Following are excerpts of stories in The LaRuelist Report:

In recognition of Black History Month, the Governor and Lt. Kim Guadagno invited several students from around the State to honor them for their extraordinary accomplishments in a literary assignments in school.

Rutgers University's Continuing Education Department and Office of Public Affairs will co-sponsor a ONE-DAY class on this very issue Wednesday, April 21, 2010. The three-hour class will run from 3-6 pm in Committee Room 6 in the State House Annex in Trenton.

The Christie Administration has announced and invites...   Read More >>

It was just past midnight in Afghanistan when Brig. Gen. Mark Milley appeared on the video screen in the Pentagon conference room to brief some of the Army's top generals on a sobering development: his unit's most recent confirmed suicide.

A 19-year-old private, working a night shift at his base, had shot himself a few weeks earlier. "There was no indication that he would harm himself, he had not been seen by the chaplain, no intimate relationships," Milley said, running through warning signs.

In the Pentagon, Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, homed...   Read More >>

SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) -- Former South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun committed suicide Saturday by leaping to his death from a hill behind his house, the government announced.

He was 62. Roh, who was president from 2003 to 2008, had gone hiking near his home with an aide about 6:30 a.m. Saturday (5:30 p.m. ET on Friday), the state-run Yonhap news agency said.

He was found later with head injuries, and died at 9:30 a.m. after being taken to a hospital in Busan, police said. A hospital spokesman declined to comment.

Roh left a suicide note for his family that family lawyer Moon Jae-in handed out to South Korean media. News reports said Roh wrote it on his computer about half an hour before he left the house.

"I am in debt to too many people," the note reads. "Too many people have s...   Read More >>

L.Y. Marlow is the third generation of her family to have been a victim and survivor of domestic violence: a violence that almost took her own life and the life of her unborn child. In her award-winning Color Me Butterfly, she tells the poignant and evocative story of four generations of mothers and daughters: the true story of her grandmother, her mother, herself, and her daughter; and the toll intergenerational domestic violence and abuse has had on her family for over sixty years.

But the story does not end there. In the fall 2007, Ms. Marlow discovered that her 22 year old daughter was trapped in an abusive relationship--one in which the abuser not only tried to kill her daughter twice, but threatened the life of their baby girl named Promise. When the system failed to protect Ms. Marlow's daughter and granddau...   Read More >>

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES

April 14, 2009

Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover was 11-- hardly old enough to know his sexuality and yet distraught enough to hang himself last week after school bullies repeatedly called him "gay."

The Springfield, Mass., football player and Boy Scout was ruthlessly teased, despite his mother's pleas to the New Leadership Charter School to address the problem.

Sirdeaner L. Walker, 43, found Carl hanging by an extension cord on the second floor of the family's home April 6, just minutes before she was going to a meeting t...   Read More >>

Who let the dog out?

That's the Washington mystery du jour.

The identity of the first puppy — the one that the Washington press corps has been yelping about for months, the one President Obama has seemed to delight in dropping hints about -- leaked out yesterday. This despite White House efforts to delay the news until the big debut planned for Tuesday afternoon.

The little guy is a 6-month-old Portuguese water dog given to the Obama girls as a gift by that Portuguese water dog-lovin' senator himself, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. The girls named it Bo — a...   Read More >>

WASHINGTON — The father of Bristol Palin's baby boy says he's been treated like an outcast since the end of Gov. Sarah Palin's run for vice president.

Appearing in an interview broadcast Wednesday on CBS's "The Early Show," Levi Johnston said he felt a need to "get my side of the story out there."

A worsening feud has developed between the 19-year- old Johnston and the governor's family in the wake of Johnston's complaints about not being able see his young son Tripp, often enough. Now there is a dispute about whether Johnston had actually lived with the Palins. Palin denies that he did; Johnston's family says the Palins are lying.

Johnston says that the biggest misconception about him is that his family is "probably that my family's white trash." He called the Palins &...   Read More >>

William P. Carey founded and chaired the real estate investment-banking firm, W.O. Carey & Co. LLC, in New York City. His company owns more than 650 commercial and industrial facilities throughout the world. But perhaps his greatest accomplishment is being a member of a club so exclusive that even the president of the United States remains on the outside looking in.

Carey holds an honorary degree from Arizona State University. He is not an alumnus of the institution. But he has his ties to it. His grandfather played a role in the school's founding and Carey himself has donated prodigiously, including a gift of $50 million for the ASU business college, named in his honor: "The W.P Carey School of Business."

The same, it seems, is not true of Barack Obama. Despite giving the commencement address at...   Read More >>

America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.

We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we add...   Read More >>

Oprah Winfrey has been generous with her studio audiences, including the famed day when she pointed to everyone there and proclaimed, "You're getting a car!"

But she's not giving away $1 million, despite a spam e-mail making the rounds. The FBI has issued a warning that the "Oprah Millionaire Contest Show" e- mail is a scam.

The message says the recipient has been nominated to be on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," during which a winner of the cash will be named. Then it asks the "nominee" for contact information.

Those "chosen...   Read More >>