(Thursday, 26 February 2009)  A Cobb County-based assisted suicide network is raided; the President introduces a budget which predicts big deficit spending; Stevie Wonder gets the nation's top pop music award.  Details on today's KISS News Now!

• Police arrest four people in a nine-state, assisted suicide organization based in Cobb County, accusing them of helping a 58-year-old Cumming man end his life last June.  The Final Exit Network says it helps the terminally ill or those in intolerable pain.  Investigators are now probing to see how many deaths nationwide might be tied to the group.  Two of the arrests came here in metro Atlanta, as the members explained the process to an undercover agent posing as a man with pancreatic cancer.
  
  
• President Barack Obama sends his first budget blueprint to Congress today; it adds up to more than $3 trillion and projects a huge deficit due to economic stimulus spending.
  
  The budget highlights include an increase in taxes for those making over $250,000 a year.  Their tax rate would go from 35% to 39.6%.  Another plan would limit deductions for those in the top two brackets; that would then fund part of an over $600 billion plan to extend healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.
  
  
• President Obama has honored Stevie Wonder with the Gershwin Award for popular song.  The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize is the nation's highest award honoring lifetime achievement in pop music.  At Wednesday's White House ceremony, the singer/songwriter said his mama would be proud.  Obama called Wonder the soundtrack of his youth, and said he doesn't think he could've courted Michelle without Wonder's tunes.
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

• Metro Atlanta police agencies work together to stop a flat screen TV crime wave.  Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington says it used to be that crooks broke in looking for jewelry; now they go straight for the entertainment center.  He says it's likely an organized ring selling the TVs to someone.  Several jurisdictions are now forming a task force similar to the one they used to find the "blue jeans bandits."
  
  
• The Postal Service today unveils a new line of 12 civil rights pioneers stamps--including notables like Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer.  The commemorative 42-cent stamps are a limited edition collection, in honor of the NAACP's Centennial celebration.  They will be introduced at the King Chapel at Morehouse at 11:00 a.m.
  
  
• In KISS news about your health:  it's not the type of diet you do, so much as the fact that you diet at all.  A two-year Harvard study says pick what you want--low carb, low fat or high protein--and the only thing that matters is that you cut calories and stick with it--and you'll lose weight either way.
  
  
• The woman in a Mississippi car wreck with Morgan Freeman last summer sues him for negligence; Demaris Meyer also says she wants to set the record straight: she is not his mistress, nor was she the cause of his marital breakup.  She says she still hasn't been able to go back to work.
  
   
• Woodstock Police hunt the man who sexually assaulted a woman in a Wal-Mart parking lot.  Detective Paul Brown says the 18-year-old had gone shopping after getting off work at 1 a.m., and the man forced her inside her car, touching and kissing on her before she kneed the horn and scared off the suspect.  He's described as a white man, about 5'10" and 150-170 pounds with a medium build.
  
   
• New numbers just out from GM are mind-boggling to hear.  General Motors lost $9.6 billion in the fourth quarter, as it asked for government bailout.  The math works out to a loss of almost $107 million a day.
  
  
• We told you yesterday that Octomom Nadya Suleman has gotten a million-dollar offer to do movies for adult studio Vivid Video.  Well, a rival studio--Pink Visual--has a counter-offer: a year's worth of diapers if she agrees NOT to do any adult films.  They tell her doing porn is not a decision a mother should take lightly.
  
  
• The KISS 104.1 weather forecast: mostly to partly cloudy, high 67, low 51.  Friday, partly cloudy, breezy, high 67.  60% chance of showers the first part of the day, 80% later into the evening.