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If you feel like suing somebody, you'd better be patient.

Due to state budget woes, courts all across the country are cutting back on personnel and the number of hours or even days that they're open. That's causing long delays, especially when it comes to civil litigation.

"There's no question that there's been a pretty devastating impact in lots of states in how we deliver services," says Kevin Burke, president of the American Judges Association.

We had steered clear of this topic the past few days because his posts certainly haven't been family-friendly material.

But now "The Fox Mole" who was filing dispatches for Gawker from inside Fox News Channel's operations in New York City has been uncovered.

There were 13,000 more first-time claims for jobless benefits last week than the week before, the Employment and Training Administration just reported.

The agency says there were 380,000 such applications, up from 367,000 (a number that has been revised upward; previously, the agency had estimated there were 357,000 claims in the week ended March 31).

Claims had been running at the lowest pace since March and April 2008. At 380,000, the pace is the lowest since June 2008.

The man accused of masterminding the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, won a key battle at Guantanamo on Wednesday — a judge said he could meet with his lawyers without having to wear restraints.

By charging George Zimmerman with second-degree murder rather than manslaughter, prosecutors have chosen a path that presents them with some steep legal hurdles, experts tell The Associated Press.

The early word from Syria is that "flashpoints of the 13-month uprising against President Bashar Assad were quiet Thursday ... suggesting a U.N.-brokered truce was starting to take hold and the regime was keeping a pledge to halt its assault on opposition strongholds," The Associated Press reports.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne with the catch of the day. Officials from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources captured, tagged and released a sturgeon weighing over 240 pounds. That makes this fish, a female, the largest on record for the state. One scientist estimates she's 125 years old. The sturgeon is old enough to have been around when Grover Cleveland was president, but a few years too young to remember a first edition of "Moby Dick." It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: