Mark Memmott

"James Arness, the towering actor best known for portraying Marshal Matt Dillon, the strong and commanding symbol of frontier justice on the landmark TV western series Gunsmoke," died today, the Los Angeles Times reports.

"Kids who grew up like me needed to know that despite the fact that their internal sense of gender did not match their sexual organs ... they mattered."

After a call from Chile's Communist Party for a formal investigation into whether poet Pablo Neruda was assassinated under orders from Gen. Augusto Pinochet, a judge has ordered a probe of Neruda's 1973 death.

As the BBC writes:

John Edwards, who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004 and a leading contender for the party's presidential nomination in 2008, was indicted by a grand jury in North Carolina today on charges connected to money given to his mistress that came from two of Edwards' political supporters.

As The Associated Press, which broke the news of the indictment, writes:

The official line from the government in Yemen is that President Ali Abdullah Saleh is "alive and will soon make a nationwide address," Reuters reports, following word of an attack on the presidential palace and an earlier claim by some in the opposition that he had been killed.

The Associated Press says it's been told by a government official that Saleh was slightly injured. Yemen's deputy prime minister was more seriously injured, according to the official.