SAN NARCISO, Calif.. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- After 16 hours of deliberation, a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of second-degree murder on Saturday, allowing him to walk free from criminal charges in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Critics, civil rights leaders and legal experts were stunned at the decision. Under Florida state law, a heavily armed citizen may slaughter another person he encounters on the street, so long as the shooter believes his life to be in peril. Zimmerman invoked this "Stand Your Ground" defense after he slayed the unarmed teenager, and the state saw fit to exonerate him. But on Sunday afternoon, Zimmerman made headlines once again by killing four more people in Sanford who frightened him half to death. Two of the individuals were reporters from Ebony magazine trying to get a statement. No other journalists were harmed. Again, police did not have enough evidence to make an arrest. Zimmerman's defense attorney, Mark O'Mara, stated that they would rely on Stand Your Ground and double jeopardy if the state opted to pursue the matter legally. "We shouldn't even see court time," O'Mara said. "If George were black, this would be a non-issue: the police wouldn't be bothering with us in the first place."

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Towns all across the United States lit up with fireworks displays Thursday to pay homage to the nation's birth on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed. But whenever pyrotechnics are involved, accidents are never far behind. Injuries and property damage from poorly staged events regularly make the news each year. That's why the strangest Fourth of July story involves a group of foreign tourists who accidentally ended up in the middle of a gang war in Los Angeles, but found the standoff stimulating, historically educational and absent any injuries or chaos.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- As the international manhunt for Edward Snowden intensifies, President Obama again tried to defend his war on whistle-blowers and the need for warrantless surveillance programs. Attorney General Holder called such actions "vital to the preservation of national security." The president even rationalized spying on the governments of European allies this Monday as a standard practice in the international intelligence community. But the NSA's data collection and monitoring efforts are neither biased nor prejudiced by religious and ethnic profiling, the president assured; every American is suspect, because any individual could be working with a terrorist cell. As if to illustrate the point Wednesday, the president fretfully admitted being suspicious about his own connections to the leaders of terrorist nations after reviewing transcripts of his private phone calls and emails, which were obtained by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on his orders.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- In the wake of two landmark Supreme Court decisions that arguably advanced the cause of gay rights in the United States, conservative factions wasted no time in retaliating. But according to data analyzed this weekend by the National Security Agency (NSA), a record-breaking majority of Americans expressed support for the rights of GLBT couples to wed.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Wednesday's ruling against Section 3 of DOMA by the Supreme Court left long-suffering members of the GLBT community jubilant and hopeful, but devastated religious conservatives who are opposed to promoting the rights of people they view as sexually immoral. Former Rep. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has been one of the most newsworthy anti-gay politicians over the past decade. In 2003, he famously warned that relaxing the legal definition of marriage would open the floodgates to all manner of deviant behavior, including "man on dog" relations. Today, in protest of the Supreme Court's ruling and to illustrate the very dangers implicit in the decision, Rick Santorum announced that he will marry a dog.