One of our stories for Friday’s Post-Dispatch focuses on the town of Columbia, Ill., where residents are ponying up tax dollars to pay for a network of video cameras.

Says the story:

“Columbia, with a population of about 9,000, has 11 known cameras trained over the town’s 9 square miles. It’s a sleepy town with a big city approach to crime. Columbia police have turned to the cameras as a basic element of law enforcement, saying they’ll do whatever it takes to keep the town safe. But a civil rights group worries that advancing technology could allow police to spy on…

The Los Angeles Times today issued an apology for a report last week that linked Sean “Diddy” Combs to an attack on rap singer Tupac Shakur in 1994. According to the story on the Times’ web site today:

The story first appeared March 17 on latimes.com under the headline “An Attack on Tupac Shakur Launched a Hip-Hop War.” The article described a Nov. 30, 1994, ambush at Quad Recording Studios in New York, where the rap singer was pistol-whipped and shot several times by three men. No one has been charged in the crime, but before his death two years later,…

People have a right to own guns, plain and simple, according to a majority of Supreme Court justices on Tuesday. Still, the justices are less clear about whether the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns should remain.

Arguments on D.C.’s gun ban could bring the high court’s first interpretation of the Second Amendment since it was ratified 216 years ago.

According to today’s story:

The central question before the court on Tuesday was whether the right to keep and bear arms applies to individuals or only to states and militias. At issue was the constitutionality of the ban on handguns…

UPDATED: There’s not a lot of setup for this topic. The story is pretty straight-forward — and enough to make anyone heartsick:

CRESTWOOD — The Good Samaritan who was run over by a car while trying to stop thieves from stealing a tip jar from Starbucks has died this morning.

Mary Jo Wich, a spokeswoman for St. Anthony’s Medical Center in south St. Louis County, said Roger Kreutz died about 2 a.m. today.

Would you have tried to stop the tip jar thieves? If you could, would you have any words for the man who did?

It’s been a year since the bombshell dropped on the city of St. Louis: We’re No. 1…in crime! That was the word from Morgan Quitno Press, which released its annual crime ranking to the consternation of officials in the city.

The news for this year is out. And we’re No. 2, according to the latest incarnation of the report. It’s done by the same organization, now under the ownership of CQ Press.

We’ve had blog items and discussions about this in the past, once in the Talk of the Day, and another time in the Pop Mama blog. So, yes, we have…