State and National News

Sorry for the wait. Big roundup this time:

The United States has indicted a former police general who worked as a security chief for former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe.

Ex-Gen. Mauricio Santoyo Velasco is charged with helping major drug traffickers evade the law to import cocaine into the United States. The AP reports Velasco was also on the traffickers' payroll.

The wire service adds:

Syria has expelled an Italian Jesuit priest for his outspoken criticism of the government's crackdown on a popular uprising. The Rev. Paolo Dall'Oglio has lived in Syria for 30 years, helping to restore a 1,000-year-old monastery that became a center for Muslim and Christian understanding.

Dall'Oglio's departure from Damascus on Saturday was sudden. More than a year ago, the government ordered him out, but a campaign on Facebook — "No to the Exile of Father Paolo" — delayed his expulsion.

This week Caryn Devins joins 13.7 regular Stuart Kauffman to consider the role of reductionism in our legal system. Devins is a third-year law student at Duke University School of Law.

An all-too-common reaction to a given societal ill is to bellow – with righteous indignation, of course – that "There should be a law against that!" For drug abuse, internet bullying, bigotry, even rudeness, we have become a society conditioned to expect legal solutions to social problems.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is riding through small towns in six states on his "Every Town Counts" bus tour. As NPR's Mara Liasson reported for Morning Edition, he's focusing on areas of GOP support in the battlegrounds of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan — all states President Obama won in 2008.

Update at 7:23 p.m. ET. The Surface: