About 200 people, organized by the N.C. Justice Center, marched Thursday in downtown Raleigh to protest what they see as racial profiling in Arizona's immigration law.

SMITHFIELD - The mother of 4-year-old Teghan Skiba faces child-abuse charges after investigators determined that she saw her boyfriend abuse the child before leaving her in his care.

All Janet Furman felt at first was a sharp pang in her right foot. But when she saw the pair of holes in her pinky toe, and the blood running out on her flip-flops, she knew she'd met a copperhead - venomous scourge of North Carolina.

Police say a Raleigh woman found shot in an apartment in Atlanta was likely killed over money, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

RALEIGH -

Most people who visit the hospital probably don't think much about where the doctors and nurses get their scrubs. But Mary Lou Coster thinks about it a lot.

RALEIGH - The financially troubled Mental Health Association of North Carolina is getting out of the business of providing care to hundreds of people.

The state Department of Transportation expects to start construction in 2013-14 on Durham's East End Connector, one of North Carolina's longest-delayed road projects.

It takes a lifetime for some people to find a way to help the world. Tessa Buscher has accomplished it at age 8.

RALEIGH - Police arrested a 47-year-old man and his two teenage sons this week on charges that they have distributed methamphetamine, possibly to sites across the country, authorities reported.

CARY - Four western Wake County towns are a step closer to building a $327 million regional wastewater treatment plant in New Hill, an unincorporated community that has fought the plant for years.

The U.S. House has passed a bill that would beef up border security in the Southwest to deal with growing violence near the Mexican border.

RALEIGH - Federal officials think a former Marine and Raleigh man used North Carolina as a home base for buying and smuggling dozens of firearms to England as part of an international scheme to avoid federal rules that govern how guns can be bought, sold and exported.

Attorney General RoyCooper on Thursday removed Robin Pendergraft, the SBI director whom he handpicked a decade ago, and halted the work of bloodstain pattern analysts whose methods have faced mounting criticism.

SMITHFIELD - District Court Judge Joseph Setzer said he will issue a ruling in the next few days on whether 33 DWI cases that were illegally dismissed in Johnston County can be reactivated.

RALEIGH - Hot Summer Nights at the Kennedy takes a break from comedies and musicals to mount Ariel Dorfman's harrowing moral thriller, "Death and the Maiden." Despite some blemishes, the production delivers gripping, edge-of-your-seat entertainment, along with thought-provoking questions about justice and forgiveness.

RALEIGH - A Raleigh man was killed after he crashed his motorcycle on Lynn Road on Thursday night.

Chances that oil from the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico will reach North Carolina's shores have been considered low from almost the beginning of the disaster.

GARNER - A Wake County school board committee charged with improving the performance of low-income students gave a warm response Thursday to an advocacy group's recommendations for easing the district's strict discipline policies.

TORONTO - Canadian actor Maury Chaykin has died at age 61, his manager said Tuesday.