An F-18 fighter jet hit an apartment building in Virginia Beach on Friday afternoon, sending thick black smoke through the sky. The Virginia Pilot reported that the Navy confirmed that both pilots were safely ejected from the jet. Both officers were taken to the hospital, according to reports on the scene. A spokesperson from the Virginia Beach Fire Department said that fires in two buildings near the crash site have been contained. The Navy confirmed that five civilians and both pilots were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

NBC News said Friday that they have fired the producer who edited George Zimmerman's 911call from the night he shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The network had already acknowledged that the tape was misleadingly edited. In the aired version Zimmerman said, "This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." But in the original recording those two sentences are separated, with Zimmerman classifying Martin as black only after asked about the teen's race. NBC says the editing was an accident.

Hoping to capitalize on high-profile debates over women's issues, President Obama is pointing out his administration's track record. During a White House conference Friday, he railed against Republican opposition to his health-care law, a move he says will kick a million young women off their parents' health coverage and will stop protecting women with pre-existing conditions. He also expressed dismay at the GOP's attempts to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. "Women are not some monolithic bloc," he told the crowd. "Women are not an interest group. You shouldn't be treated that way." A recent poll showed Obama leads Romney in female supporters within 12 key states.

Barren and bleak is the Nevada National Security Site, wrote investigative reporter Seymour Hersh at The New Yorker’s website Friday, which is likely why it was chosen as the training ground for members of Iranian opposition group the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Listed by the State Department as a terrorist group, the MEK has been active in Iran since the 1970s, but the group, which was training in six-month increments at the location sometime before 2007, has also been implicated in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and the exposure of the country’s plan to enrich uranium.

Rick Santorum’s 3-year-old daughter, Bella, was taken to the hospital on Friday, according to his campaign spokesman. The Santorum campaign did not release any more details, except asking in a statement for “privacy and prayers as Bella works her way to recovery.” Bella has a rare genetic disorder known as trisomy 18, and she was hospitalized with pneumonia in January. Most trisomy 18 babies do not live past the first week of their lives.

A group of Detroit-based neo-Nazis has taken to patrolling the streets of Sanford, Fla., where 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in late February. A representative for the group said they are not there to incite violence but to show solidarity with the white community in case of a race riot. They noted that the $10,000 bounty put on George Zimmerman by the New Black Panther Party is evidence that there could be racial violence. Zimmerman has yet to be arrested or charged in the killing, but public outcry for his arrest has spread across the country.

So there is just no way the whole Keith Olbermann–Current TV feud will end nicely now, is there? Al Gore’s channel filed a countersuit against Olbermann, accusing the man once considered to be the network’s star of unprofessional behavior. The suit alleges Olbermann threw a mug on the set and also took off, unexcused, 19 out of 41 workdays in January and February. Olbermann filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking up to $70 million in damages for wrongful termination.

While some might contend otherwise, anyone can live without an iPhone. But a 17-year-old Chinese boy is suffering from renal deficiency after selling his kidney so he could buy an iPhone and iPad last year. The young man received about $3,500 for the sale, while the rest of the $35,000 the organ fetched was split among other people involved in the transplant, including five who have now been charged with intentional injury. The teen is from one of China’s poorest provinces, and only admitted to selling his kidney after his mother asked where he got the money.

Despite the enormous box-office success of The Hunger Games, director Gary Ross won’t be returning to work on the sequel. The Hunger Games has made $263 million at the box office to date. While Ross received a relatively low $3 million salary for the film, his reasons for departing before Catching Fire, the next installment, aren’t over money. According to the blog The Playlist, the director, known for his ever-changing tastes, will instead be directing a project he wrote himself that is reported to be bringing him a bigger paycheck than the first Hunger Games installment. Catching Fire is slated to shoot this fall and open in November 2013.

Sigh—another child loses her good girl image. Amanda Bynes, 26, was arrested for driving under the influence early Friday morning in West Hollywood, People reports. The She’s the Man star was allegedly pulled over at 3:00 a.m. after she sideswiped a cop car while zipping around town in her black BMW. Though her acting career has seemingly slowed down since she starred opposite Emma Stone in 2010’s Easy A, Bynes has reportedly maintained a lively social life and has recently been photographed stumbling out of clubs in the wee hours. The actress is allegedly still behind bars with bail set at $5,000.

