Pleas

It's the time of the year when high school football coaches start designing new uniforms for the coming season, and let me make an urgent plea: Can the jersey numbers please be visible to the naked eye? For some unknown reason, new jerseys keep being designed on which the numbers can barely be seen if you're sitting in the bleachers or a press box unless you have binoculars. And even then, they can be tough to identify. It's not good to get grandmothers and grandfathers angry, not to mention TV announcers and sportswriters, but that's what several teams did this past season with their fancy, Nike-designed uniforms.

The judicial body of the African Methodist Episcopal church has denied the petition of the Rev. John J. Hunter, former leader of First AME in Los Angeles, to return to the helm of the storied black church. Hunter, who was abruptly moved from First AME in October, challenged his reassignment to Bethel AME in San Francisco after that congregation rejected him. He maintains that his rights as a minister were violated, saying Bishop Larry T. Kirkland moved him to a smaller church without the proper 90-day notice and without reason.

A West Hollywood psychiatrist who pleaded guilty to felony drug dealing after pills he prescribed turned up for sale on Craigslist will be able to get his medical license back in a year under an agreement announced Friday by the Medical Board of California. The sanction, though harsh by board standards, allows Nathan Kuemmerle, 40, a former methamphetamine user, to treat patients again as soon as next February. As a result of the criminal charges, Kuemmerle had lost his privilege to prescribe controlled substances and must apply to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration if he wants it restored.

WASHINGTON -- The year's first congressional committee hearing on guns began with an emotional jolt Wednesday, with former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was seriously wounded in a mass shooting two years ago, urging senators to "be bold, be courageous" in addressing gun violence. Bucking tradition, Giffords spoke at the outset of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, before senators made their opening statements. She and her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, were escorted to the witness table by the committee's chairman, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, and its ranking Republican, Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.

HOUSTON - A military judge Wednesday ruled that an Army psychiatrist charged in the deadly 2009 shooting at Ft. Hood in Texas would still face a possible death sentence at court-martial, potentially barring a guilty plea. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 42, is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder in connection with the rampage at the Army base, the worst mass shooting on a U.S. military installation. His lawyers had asked the judge, Col. Tara Osborn, to remove the death penalty in the case, setting the stage for a possible guilty plea.

WASHINGTON - A former CIA officer was sentenced Friday to 30 months in federal prison for disclosing classified information to journalists in a case that underscored the Obama administration's harsh crackdown on national security leaks. John Kiriakou, a 14-year CIA veteran, pleaded guilty in October to identifying an undercover operative who was involved in the use of severe interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, on terrorism suspects during the George W. Bush administration.

FORT BRAGG N.C. -- Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair, a veteran of five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, deferred entering a plea to criminal charges including sexual misconduct at his court-martial Tuesday. In a rare case of an active-duty general charged with criminal offenses, Sinclair decided not to enter a plea at his arraignment hearing. After he deferred the plea, the defense moved to sanction prosecutors for having privileged e-mails. The general is accused of 25 specific violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice between October 2007 and March 2012.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 villagers in Afghanistan, deferred entering a plea when he appeared Thursday morning for his arraignment at a hearing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Seattle. A veteran of three tours in Iraq before his Afghanistan deployment, Bales, 39, faces 16 murder charges, and other counts including attempted murder, assault and drug and alcohol charges. The proceeding is the equivalent of an arraignment and allows the military to move forward on a court-martial.

Lindsay Lohan had a not guilty plea entered on her behalf Tuesday morning in a Los Angeles courtroom.  But like all things Lindsay, it wasn't that simple. Lohan is, of course, facing three misdemeanor counts of lying to police, reckless driving and obstructing police from performing their duties, stemming from a car-versus-truck collision on Pacific Coast Highway last June. Though she told police she wasn't driving the Porsche at the time, police say they have evidence to the contrary.

After ruling last week that Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was subjected to overly restrictive confinement at a Marine Corps brig, a military judge postponed proceedings in Manning's court-martial until June. The Army should use that delay to consider a plea arrangement in which the accused leaker of vast amounts of classified information would receive significant prison time but not the life sentence associated with the most serious charge against him. Manning, a 25-year-old former intelligence analyst in Iraq, has been accused of providing WikiLeaks with more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables and thousands of military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan.