Arias spoke to The Associated Press as part of a series of interviews with media outlets. She repeated many of her claims from previous interviews, testimony on the witness stand and her statements to the jury earlier Tuesday as she pleaded for mercy.

But she provided some new information about her case and how she believed her lawyers let her down by not calling more witnesses who could have bolstered her claims that she was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of Travis Alexander.

Arias was convicted last week of first-degree murder in the June 2008 stabbing and shooting death of her one-time lover in what prosecutors described as a cold, calculated killing carried out in a jealous rage. Arias has maintained all along it was self-defense.

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It was the 83-year-old grandmother's first time back at her home since a monstrous and deadly tornado ravaged her neighborhood in suburban Oklahoma City. Part of the roof was sitting in the front yard, and the siding from the front of the house was gone. As her son, Jeff, and her grandsons picked through what was left of her belongings, Arvin found some dark humor in the situation.

"Oh thank God," she said, laughing, when a grandson brought over her keys. "We can get in the house."

Monday's tornado killed at least 24 people, destroyed countless homes and reduced one elementary school almost entirely to rubble, killing seven children inside.

As state and federal officials work to set up disaster recovery centers to provide aid and assistance, Arvin and other residents of Moore are beginning the deliberate process of assessing what's left of their homes and possessions and what comes next.

Officials are still trying to make sense of what will be needed in the coming days, weeks and months: Will homes be rebuilt or torn down? Where will the children go to school? How much will it all cost?

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"Most often" and "typically," though, are the operative words these days. While I'm obviously hesitant to invoke the 37th president terms for the aforementioned reasons -- and while I agree with my Salon colleague Alex Pareene and my pal Steve Almond that the IRS and Benghazi brouhahas most certainly do not warrant Nixon references -- I do believe Nixon's legacy is nonetheless applicable to the revelations about the Obama administration's posture toward press freedom.

Those particular revelations, of course, aren't happening in a vacuum. Instead, they relate to an administration whose known obsessions suggest this is part of a larger, dare I say Nixonian, pathology - one defined by a hostility toward the most basic democratic ideals.

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NBC reported:

A friend of the suspect, Khusn Taramiv, said his friend, 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev, was being investigated as part of the Boston bombings and knew Tsarnaev because both were MMA fighters.

Taramiv claims he and Todashev were interviewed by the FBI for nearly three hours on Tuesday.

"(The FBI) took me and my friend, the suspect that got killed. They were talking to us, both of us, right? And they said they need him for a little more, for a couple more hours, and I left, and they told me they’re going to bring him back. They never brought him back," Taramiv said.

"He felt inside he was going to get shot," Taramiv said about Todashev. "I told him, 'Everything is going to be fine, don't worry about it.' He said, 'I have a really bad feeling.'"

Taramiv said he left the interview and when he came back to the apartments he found that there had been a shooting.

"I was completely shocked. I still can’t believe it, you know what I mean?" he said.

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The 13-5 vote cleared the way for an epic showdown on the Senate floor on legislation that is one of President Barack Obama's top domestic priorities — yet also gives the Republican Party a chance to recast itself as more appealing to minorities.

The action sparked rejoicing from immigration activists who crowded into a Senate committee room to witness the proceedings. "Yes, we can! Si, se puede" they shouted, reprising the campaign cry from Obama's first run for the White House in 2008.

In addition to creating a pathway to citizenship for 11.5 million immigrants, the legislation creates a new program for low-skilled foreign labor and would permit highly skilled workers into the country at far higher levels than is currently the case.

At the same time, it requires the government to take costly new steps to guard against future illegal immigration.

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The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence. But the investigation has been slowed by the reduced U.S. intelligence presence in the region since the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, and by the limited ability to assist by Libya's post-revolutionary law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which are still in their infancy since the overthrow of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and holding them at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The preference is toward a process in which most are apprehended and tried by the countries where they are living or arrested by the U.S. with the host country's cooperation and tried in the U.S. criminal justice system. Using military force to detain the men might also harm fledgling relations with Libya and other post-Arab-Spring governments with whom the U.S. is trying to build partnerships to hunt al-Qaida as the organization expands throughout the region.

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I am lying in bed right now sobbing, which I've been doing a lot lately, and writing to get these twisted feelings out of my head and onto paper. I'm graduating college on Saturday ... wow, great, such an accomplishment. Did you read that in a monotone voice twinged with sarcasm? Because that is how I feel about it. Literally, whatever. I had so many hopes for this semester and everything has fallen apart.

I spent six months in 2012 traveling in Central America. Some of it was for school, some of it was because I wanted to throw a middle finger to everyone who has ever told me I couldn't do something. I planned the whole trip on my own, decided my travel itinerary, applied for an internship, and designed my senior thesis so I could do field work abroad on poverty alleviation, (I've had grad students tell me my undergrad senior thesis sounds like a grad level thesis). It was a monumental test of my independence and a challenge to all the fear I feel in my life. I wanted this trip to not be a generic study abroad experience; I wanted to break away, completely on my own and not rely on anyone else.

