By TORSTEN OVE, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Ken Lanning's college-age daughter recently suggested to him that something good may come out of the Penn State University scandal in that more people will be made aware of how acquaintance child molesters operate.

He told her he was a bit too jaded to believe that.

The apparent failure of anyone to properly report allegations that Jerry Sandusky sexually assaulted a 10-year-old boy in 2002 could be a unique violation of a 1990 federal law requiring universities to document crime.

If you're a bad guy, don't mess with Texas -- or at least its largest city.

For two years, some of Houston's street cops have been carrying a handheld device that instantly scans fingerprints and sends them to an FBI database in Clarksburg, W.Va., that contains 2 million prints belonging to terrorists, sex offenders and criminals with outstanding warrants.

People in jail aren't supposed to have cell phones.But across America, one way or another, they're getting them.In Maryland, inmate Patrick Albert Byers Jr. used one to arrange the murder of a witness in a homicide case, prosecutors say. He's facing the federal death penalty.

PITTSBURGH -- A former Pittsburgh surgeon and his wife have been charged with confining their daughters to the garage of their new home in New Mexico for days and sending them to live alone in a run-down mobile home for two months.