State and National News

Most Americans believe that global warming has played a role in a series of unusual weather events during the past year.

A poll released today by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that 72 percent of Americas believe global warming played a role in the very warm winter the United States just experienced.

Teacher movies tend to be more alike than unalike, but Monsieur Lazhar makes the familiar unusually strange. The note on which it opens is shocking, tragic: A Montreal middle school student, Simon, enters his classroom ahead of the other kids and finds his teacher hanging from a pipe, dead by her own hand.

When the ban on slaughtering horses for human consumption was lifted in the U.S. last November, it was only a matter of time before someone applied to start the practice up again.

That person is Rick De Los Santos, a New Mexico rancher and owner of Valley Meat Co. If the USDA approves his application to have a former beef slaughterhouse inspected, it would allow the first slaughter of horses in the U.S. since 2007.

The winning ticket in Illinois from last month's record $656 Mega Millions lottery has been turned in by a retired couple from the little town of Red Bud, Ill.

"Merle Butler, 65, and his wife Patricia, 62, accepted the giant check Wednesday morning," as Chicago's WLS-TV reports.

Host Michel Martin speaks with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who chaired the first Senate hearing on Tuesday about racial profiling since before 9/11. The controversies surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin and revelations that New York Police monitored Muslim groups served as the backdrop. Martin is also joined by NPR's Carrie Johnson.

The White House is making what some would call an unconventional investment. It's studying the benefits of video games on those who play them. White House senior policy analyst Constance Steinkuehler is at the head of that research and she discusses the initiative with host Michel Martin.

The Beauty Shop ladies discuss the prostitution scandal surrounding the Secret Service, and recent studies on "cohabitation" and whether living together before marriage is the surest way to kill "happily ever after." Host Michel Martin checks in with columnist Mary Kate Cary, PJ Media's Bridget Johnson, and bloggers Viviana Hurtado and Danielle Belton.

As part of Tell Me More's series for National Poetry Month, host Michel Martin shares a poetic tweet from land surveyor and poet Brandon Montero of Ripon, California. Listeners are invited to tweet original poems of 140 characters or less to #TMMPoetry.