Exclusive: UAW steps up bid to organize VW U.S. plant: sources

Exclusive: UAW steps up bid to organize VW U.S. plant: sources
Whitney Houston drowned with cocaine in system: coroner
Police chief in "Stand Your Ground" killing steps down
Mississippi executes man for 1995 brutal murder
Florida man to plead guilty to celebrity hacking-prosecutors
Detroit mayor admitted to hospital for "discomfort"
Marine sergeant faces discipline for Facebook critique of Obama
Analysis: Why U.S. high court may uphold healthcare law
Penn State coach asks judge to throw out his child abuse case
Kroger joins rival grocers in rejecting "pink slime" beef
Kroger joins rivals in halting purchase of "pink slime" beef
Police chief investigating killing of Florida teen steps down
De-frocked priest pleads guilty ahead of Philadelphia pedophilia trial
Remains identified as those of slain Montana teacher
Facing heat over gas price rise, Obama vows to speed pipeline's southern leg
FTC says it halted mortgage relief scam
Rain pummels southeast as Midwest basks in warmth
Kentucky court overturns murder conviction, cites testimony on Furby toy
Carmakers flag problems, but U.S. seeks bigger fines
Bagel pioneer Murray Lender dies at 81 in Florida
Texas trial to focus on whether sect marriages broke bigamy law
Bernanke says U.S. consumption still too weak
Escape plot foiled for lone woman on Tennessee Death Row
Mississippi set to execute man for 1995 brutal murder
Gun makers' shares rise on strong demand
Rutgers student says sorry to gay roommate's family
Florida police chief under fire in case of slain teen
Boy's "wish" to blow up school warrants suspension, court says
Volkswagen to add 800 workers at Tennessee plant
Florida governor appoints task force to probe teen's killing
Police chief in "Stand Your Ground" killing steps down
Florida man to plead guilty to celebrity hacking-prosecutors
Kroger joins rival grocers in rejecting "pink slime" beef
Exclusive: UAW steps up bid to organize VW U.S. plant: sources
Bernanke says U.S. consumption still too weak
Mississippi executes man for 1995 brutal murder
Detroit mayor admitted to hospital for "discomfort"
Analysis: Why U.S. high court may uphold healthcare law
Remains identified as those of slain Montana teacher

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CHATTANOOGA, Tenn./DETROIT (Reuters) - The United Auto Workers union is soliciting signatures of support from workers at Volkswagen AG's U.S. factory, an escalation of its effort to establish a foothold outside the Detroit automakers. In early March, the UAW started passing out authorization cards for workers to sign in an early formal step needed for union representation, workers at the factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, told Reuters. UAW President Bob King has said organizing U.S. plants run by foreign automakers, known in the industry as transplants, is crucial for the union's survival. ...

Whitney Houston drowned with cocaine in system: coroner

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Pop star Whitney Houston died of accidental drowning due to the effects of cocaine use and heart disease, a Los Angeles County coroner's spokesman said on Thursday. The 48-year-old singer, who spent years battling addiction to drugs including cocaine, was found submerged in the bathtub of her Beverly Hills hotel room on February 12, the eve of the Grammy Awards. ...

Police chief in "Stand Your Ground" killing steps down

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SANFORD, Florida (Reuters) - A local police chief and a Florida state prosecutor overseeing the case of an unarmed black teenager shot dead by a neighborhood watch captain stepped aside on Thursday following withering criticism and national outrage that police have declined to arrest the shooter. Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee's resignation - which he called "temporary" - failed to appease civil rights and community leaders who are calling for the arrest of watch captain George Zimmerman, 28, who shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and claimed self-defense. ...

Mississippi executes man for 1995 brutal murder

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STARKVILLE, Mississippi (Reuters) - A Mississippi man convicted of brutally murdering a convenience store clerk in 1995 was put to death by lethal injection on Thursday, the second execution in the state this week. William "Jerry" J. Mitchell, 61, sexually assaulted and mutilated Patty Milliken after she disappeared from her job in Biloxi toward the end of her shift in November 1995, jurors found. Mitchell, who at the time of Milliken's death was on parole for a previous murder conviction, was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. ...