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“By a show of hands, how many folks here tonight are Freedmen?” Cornsilk asked into the microphone. Each raised an arm. Visibly dismayed, Cornsilk shook his head. It was a trick question.

“No,” Cornsilk said. “The Freedmen died a long time ago. You are not Freedmen. You are Cherokee, and it is time that you begin to recognize who you are.”

Cornsilk is Cherokee, and a self-taught civil rights advocate and genealogist. He traces his slave-owning ancestors back to their aboriginal lands of Georgia and Tennessee — to a period before the Trail of Tears. Cornsilk is not a Cherokee Freedmen descendant. For nearly two decades, however, Cornsilk fought for the citizenship rights of Freedmen descendants — blacks who descend from slaves once owned by Cherokee and other tribes.

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We all knew it was too good to be true. Snapchat, the photo-texting app designed to delete your pictures soon after they’re received, is supposed to be a completely safe way to send naughty pics to your significant other without consequences.

But for $300 to $500, you could retain any photos a person has sent you. Want your sexy snapchats back? Just call Richard Hickman, of Utah security firm Decipher Forensics, who says he can get back the photos in just six hours.

That’s because the photos remain stored deep inside Android smartphones—in a folder called RECEIVED_IMAGES_SNAPS. Rather than deleting the files, Snapchat actually just turns them into reusable data with a .NOMEDIA extension, which makes the photos invisible to most people. But do a bit of forensic research and voila! The pictures are viewable once again.

The photos can then be passed on to parents, lawyers, revenge-porn sites and the police.

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He also didn't specify if it was the Illuminati who whisked Dorothy off to Oz.

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"Service in the Peace Corps is a life-defining leadership experience for Americans who want to make a difference around the world," Peace Corps Deputy Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet said in a statement. "I am proud that the agency is taking this important step forward to allow same-sex domestic partners to serve overseas together."

News of the reform comes only weeks after Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) introduced the Peace Corps Equity Act, a measure to extend insurance coverage to Peace Corps volunteers for abortions in instances of rape. As Salon's Irin Carmon notes, the Peace Corps is currently the only federal agency that doesn't have insurance coverage for rape survivors seeking abortion care.

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The implication was that House Republicans had decided that the lesson of the bruising 2012 election was to back off on anything that Democrats could tar as a war on women. (In the meantime, their allies in the states could push through real changes in abortion and contraception access, with very few political barriers.) But that fragile detente may be over, both nationally and in this year’s key state races. The question is whether it's a battle Republicans even want to fight.

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True the Vote, a Houston-based group that pushes for harsher voter restrictions at the state level, filed a suit in U.S. District Court in D.C. asking the court to grant the group tax-exempt status and to award damages for the IRS's alleged targeting of conservative groups.

The Washington Post reports:

Originally called [King Street Patriots]/True the Vote, the group filed in July 2010 for tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) charity organization. In August 2011, the group changed its name to True the Vote Inc.; King Street Patriots has separately been seeking the 501(c)(4) status from the IRS. True the Vote has come under fire for intimidating African-American and other minority voters at the polls.

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"It was very tough because I had to revisit what that period was and go deeper into it," he said of his daughter Nikki's premature birth, years of emotional issues, and eventual suicide at the age of 40.

The 84-year old award-winning music composer of such classics as "I'll Never Fall in Love Again," the Oscar-winning "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," and The Carpenters' "(They Long to Be) Close to You," understood that baring his deep, dark secrets was essential to his recently released autobiography, "Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music" (Harper).

The idea for a memoir came long before Nikki's death in 2007. Bacharach had Nikki with former wife Angie Dickinson, best known for her role on the seventies drama, "Police Woman."

"(Nikki) was one-pound, 10 ounces at birth, you should know the deck is stacked against you then," Bacharach said.

According to Bacharach, she grew up with emotional issues, which he later found out was an undiagnosed case of Asperger's syndrome (the autism spectrum disorder is a relatively new diagnosis.)

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I don't condone Apple's tax-avoidance schemes, but the company is hardly alone in taking advantage of loopholes in U.S and Irish tax law. The Wikipedia page that details the two key strategies employed by Apple, the Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich, lists 12 other major U.S. corporations that are pulling the same flim-flam. Among them are Apple's tech sector colleagues -- Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook and Adobe Systems -- along with General Electric, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Starbucks.

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"The World of Halo," based on the massively successful gaming franchise, will be exclusive to Xbox. “For me, the ‘Halo’ universe is an amazing opportunity for the intersection” of “mythmaking and technology,” Spielberg said via video.

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In the letter, Jaclyn Friedman of Women, Action, & the Media, writer Soraya Chemaly and the Everyday Sexism Project's Laura Bates, along with dozens of other activists and groups, call on Facebook to "Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech" and train its moderators to recognize and remove it. It asks Facebook users to "contact advertisers whose ads on Facebook appear next to content that targets women for violence." It's an oft-made request. But maybe this time, it'll be heard.

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