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execution date is set, Hasan faces years, if not decades, of appeals. And this time, he won't be allowed to represent himself.
• "If he really wants the death penalty, the appeals process won't let it happen for a very long time," said Joseph Gutheinz, a Texas attorney licensed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. "The military is going to want to do everything at its own pace. They're not going to want to let the system kill him, even if that's what he wants."
• Hasan opened fire at a Fort Hood medical center packed with soldiers heading to or recently returned from overseas combat deployments. He also was set to soon go to Afghanistan to counsel soldiers there, and said he carried out the attack to protect Muslim insurgents on foreign soil.
• During trial, Hasan acknowledged that evidence showed he was the gunman, and put up virtually no defense of his actions. He's suggested in writings that he would "still be a martyr" if he received death. At trial, Lt. Col. Kris Poppe, a standby military attorney assigned to Hasan, told the judge that Hasan's "goal is to remove impediments or obstacles to the death penalty."
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- For many among the tens of thousands of Americans who thronged to the National Mall to mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, President Barack Obama's challenge to seize the cause of racial equality from the "glorious patriots" of the tumultuous 1960s struck a deep generational chord.
• Standing on hallowed ground for the civil rights movement, the very steps on the Lincoln Memorial from which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke a half-century ago, Obama urged each person in the crowd Wednesday to become a modern-day marcher for racial harmony and economic justice.
• "The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice but it doesn't bend on its own," Obama said in an allusion to King's own message.
• The nation's first black president and civil rights pioneers joined the crowd under showery skies 50 years to the day that King, with soaring oratory and a steely countenance, delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, pleading for Americans to unite and create a land of opportunity for all.
• Obama's words were steeped in history and rich with symbolism, especially for those in the crowd who could count parents or other family members who were part

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