The superintendent of the West Virginia coal mine where an explosion killed 29 men was charged Wednesday with conspiracy to defraud the federal government, becoming the highest-ranking employee to face criminal prosecution in an investigation that appeared to be moving steadily up the corporate ladder.

Former Upper Big Branch mine boss Gary May, 43, of Bloomingrose, W.Va., is named in a “federal information,” a document that signals a defendant is cooperating with prosecutors. He is the second employee of the company that owns the mine, Massey Energy, to face prosecution in the case.

Reached at his home Wednesday morning, May declined comment.

U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin said his investigation of the worst U.S. mine disaster in four decades is “absolutely not” finished, signaling that officials are now exploring possible criminal charges against even higher-level executives of the company. Goodwin did not immediately comment further.

September 14, 2010 should go down as an important date in Republican Party history. That was the day Republican primary voters in Delaware elected Christine O’Donnell to be their nominee for the U.S. Senate seat held for decades by Joe Biden. Democrats expected to lose the seat to proven winner Mike Castle, but instead those GOP voters rejected Castle and went with Tea Party and social conservative favorite O’Donnell. Two months later, O’Donnell lost the special election by 17 points to New Castle County Executive Chris Coons.

Choosing O’Donnell represents the extreme case of Republican primary voters seeking ideological purity over electability. Odds are neither party will ever again nominate a candidate who, among other explanations, had to say she was not a witch. But O’Donnell’s win over former governor and nine-term Congressman Castle demonstrated that conservative voters will choose even someone like her over a moderate like Castle.

No, Rick Santorum is not the equivalent of O’Donnell (even though he also lost his last Senate race in Pennsylvania by 18 points), but her primary win in Delaware shows why no one should be surprised that Santorum looks like the last man standing against Mr. Inevitable, Mitt Romney. Some experts (prematurely I think) believe that should Santorum win Tuesday in Romney’s birth state of Michigan, Santorum will be the nominee.

Long written off as too late to matter, California’s Republican primary June 5 may turn out to matter a lot. A new Field Poll shows former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum just six points behind front-runner Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.

California’s mother lode of 172 delegates has long been considered Romney’s firewall against a contested or even brokered national convention in Tampa, Fla., in August. A contested convention is the ultimate nightmare scenario for the GOP, which has savored this year as its best chance since Jimmy Carter to deny a second term to an incumbent Democratic president.

“It’s a different world than it was just two or three weeks ago,” said Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo.

Romney leads with 31 percent of the sample of 400 registered Republican voters, followed by Santorum with 25 percent and Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian Texan, coming in third with 16 percent. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has fallen to fourth place with 12 percent, while 14 percent are undecided.

Less than a week before Tuesday’s crucial Republican presidential primary in Michigan, a new NBC News/Marist poll shows Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum locked in a statistical tie, while a separate NBC/Marist survey shows Romney comfortably leading in Arizona, which holds its primary the same day.

In Michigan – which has turned into a make-or-break contest for Romney – the former Massachusetts governor gets the support of 37 percent of likely GOP primary voters, including those who are leaning toward a particular candidate.

Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, gets 35 percent, and he’s followed by Texas Rep. Ron Paul at 13 percent and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 8 percent.

“Michigan is neck and neck,” says pollster Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted both surveys.

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet’s flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

Since the Net’s inception, engineers, academics, user groups and others have convened in bottom-up nongovernmental organizations to keep it operating and thriving through what is known as a “multi-stakeholder” governance model. This consensus-driven private-sector approach has been the key to the Net’s phenomenal success.

In 1995, shortly after it was privatized, only 16 million people used the Internet world-wide. By 2011, more than two billion were online—and that number is growing by as much as half a million every day. This explosive growth is the direct result of governments generally keeping their hands off the Internet sphere.

A researcher who advocates for battling global warming has admitted to using deceptive tactics to obtain internal strategy and budget documents from the Heartland Institute, a free-market group that rejects mainstream climate science.

Peter Gleick, president of the California-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, also said in a blog post Monday night that he made no changes or alterations to the documents.

The Heartland Institute calls a strategy memo circulated last week a fake, and has said separate documents obtained from the group might have been altered.

Gleick, admitting a “serious lapse” of judgment and ethics, wrote in the Huffington Post that he used someone else’s name to obtain the documents and circulate them among a group of journalists and advocates in mid-February.

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to tackle another election-year blockbuster and will decide whether the University of Texas’ race-conscious admission policies violate the rights of white applicants.

If health care reform, illegal immigration crackdowns, voting rights and TV indecency were not enough, now the nine-member bench is poised to add to its high-profile docket, wading into the divisive, sea-change issue of state-mandated racial diversity and affirmative action. Oral arguments would be held this fall, ensuring the court — however it decides the appeal — will be a major campaign issue. A ruling however will not likely be issued until early 2013.

Abigail Noel Fisher, a former high school graduate from Sugar Land, Texas, individually sued the flagship state university when her college application was rejected in 2008. The school defends its policy of considering race as one of many factors — such as test scores, community service, leadership and work experience — designed to create a diverse campus.

Watching a lot of movies that feature alcohol doubles the likelihood that young teens will start drinking, and these teens are more likely to progress to binge drinking, according to a new study.

The researchers said their findings suggest that U.S. movie makers should adopt the same restrictions for alcohol-product placement as they have for tobacco.

The study included more than 6,500 U.S. kids, aged 10 to 14, who were asked about their consumption of alcohol, and potentially influential factors such as movie viewing and marketing, their home environment, peer behavior and personal rebelliousness.

During the two-year study, the proportion of kids who started drinking alcohol more than doubled from 11 percent to 25 percent, and the proportion of those who started binge drinking (five or more drinks in a row) tripled from 4 percent to 13 percent, the investigators found.

Yale University and student groups are condemning the monitoring of Muslim college students across the Northeast by the New York Police Department, while Rutgers University and leaders of Muslim groups are calling for investigations.

The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The Associated Press reported Saturday.

Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip in upstate New York, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.

Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

A 2006 report explained that officers from the NYPD’s Cyber Intelligence unit visited the websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations as a “daily routine.” The universities included Yale; Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; Syracuse; New York University; Clarkson University; Rutgers University; and the State University of New York campuses in Buffalo, Albany, Stony Brook and Potsdam, N.Y.; Queens College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College and La Guardia Community College.

This time around, President Barack Obama’s message can sound decidedly down-to-earth.

Four years after winning the White House, Obama is dealing with a different economic and political reality as he seeks re-election. He’s focused less on a lofty vision for overcoming divisions and remaking Washington, and more on the most basic building blocks of middle-class economic security: a job, a house, a college education for the kids, health care, money for retirement.

What Obama describes as the American Dream can seem a spare, fundamental aspiration, tailored for a campaign that looks to be fought over who is best equipped to safeguard the interests of middle-class Americans.

The question is whether it will convince, even as Mitt Romney and the other GOP presidential hopefuls mount a counter-argument that the president has made the American Dream harder, not easier, to achieve. And Obama must overcome the grinding realities many voters confront daily, even with the economy showing signs of life: no jobs, mortgages they can’t pay, dwindling retirement funds and college savings.