Florida man to plead guilty to celebrity hacking-prosecutors

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A Florida man accused of hacking into email accounts to access and distribute nude photos of celebrities including Scarlett Johansson and Mila Kunis has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges, prosecutors said on Thursday. Christopher Chaney of Jacksonville was arrested in October after an 11-month investigation dubbed "Operation Hackerazzi" by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ...

Detroit mayor admitted to hospital for "discomfort"

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DETROIT (Reuters) - Detroit mayor Dave Bing was admitted to a hospital on Thursday afternoon due to "discomfort" after an early morning dental appointment, the mayor's office said on Thursday. Bing will be held at Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital overnight for observation as a precautionary measure, said Robert Warfield, director of communications for the mayor. Bing, a former professional basketball player who was elected mayor in 2009, is under intense pressure from Michigan's governor to cut costs and craft a restructuring plan for the city before it runs out of money in May. ...

Marine sergeant faces discipline for Facebook critique of Obama

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SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - The Marine Corps has initiated disciplinary action against a Marine sergeant for comments he posted on his "Armed Forces Tea Party" Facebook page criticizing President Barack Obama, a spokesman said on Thursday. Sergeant Gary Stein, 26, a weather forecaster assigned to Camp Pendleton near San Diego, cast the Marines' reaction to his comments as an infringement on his freedom of speech and defended his right to express personal political opinions when he is off-duty and out of uniform. ...

Analysis: Why U.S. high court may uphold healthcare law

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(Reuters) - Conventional political wisdom holds that the U.S. Supreme Court, scheduled to hear a challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law beginning on Monday, is likely to strike it down on partisan lines. The court's Republican appointees enjoy a 5-4 majority. But a review of lower court rulings by conservative judges, subtle signals from individual justices, and interviews with professors and judges across the ideological spectrum suggest that presumption is wrong - and that the court will uphold the law. ...

Penn State coach asks judge to throw out his child abuse case

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HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Jerry Sandusky's lawyer on Thursday asked a judge to dismiss all 52 child abuse charges against him because the prosecutor failed to turn over detailed information needed to defend the former Penn State assistant football coach. Attorney Joe Amendola, whose client is accused of abusing 10 boys over a 15-year period, raised questions specifically about the validity of charges tied to three of the boys - identified only as Victim 2, Victim 6 and Victim 8. ...

Kroger joins rival grocers in rejecting "pink slime" beef

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The biggest U.S. supermarket chain, Kroger Co, will stop buying the ammonia-treated beef product critics call "pink slime," bowing to consumer pressure one day after the nation's No. 2 and 3 grocers also rejected the product. Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the largest U.S. retail seller of food, stopped short of banning the product, which the meat industry calls lean finely textured beef, but said its fresh ground beef in trays would no longer contain the product. ...

Kroger joins rivals in halting purchase of "pink slime" beef

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The biggest U.S. supermarket chain, Kroger Co, will stop buying the ammonia-treated beef product critics call "pink slime," bowing to consumer pressure one day after the nation's No. 2 and 3 grocers rejected the product. Safeway Inc and Supervalu Inc said on Wednesday that they would also stop buying the product, which the meat industry calls finely textured beef. "Our customers have expressed their concerns that the use of lean finely textured beef ... ...

Police chief investigating killing of Florida teen steps down

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SANFORD, Florida (Reuters) - The police chief of a Florida town where an unarmed black teenager was killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer said on Thursday he would temporarily step down from his job, saying his role in the investigation had become too much of a distraction. Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee had been heading up the probe into the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by watch captain George Zimmerman, 28. The shooting sparked a nationwide public outcry over Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law. ...

De-frocked priest pleads guilty ahead of Philadelphia pedophilia trial

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PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - A defrocked priest accused of sex abuse in the pedophilia scandal that has rocked the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia pleaded guilty on Thursday, just days before he, another priest and a higher-ranking monsignor were due to go to trial. Edward Avery, 69, admitted to sex abuse involving a 10-year-old boy and was promptly sentenced by Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina to two-and-a-half to five years in prison for involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and criminal conspiracy to endanger the welfare of children. ...

