As soon as you step in the elevator of Las Vegas' new Mob Museum, a cop on a video monitor reads you your rights. When the doors finally open, you're greeted by a huge photo of 1920s-era gangsters standing in a police lineup, wearing fedoras.

When presidents give major set-piece speeches, they're mainly engaged in exercises in futility since a commander-in-chief's high-flown rhetoric rarely shifts voter attitudes for long.

Indeed, the exercise could even be more negative than neutral since speeches by presidents advocating specific policy not only leave citizen unswayed but can fire up political opponents in the other party, according to Ezra Klein in an essay in the New Yorker.

With a fierce yell and a resounding thwack, 13-year-old Japanese student Nanami Usui brings her bamboo sword down on her opponent.

By practicing Kendo, or Japanese swordsmanship, Usui is one of several students in the town of Minamisanriku who are rebuilding their confidence after last year's tsunami washed away their homes and shattered their hometown in the country's northeast.

Usui says she dreams of being a police officer, but she doesn't know yet where she wants to live and work.

In a report issued today, the board of directors of Penn State University confirmed what everyone already figured: They fired head coach Joe Paterno over his actions concerning the sexual abuse allegations against his once assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

The university said it made its decision based on a grand jury report that said graduate student Mike McQueary had told the coach that he saw Sandusky "in the Lasch Building showers fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy."

The board says:

The Gaithersburg, Md., priest who refused to give Communion to a lesbian parishioner during a funeral mass for the woman's mother has been has been placed on leave, according to NBC Channel 4 news.

A letter from an archdiocese official says that Rev. Marcel Guarnizo was placed on leave for engaging in intimidating behavior. The archdiocese had previously apologized for Guarnizo's behavior.

Many details remain unknown about Sunday's shooting in southern Afghanistan, where a U.S. Army sergeant is suspected of walking through villages near Kandahar and killing 16 Afghan civilians.

But the shooting has raised the specter of reprisals against American troops and also led to questions about how much damage it could cause to the larger American war effort in Afghanistan.

Here's a look at what is, and isn't, known so far.

The Suspect

We're all familiar with the gruff Richard Nixon of the Watergate tapes. But the presidential library of the 37th president of the United States has an exhibit that shows a different side of him — the softer, gushy side of him that emerged as he was courting Pat Ryan, the woman who would become his wife.

The Federal Transit Administration has committed $900 million to the Bart Silicon Valley project. This extends the existing Bart system 16 miles south to San Jose. Construction can begin, and if all goes as planned, the extension could be running four years from now...

In the past decade or so, we've gotten used to jobless recoveries, when the economy grows its way out of a recession without adding many new jobs.

At the moment, we may be living through the opposite of a jobless recovery. In the past few months, job growth has picked up, while economic growth has slowed.

The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has reached the conclusion that the United States violated some of the rights of the Army private accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks.

Pfc. Bradley Manning has been in U.S. custody since May 2010 and as we've reported, Juan Méndez, the U.N.'s top torture official, has already had some tough words for the U.S. leading up to this report.