On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King was killed by assassin in Memphis, Tennessee. He was in the state to help support a sanitation workers' strike. The legendary figure had been at the forefront of the civil rights movement, beginning with the Montgomery boycott in 1955, all the while leading a series of nonviolent protests against discrimination.
The governor signed into law Thursday sweeping new restrictions on weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines similar to the ones used by the gunman who killed 20 children and six educators in Newton. Connecticut joins states California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts in having the country's strongest gun control laws, Brian Malte, director of mobilization for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington.
Richard Beasley, the Ohio street-preacher who lured his murder victims with bogus Craigslist job offers, has been sentenced to the death penalty in Akron. Beasley was convicted on March 12 of killing three men and wounding a fourth, all of whom hegave false promises of farmhand jobs to in southeast Ohio in 2011.