Robert Gates, who retired as defense secretary two years ago, will become president of the Boy Scouts of America, taking the helm of a national executive board that remains tangled in controversy over the organization’s policies toward gays.
Jennifer Welton and husband Jacob are suing Arizona, seeking to treat their 5-year-old son Zander’s seizure disorder with marijuana extracts under the state’s medical-marijuana law.
Jill Easter of Irvine, Calif., was ordered to serve almost four months in jail for planting prescription painkillers, marijuana and a marijuana pipe in the car of an elementary-school volunteer because Easter and her husband felt that the woman hadn’t properly supervised their son.
Joe Biden, the vice president who as a senator sponsored the federal Violence Against Women Act, toured the National Domestic Violence Hotline’s facility in suburban Austin, Texas, where he called victims of such abuse “prisoners in plain sight.”
Michael James Pascal, 45, an airline pilot from Park City, Utah, is charged with abusive sexual contact after being accused of groping a 14-year-old girl while he was a passenger on a flight from Detroit to Salt Lake City.
Richard Jeremy Ware, 37, was sentenced in Georgia to five years in federal prison for threatening in a letter to kill President Barack Obama and the first lady, as well as kidnap and molest the Obamas’ daughters.
Devin Kohlman, 13, who has aggressive brain cancer and was released from the hospital last weekend to return home, got his home for-Christmas wish after members of his northern Ohio community of Port Clinton placed several tons of shaved ice outside his apartment window to mimic drifting snow, put up decorations, held Christmas caroling and persuaded Santa to appear on his motorcycle.
President Vladimir Putin oversaw an exercise of Russia’s nuclear forces that involved multiple test launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Kremlin said.
Nguyen Van Thuy, a Vietnamese man claiming to have paranormal powers that allow him to find the remains of dead people, has been arrested on suspicion of planting animal bones and claiming that they were the remains of soldiers killed and missing during the Vietnam War in order to claim more than $350,000 from a charitable fund set up by a state-owned bank.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/31/2013