expected to run for mayor, warned that "we should not as a matter of policy profile people based on religion or race — it goes against everything this city stands for."

Liu, a Queens Democrat, faces a federal investigation into his fundraising operation after reports of inconsistencies in his campaign finances.

At a hearing in October, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said that a department squad called the Demographics Unit mapped the city’s Muslim population, according to The New York Times. 

Councilmembers at the hearing said they worried New Yorkers' civil liberties were being violated.

“It looks like we are targeting Muslim neighborhoods and communities,” Councilman Brad Lander said at the time. “That’s not good for us. We have people out there who are partners who feel the trust is betrayed.”

The Associated Press and The New York Times contributed to this report.

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