A homeless Gastonia man who allegedly hoisted a sign reading, “I’m thinking of a cheeseburger,” near an interstate off-ramp was charged with violating the city begging ordinance.

Michael Francis McLaughlin, 48, held the cardboard sign on the 500 block of Cox Road near I-85 Friday evening, Gastonia Police Officer J.K. Sarratt wrote on a misdemeanor criminal citation.

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Have you ever wondered what it is like to be at the centre of a sex scandal?

The type where the National Enquirer starts sniffing around the story and people start to get nervous?

Where denials get issued and attempts are made to bury the story, which lead to more and more media attention?

The kind where you eventually end up sitting on Oprah's couch to talk it out?

Andrew Young, the one-time confidant of former U.S. Senator John Edwards, understands intimately what the process is like.

Better known as the guy who pretended to be the father of Edwards' lovechild, Young is now the author of a top-selling, tell-all book about his former boss.

In his book, Young tells the story of how he came to meet the up-and-coming politician and become one of the trusted people in his inner circle.

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But one of the more sensational claims — that one of the suspects forced their young victims to help kill a man — is creating an uphill climb for prosecutors that could sink the rest of their case, legal experts say.

Investigators say the sexual abuse allegations have been corroborated by six siblings, at least three of whom say they were raped and molested over a 10-year period beginning in the mid-1980s on a farm east of Kansas City.

Still, the case against Burrell E. Mohler Sr., 77, his brother and four adult sons could be compromised by the homicide claim. Authorities have yet to produce a victim or file homicide charges, and officials are mum about whether a homicide investigation is even under way.

Without a body, prosecutors could face larger doubts about victims' stories that defense lawyers could exploit.

"It's easier to discredit what victims are going to say, given the circumstances, than to prove it," said Thomas Nolan, a criminal justice professor at Boston University. "If I'm the prosecutor, I've got my work cut out for me."

In November, Lafayette County prosecutors unleashed waves of sexual abuse allegations against the Mohlers. Probable cause statements described how one girl was forced into sexual contact with a horse, while another said a dog was forced onto her.

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No one seems to know what they are advertising but then, no one seems to really care.............

The News & Observer along with about 60 other media outlets are being subpoenaed by defense lawyers for Demario Atwater, the man facing the death penalty in the Eve Carson murder case.

The subpoena calls for all relevant newspaper articles, letters, editorials and copies of all radio and television broadcasts that covered the Eve Carson murder. It’s the latest strategy by the Atwater defense team to prove their client will not receive a fair trial in North Carolina and that the trial should be moved to Virginia. The subpoena also calls for a profile..........

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A British teenager who reported a sexually explicit online conversation to authorities may have saved a 5-year-old North Carol from becoming a rape victim at the hands of her babysitter, according to a police report.

The 17-year-old U.K. teen, who is not identified in police documents, came forward last week to report instant messages from North Carolina college student James Carroll as "disturbing," the report states.

According to the teen's statement, outlined in a probable cause affidavit obtained by ABCNews.com, Carroll, 20, detailed his intentions of having sex with a young girl he was scheduled to babysit.

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Gloria Gadsden said she had been put on paid leave indefinitely following a meeting with a dean and university administrators Wednesday afternoon.

They cited two comments she posted on Facebook, the popular social networking site, she said.

In the first, posted Jan. 21, Gadsden wrote, "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman? Yes, it's been that kind of day..."

Five comments followed the message, suggesting those to whom she was linked understood the joke. One said she was "ROFL," shorthand for "rolling on the floor laughing."

In the other comment, posted one month later, Gadsden wrote, "had a good day today, DIDN'T want to kill even one student . Now Friday was a different story."

federal tax

The Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation says the housing exemption gives churches an unfair advantage because they can compensate their leaders with tax-free housing. Other nonprofits, such as the foundation, can't do that. So it's suing the federal government to outlaw the housing allowance.

"We think the law is rotten at the core," said co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor. "It is not constitutional, it is not fair, and it is not necessary."

But the exemption's supporters point to a similar court dispute in 2002 that went nowhere after Congress almost unanimously rushed to save the housing break.

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Today, the Attorney General’s Office made their suspicions official, with a Sussex County grand jury indicting Bradley in the rapes of 102 girls and one boy he treated, a more-than-tenfold increase in the number of victims originally alleged.

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He's one of two men charged with the murder of UNC student body president Eve Carson.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin at the federal courthouse in Winston-Salem. A huge pool of potential jurors will be asked to fill out a questionnaire about the case.

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Witness: Oakland Bus Fight Racially Tinged

CBN News has learned exclusively that five Muslim soldiers at Fort Jackson in South Carolina were arrested just before Christmas. It is unclear whether the men are still in custody. The five were part of the Arabic Translation program at the base.

The men are suspected of trying to poison the food supply at Fort Jackson.

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Authorities charged her with five counts of arson, simple assault, identity theft, communicating threats, damage to property, resisting, delaying and obstructing an officer and three counts of child endangerment.

Shortly after 11:30 p.m., police received a 911 call about a domestic dispute at 2220 Lincoln St. Authorities said they believe the call came from one of the three children inside the home.

When officers arrived, they found Mangum and her boyfriend, Milton Walker, 33, in the middle of a fight. Mangum then went into a bathroom and set some clothes on fire in the bathtub, police said.