Remains identified as those of slain Montana teacher

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MISSOULA, Montana (Reuters) - Investigators have positively identified human remains found in North Dakota as those of a Montana school teacher who authorities say was abducted and slain as she was jogging near her home two months ago, the FBI said on Thursday. The remains of Sherry Arnold, 43, were recovered by FBI investigators on Wednesday in the vicinity of Williston, North Dakota, about 40 miles from the northeastern Montana town of Sidney, where she lived, FBI spokeswoman Deborah Bertram said. ...

Facing heat over gas price rise, Obama vows to speed pipeline's southern leg

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CUSHING, Oklahoma (Reuters) - Standing in front of a row of pipes, President Barack Obama pledged on Thursday to accelerate approval of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, seeking to deflect criticism that his rejection of the full project helped drive up gasoline prices. The campaign-style stop was immediately dismissed as a stunt by Republicans, saying that Obama doesn't have the authority to really jump start the project. Analysts say it won't likely be finished until 2014 at the earliest. ...

FTC says it halted mortgage relief scam

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(Reuters) - A district court in California has shut down a foreclosure rescue fraud that urged homeowners to pay thousands of dollars to join lawsuits against their lenders, the Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday. The FTC, which filed the legal action to halt the alleged fraud, said the lawsuits were either neglected or dismissed. The case is one of many arising from the mortgage and foreclosure crisis that hit the United States in 2007 and caused a subsequent recession. ...

Rain pummels southeast as Midwest basks in warmth

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(Reuters) - Parts of the southeastern United States were hit by heavy rain and flood warnings on Thursday as above-normal and record-breaking temperatures warmed much of the rest of the middle and eastern part of the nation, meteorologists said. Thunderstorms producing heavy rain and flooding were moving slowly through southeastern Mississippi into southwestern Alabama on Thursday, said Steven Weiss, chief of the science support branch at the National Storm Prediction Center. The weather service issued flash flood warnings until 7:30 p.m. ...

Kentucky court overturns murder conviction, cites testimony on Furby toy

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(Reuters) - Kentucky's Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction on Thursday of a man accused of killing his girlfriend, saying trial testimony from a woman who had once seen him shoot a toy gremlin between the eyes had prejudiced the jury against him. Richard Gabbard was convicted of wanton murder in 2007 for the shooting death of his long-time girlfriend, Michelle Krystofik, the previous year. Gabbard admitted he shot Krystofik but said it was an accident that occurred while he was cleaning his gun. ...

Carmakers flag problems, but U.S. seeks bigger fines

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Automakers are quicker since the 2010 Toyota safety crisis to report defects and recalls to U.S. regulators, but the Obama administration believes that substantially higher fines are still needed as a check against future disclosure lapses. David Strickland, the government's top auto safety official as administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), said on Thursday the current maximum fine of $17 million per case is inadequate. ...

Bagel pioneer Murray Lender dies at 81 in Florida

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(Reuters) - Murray Lender, who made a traditionally Jewish food a staple of American cuisine and built a frozen bagel empire, died on Wednesday in Miami Beach, Florida, after a 10-week illness. He was 81. He became the face of Lender's Bagels in the 1970s and 1980s when he appeared on television advertisements encouraging people unfamiliar with bagels to try them. "It's not so easy telling people that after all those years of eating toast for breakfast, now there's something better," Lender said in one ad from the 1980s. "But it's not so hard either. ...

Texas trial to focus on whether sect marriages broke bigamy law

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MIDLAND, Texas (Reuters) - Were the "spiritual" marriages of a former leader of a breakaway Mormon sect to multiple women true marriages under Texas law? That's the question that a jury of five women and seven men will have to answer in the bigamy trial that started this week of a former president of the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Wendell Loy Nielsen, 71, is charged with three counts of bigamy, a rarely prosecuted crime. ...

Bernanke says U.S. consumption still too weak

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Consumer spending is still too weak to ensure a healthy pace of economic growth, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Thursday. "Right now, in terms of debt and consumption, we're still way low relative to the pattern before the crisis," Bernanke told students in the second of two lectures at The George Washington University. "We lack a source of demand to keep the economy growing." The U.S. economy grew 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 but that rate was seen slowing to just under 2 percent in the first three months of this year. ...

