Air marshals arrest man on flight from New York

A plane was diverted Saturday after air marshals arrested a passenger after he began shouting "Majority rules! Turn the plane around!" and walked toward an exit door during a flight from New York's LaGuardia Airport to New Orleans.

Richard Perez, 30, of Bay Shore, N.Y., was arrested and taken to a hospital after the plane landed at Charlotte, N.C., said Robert Johnson, spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration.

Johnson said crew members had told Perez to sit down after he walked toward the front of the plane and started yelling 45 minutes after taking off at 8:10 a.m. He returned to his seat, then got up and shouted again as he headed for an exit door before three passengers and an air marshal intervened, Johnson said.

Aging reputed Klansman convicted in 1966 slaying

JACKSON, Miss. -- A decades-old murder case that allegedly involved a failed plot to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. ended with the conviction of a 72-year-old reputed Klansman.

Ernest Avants was convicted Friday in the 1966 slaying of a black sharecropper, a crime prosecutors say was staged to lure Martin Luther King Jr. to southern Mississippi to be assassinated. Avants is the latest white defendant in recent years to be convicted of crimes from the nation's civil rights era.

Avants, a stroke survivor, remained seated in his wheelchair as the verdict was read. Federal prosecutors said they won't seek the death penalty, meaning he faces up to life in prison at sentencing May 9.

Pennsylvania town marks 100 years of chocolate

HERSHEY, Pa. -- It has been 100 years since the first shovels of dirt were turned for a factory that created a community, where residents still are mindful of founder Milton S. Hershey, his generosity and his business acumen.

"It's nice to be in a town that stands for philanthropy, and it's not so bad being in a town that smells like chocolate," said Kathryn Taylor, 55.

This weekend, Taylor and her fellow Hershey residents begin celebrating the months-long centennial of that groundbreaking. A historical marker to be unveiled today by the state honors "Hershey -- model industrial town and noted tourism destination."

Calif. to give evidence of graft in electricity market

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California officials will submit evidence that many public and private energy companies systematically withheld electricity during the state's energy crisis, driving up prices.

The evidence that California is submitting to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday will remain confidential, but a summary will be made public. Names of the companies won't be released unless FERC decides to overturn a protective order.

California wants FERC to order $8.9 billion in refunds for 2000 and 2001, when power prices soared in the state's newly deregulated market and the state faced energy shortages and rolling blackouts.

A draft of the summary says the generating companies engaged in systematic withholding, according to a source who had seen the document.

Murder defendant facing death asks for two juries

NEW YORK -- A man facing a federal death penalty trial in a drug gang killing wants two juries -- one to decide if he's guilty and, if so, a second to decide if he should be executed.

Lawyers for Emile Dixon made the unusual request at a hearing in federal court, saying the selection process for federal capital cases would violate Dixon's constitutional right to an impartial jury.

Prosecutors argued in court papers that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the federal statute requiring a single jury for trial and sentencing "absent extraordinary circumstances, which are not present here."

--From wire reports