Following are excerpts from some of the letters Judge Glenn Berman received as he considered the sentence for Dharun Ravi, who was convicted in March of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation and other charges for using his webcam to see roommate Tyler Clementi kissing another man. Clementi committed suicide days after the September 2010 invasion. Berman sentenced Ravi to 30 days in jail.

The letters came from a man who was once beaten with a baseball bat in a racially motivated attack, the widow of a Minnesota judge, a group representing lesbian, gay and transgendered people from South Asia, a gay member of the Navy, and the father of a woman who committed suicide, among others.

When police dug up a Manhattan basement last month in a fruitless search for the remains of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old boy who disappeared in 1979, Lucy Suarez saw the news on TV and wished that the family of the missing child would finally get some peace.

Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday that the United States can now focus on new global challenges after a long decade of war in an election-year commencement address to jubilant graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Going to college seemed inconceivable when Adriana Sanchez, the 12-year-old daughter of farm workers, was brought from Mexico to Central California and the family overstayed their visas.

Rattlesnake Mountain offers sweeping views of the historic McWhorter Ranch, a pristine property largely unchanged since it was settled in 1903, laced with dry grasses and sagebrush and home to elk and other wildlife. The ranch stretches down the mountain's south face across more than 20 square miles of Washington's shrinking shrub-steppe habitat.

A wildfire in Michigan's Upper Peninsula grew by 17 percent to more than 21,000 acres Saturday as officials warned of tough conditions and welcomed help from water-dumping aircraft from the Michigan National Guard.

Quebec's generous social services date back to sweeping reforms in the 1960s, a period of intense nationalism. Yet many Quebecers look back at the "Quiet Revolution" with regret over one unfulfilled promise: free higher education.

Louisiana authorities are searching for a college student who has been missing for nearly a week after she was last seen on a bicycle in the early morning hours.

Firefighters are battling a massive wildfire in southwestern New Mexico that has destroyed a dozen cabins and spread smoke across the state, prompting holiday weekend air-quality warnings.

"Looks like we've got us a dragon by the tail." - NASA astronaut Donald Pettit after he used the International Space Station's 58-foot robot arm Friday to snare SpaceX's Dragon capsule, the first time a business enterprise delivered a supply ship to the space station.

Barbara Kydd Graves, the wife of the publisher of Black Enterprise Magazine who aided in the growth of the publication and media company, died Friday.

A cluster of thunderstorms that stalled off the southeastern U.S. coast on Saturday is expected to make for a sloppy, rainy Memorial Day on beaches and in tourist towns from Florida to South Carolina.

In a story May 22 about internal files of nine Franciscan priests that were released as part of a sexual abuse lawsuit settlement in California, The Associated Press incorrectly spelled the name of the attorney for the Roman Catholic order. His name is Brian Brosnahan.

Police want to review audio recordings of conversations between a Manson family member and his attorney as detectives search for information about unsolved killings.

A Colorado farm that was traced to a listeria outbreak in cantaloupe last year has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

High-ranking members of both political parties were unaware that posting photos of completed ballots on Facebook or Twitter is illegal in Wisconsin, and they promised to quickly take down the posts Friday after election officials reminded voters of the law.

Student groups in Quebec have filed a legal motion against a provincial law aimed at ending more than three months of protests over proposed tuition hikes.

An alert police officer who boarded a bus full of recent Utah high school graduates headed to Disneyland averted what could have been a deadly road trip after arresting the driver for suspicion of being under the influence of drugs, authorities said Friday.

It was 35 years ago Friday that moviegoers were first transported to a galaxy far, far away.

Jackson public schools will no longer handcuff students to poles or other objects and will train staff at its alternative school on better methods of discipline.

An Arkansas judge who ordered a new trial in a lawsuit over a $1 million lottery ticket that a woman says she mistakenly discarded announced Friday that he won't preside over the case.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his opponent, Democrat Tom Barrett, are locked together in a fiercely fought recall campaign, but that's where the similarity ends. They don't campaign the same way.

Jurors in the John Edwards campaign fraud trial have the long holiday weekend to think over the case - but not talk about it - as the judge sternly warned before sending them home after six days of deliberations.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon blamed the Syrian government Friday for much of the "unacceptable levels of violence and abuses" occurring every day in violation of a U.N.-backed peace plan.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has signed a law aimed at keeping the state's courts or government agencies from basing decisions on Islamic or other foreign legal codes, and a national Muslim group's spokesman said Friday that a court challenge is likely.

A Mexican police officer pleaded guilty Friday in a drug smuggling case and admitted he hired a fellow officer to run a hit squad on behalf of a Tijuana-based drug cartel, prosecutors said.

A judge in California has ruled that the federal law that prohibits recognition of same-sex unions is unconstitutional because it denies long-term health insurance benefits to legal spouses of state employees and retirees.

A homeless military veteran has been charged with breaking into a Kansas television station and attacking several employees.

Seattle-based Zillow says the man fatally shot by a stray bullet while he and his family drove down a Seattle street was an employee of the high-tech real estate company.

A grand jury has indicted a man for murder after he was released from the Oregon state mental hospital and accused of killing a woman making a routine medicine delivery to his apartment.

More Americans will hit the road this holiday weekend than a year ago. And they'll have a bit more money to spend thanks to lower gas prices.

Residents near a privately owned New Mexico ghost town were ordered Saturday to evacuate as a blaze in the Gila National Forest continued to burn erratically, as Colorado crews took to fighting a new fire along the Utah-Colorado border.

It's an anniversary the few remaining souls who live here won't be celebrating.

The mother of three young children abandoned in a Portland shed was found by police on Friday, a day after the kids were taken to safety.

The commanding Marine general in one of Afghanistan's hardest-fought regions said Friday he is seeing big improvements in the vetting of Afghan recruits to the country's security forces following attacks by Afghan soldiers on their NATO partners.

A Florida man was sentenced Friday to eight years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme that swindled hundreds of victims out of $8 million.

A coroner says the gunman killed in a northwestern Indiana police standoff was a Texas man.

From the vantage point of the Comfort Inn parking lot near the entrance to Kodiak's airport, traffic moves north toward downtown or south to the Coast Guard air station, the home to cutters, helicopters and rescue swimmers that aid mariners in the Bering Sea or the Pacific Ocean.

Federal prosecutors say a New Jersey mayor and his adult son hacked into websites of political foes who were seeking his recall.