Escape plot foiled for lone woman on Tennessee Death Row

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NASHVILLE, Tenn (Reuters) - A prison guard and the boyfriend of the only woman on Tennessee's Death Row have been charged in connection with a thwarted plan to break her out of a woman's prison. The prisoner, Christa Gail Pike, 36, was sentenced to death in March 1996 for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. She is being held at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville. ...

Mississippi set to execute man for 1995 brutal murder

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STARKVILLE, Mississippi (Reuters) - A Mississippi man convicted of brutally murdering a convenience store clerk in 1995 is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on Thursday, the second execution in the state this week. William "Jerry" J. Mitchell, 61, sexually assaulted and mutilated Patty Milliken after she disappeared from her job in Biloxi toward the end of her shift in November 1995, jurors found. At the time, Mitchell had been released on parole for less than a year for a murder conviction two decades earlier. Mitchell's execution is set for 6 p.m. ...

Gun makers' shares rise on strong demand

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(Reuters) - Gun maker Sturm Ruger & Co Inc's shares rose to a life-high on Thursday, after the company said demand was rising so fast that it was suspending new orders until May. Sturm Ruger said on Wednesday that it has received orders for more than one million guns for the first quarter and it could not keep up with demand despite increased production. The spike in demand comes in an election year when fears of gun control regulations resurface. In 2009, gun sales had shot up after Barack Obama won the U.S. ...

Rutgers student says sorry to gay roommate's family

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(Reuters) - Dharun Ravi, convicted of hate crimes for using a webcam to spy on his Rutgers University roommate's gay encounter, apologized publicly for the first time to the young man's family, saying "I didn't hate Tyler." After being offered a plea deal with no jail time, Ravi, 20, took a gamble by going to trial in a case that put a national spotlight on gay bullying and teen suicide. The roommate, Tyler Clementi, killed himself three days after learning his sexual tryst was seen by webcam. ...

Florida police chief under fire in case of slain teen

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ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - Florida politicians and civil rights leaders joined calls for the firing of a police chief in the case of a neighborhood watch captain who killed an unarmed black teenager, as new details emerged on Wednesday about police handling of the investigation. "The reality is that people in this community have lost faith in the police chief's ability to keep their children safe," Benjamin Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), told Reuters. ...

Boy's "wish" to blow up school warrants suspension, court says

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(Reuters) - A New York school district acted properly in suspending a 10-year-old boy who during a class exercise wrote in crayon that he wanted to "blow up the school with the teachers in it," a divided federal appeals court said. The boy, then a fifth-grade student at Berea Elementary School in Montgomery, New York, about 75 miles north of Manhattan, had been suspended for six days by the Valley Central School District for his September 12, 2007 crayon message. ...

Volkswagen to add 800 workers at Tennessee plant

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CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee (Reuters) - Volkswagen AG will add 800 jobs at its only U.S. plant to increase production of the Passat sedan, the company said on Thursday. The new hires will be added to the Chattanooga plant's existing workforce of 2,200 Volkswagen workers and another 500 who work for a contract firm called Aerotek. The plant will not add another shift, but will place a third "team" of workers on the existing two shifts and add a Saturday shift to accommodate the additional production, said Hans-Herbert Jagla, head of human resources at the factory. ...

Florida governor appoints task force to probe teen's killing

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(Reuters) - Florida Governor Rick Scott appointed a task force on Thursday to investigate the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin as calls grew for charges to be filed against the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed him. Also, the state prosecutor who had been handling the investigation will step aside from the probe, Scott said in a statement. In addition to examining the Martin incident, the task force "will thoroughly review Florida's 'Stand Your Ground' law," Scott said. ...

Police chief in "Stand Your Ground" killing steps down

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Florida man to plead guilty to celebrity hacking-prosecutors

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Kroger joins rival grocers in rejecting "pink slime" beef

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Exclusive: UAW steps up bid to organize VW U.S. plant: sources

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Bernanke says U.S. consumption still too weak

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Mississippi executes man for 1995 brutal murder

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