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We can probably agree on several things in the case of the Wake County teacher suspended last week after posting remarks about her students on Facebook.

For instance, we know the social media site switched security settings in December, and many users unwittingly made their pages more public than they realized.

And we can agree students shouldn't use religion to taunt teachers. It sounds as if some in Melissa Hussain's eighth-grade class at an Apex middle school were doing that. They left a Bible and a Christmas card with the "Christ" in "Christmas" underlined. They sang "Jesus Loves Me" in class, she said on Facebook, and spread rumors she was a Jesus-hater.

None of that exempts Hussain from this: It's her job to be the grownup.

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Melissa Hussain, an eighth-grade science teacher at West Lake Middle School in southern Wake County, was suspended with pay Friday while investigators review her case, according to Greg Thomas, a Wake schools spokesman. The suspension came after some of Hussain's students and their parents objected to comments on her Facebook page, many revolving around her interaction with Christian students.

Hussain wrote on the social-networking site that it was a "hate crime" that students anonymously left a Bible on her desk, and she told how she "was able to shame her kids" over the incident. Her Facebook page included comments from friends about "ignorant southern rednecks," and one commenter suggested Hussain retaliate by bringing a Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster to class with a swastika drawn on the NASCAR driver's forehead.

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President Obama's new envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference, Rashad Hussain, is at the center of a controversy over remarks attributed to him defending a man who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to aid a terrorist group.

The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs quoted Hussain in 2004 as calling Sami al-Arian the victim of "politically motivated persecutions" after al-Arian, a university professor, was charged in 2003 with heading U.S. operations of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The United States has designated the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a foreign terrorist group as far back as 1997. At the time of al-Arian's arrest, then Attorney General John Ashcroft called it "one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the world."

Al-Arian pleaded guilty in 2006 to conspiracy to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was sentenced to more than four years in prison.

The White House says the controversial remarks defending al-Arian two years earlier were made by his daughter — not by Hussain. Both were part of a panel discussion at a Muslim Students Association conference, but the reporter covering the event told Fox News she stands by the quotes she attributed to Hussain, who was a Yale Law student and an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Commentary: When you go the full story, be sure to read the comments section.

Yep, this dude here......

Hussain is an eighth grade science teacher in North Carolina who was getting harassed by bible-thumping students in her classroom — harassments that was apparently encouraged by their red-necked ignorant parents. The kids were giving her Bibles and Jesus postcards and reading Bibles instead of doing their classwork, and seemed to have enjoyed flaunting their dumb-ass religiosity at her. So she vented on Facebook. The parents got indignant that she would dare to express her unhappiness with their darling little children, and are pressing to have her fired — but the curious thing is that the only comments they quote all seem reasonable and moderate.

Hussain wrote on the social-networking site that it was a "hate crime" that students anonymously left a Bible on her desk, and she told how she "was able to shame" her students over the incident. Her Facebook page included comments from friends about "ignorant Southern rednecks," and one commenter suggested Hussain retaliate by bringing a Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster to class with a swastika drawn on the NASCAR driver's forehead.

Notice that other people are making rude comments about the Bible-thumpers (and I feel the same way), not the teacher. That was the worst they could find? That she rejects religious harassment and shamed her students to get them to stop doing it?

Islamic Supremacist Group Holds First U.S. Conference

They were Senate colleagues first, then running mates, a photogenic team for the high-stakes 2004 Democratic presidential race.

Now, with John Edwards disgraced by reports that he got an aide to cover for him as he conducted an affair — and fathered a child — with campaign filmmaker Rielle Hunter as his wife, Elizabeth, was battling cancer, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts is speaking out for the first time about his former vice presidential selection.

"Honestly, it's a tragedy," Kerry said in an interview to air on CNN's "Larry King Live." "Everybody just feels awful about it, in terms of their family, their relationship that everybody saw publicly, the promise, the hope, you know, obviously a capable career."

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Commentary: Yep, it's got to be true if Time says so: Global Cooling Is Caused By Global Warming. Ya just gotta read it to believe it.......

As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven't we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change? After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like PalmPilots and majority rule in the Senate. Certainly that's what the Virginia state Republican Party thinks: the GOP aired an ad last weekend that attacked two Democratic members of Congress for supporting the 2009 carbon-cap-and-trade bill, using the recent storms to cast doubt on global warming. (See pictures of the massive blizzard in Washington, D.C.)

Brace yourselves now — this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.

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The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill, which sponsored the investigation, will present the report's findings at a free public meeting Feb. 17 at the Horace Williams House.

"This is what we'd hoped to find," said Ernest Dollar, executive director. "We knew there was a large population buried in that part of the cemetery. This gives us a much better sense of where those graves actually are."

The section of the cemetery examined — a one-third acre portion of what is known as Section B — was used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a burial place for slaves and freemen. Some of their graves may never have had headstones; most of the others were marked only with rough, uninscribed fieldstones that over the years have been moved, destroyed or otherwise lost. UNC football fans used that portion of the cemetery as an impromptu parking lot for a game in 1985, no doubt damaging or burying some stones, and maintenance workers, unaware that the stones marked graves, used some of them to rebuild stone walls.

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