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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.

Mississippi and Alabama hold Republican primaries on Tuesday. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney scheduled a last-minute campaign event in Mobile, where he appeared on stage with the comedian Jeff Foxworthy. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich both addressed an energy summit in Biloxi.

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.

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.

Peter Bergman, one of the founding members of the four-man surrealist comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre, died Friday of complications from leukemia. He was 72.

Bergman, along with collaborators David Ossman, Phil Proctor and Phil Austin, created satire out of the political and civil upsets of the 1960s and 1970s, blending surrealism, absurdities, non sequiturs, paranoia, parodies of the Establishment, sound effects, in-jokes about hippies and knowing allusions to literature and trash culture.

Farms may conjure an image of a pastoral landscape, with children running and frolicking in green pastures. But farms do come with their own dangers. And there's plenty of argument on what should be done to ensure the safety of children who live or work on farms.

The U.S. Department of Justice has blocked a new voter ID law from going into effect in Texas. The department says the state failed to show that the law would not deny or limit minorities' right to vote. It's the second state voter ID law the department has blocked.

After Dave Brubeck signed with Columbia Records in the mid-1950s, his quartet made a few albums a year, and now that material has been collected in a 19-disc box set called The Dave Brubeck Quartet: The Complete Columbia Studio Albums Collection.

USS Enterprise, the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, is beginning the last deployment in her storied 50-year career on the frontlines of American sea power.

Known as the "Big E", she was among the vessels dispatched to the waters off Cuba during the October 1962 missile crisis with orders from President Kennedy to enforce an air and sea blockade of the island nation.

Rising gas prices have many voters looking for someone to blame and President Obama appears to be as good a target as anyone, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll suggests, with the president's approval rating falling from 50 percent last month to 46 percent recently.

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

— Taliban Vow Revenge For Alleged U.S. Attack On Civilians

— Report Shows Drop In U.S. Oil Imports

— Syrian Militia Blamed In Latest Killing

Other stories in the news:

Syrian activists blamed pro-government militiamen for the latest killing of civilians in the city of Homs. At least a dozen people, including children, were killed, state media confirmed, saying instead that the perpetrators were "armed terrorists."

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 12 people were killed, but the Local Coordination Committee had a much higher figure – 45, according to The Associated Press.

The AP quoted the LCC and the Observatory as saying:

With three wins on Super Tuesday, and a victory in the Kansas caucuses over the weekend, GOP hopeful Rick Santorum is on a high — and campaigning hard in the South.

"This is going to be a very close race here in Mississippi and I know the same thing is true in Alabama. We've got lots of folks down here working hard," Santorum told a crowd at Weidmann's historic restaurant in Meridian, Miss. on Sunday.

The White House will unveil a report today showing that U.S. dependence on foreign oil imports has dropped by more than two million barrels a day since President Obama took office.

The report shows U.S. imports at 8.4 million barrels a day last year from 11 million barrels a day in 2008. As a percent of all U.S. consumption, foreign imports went from 57 percent down to 45 percent in the same period, the report says.