Bad news: the streak of robust hiring in the U.S. economy has come to a close. After three months of at least 200,000 new jobs added, the U.S. produced only 120,000 jobs in March, a disappointing number that was lower than expected. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3 to 8.2 percent, due in part to fewer Americans looking for work, not entirely to more people finding jobs. Stock futures are falling in response to the news.

Russia on Friday criticized the United States for sentencing accused arms dealer Viktor Bout to 25 years in prison, calling the verdict “baseless and biased.” Bout was dubbed “Merchant of Death,” which became the title of a book about him, and he also inspired the film Lord of War starring Nicolas Cage. The Russian foreign ministry vowed to do everything to bring Bout back to Russia, and accused the U.S. of “creating intolerable conditions of detention, physical and psychological impact” against Bout.

It looks like Rick Santorum’s campaign could really be done if he can’t even carry his home state. According to a Public Policy Polling survey, frontrunner Mitt Romney is ahead of Santorum 42 to 37 percent. It’s a huge reversal of fortune for the former Pennsylvania senator, who led Romney by 18 points when PPP conducted a poll just a month ago. The state will hold its primary on April 24.

Kraft has made itself the third company to abandon the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that supports the controversial “Stand Your Ground” gun laws. After advocacy group ColorofChange began protesting corporations that are members of ALEC. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola announced this week that they were withdrawing their membership. Kraft joined them on Thursday, saying that the company will not renew its membership when it expires in the spring. There were a “number of reasons” for the decision, the company said in a statement, but did not specifically mention the campaign against ALEC.

A new poll conducted by USA Today/Gallup shows a huge divide between blacks and whites in their views about the Trayvon Martin shooting. Among blacks, 73 percent believe George Zimmerman, the alleged shooter who killed Martin on Feb. 26, would have been arrested if Martin was white, while only 33 percent of whites agreed. When asked whether race made a difference in the case, 52 percent of whites said no.

A military board has recommended that Marine Sgt. Gary Stein be dismissed after he criticized President Obama on his Facebook page, including allegedly putting the commander-in-chief’s face on a Jackass movie poster. The Marine Corps administrative board said late Thursday that Stein was guilty of misconduct and should be given a less-than-honorable discharge. A general will now decide Stein’s fate. Stein allegedly posted images on a page he created called Armed Forces Tea Party, and he also superimposed Obama's image on a poster for The Incredibles, but changed the title to The Horribles.

President Barack Obama told supporters at a fund-raising dinner on Thursday night in Washington that he “cannot wait” to compare and contrast his plan for America with what the Republicans bring to the table this election cycle. As Mitt Romney has inched closer to securing the Republican nomination, Obama has begun calling out the former Massachusetts governor for backing a GOP budget plan that would cut programs that help the neediest. “It’s good to have the truth on your side,” Obama said.

Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika reportedly died from a heart attack Thursday, doctors and cabinet ministers told the BBC, though the official announcement has not yet been made. State media reported that he was flown to a South African hospital, but sources told Reuters that Mutharika was dead when he was rushed to a hospital in Lilongwe. The 78-year-old was a former World Bank official who was blamed for the country’s recent economic collapse, and had been accused of trampling on human rights in recent years.

An “unmanned, unlit, unmarked” ghost ship that drifted across the Pacific Ocean in the wake of the tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011, has been sunk by the U.S. Coast Guard. Deemed hazardous to Alaska’s marine environment, the rust-stained squid trawler Ryou-Un Maru had been on an aimless voyage for more than a year, an eerie reminder of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan last year. The ship caught fire and capsized some 180 miles southwest of the port of Sitka.

Google cofounder Sergey Brin was caught sporting a prototype of his company’s super-smart specs, according to PC Magazine. The company unveiled Project Glass earlier this week, immediately sparking debate in the tech blogosphere over whether the glasses, which place screens directly over the user’s eyes, were anything more than a gimmick. Which they still may be. But cornered at a charity event, Brin confessed to a blogger that he was taking the eyewear out on a test run. It’s one huge leap for Google, and, for everyone else, it's one more small way to get into a car accident.

President Obama and likely Republican challenger Mitt Romney got into it Friday. Obama's and his top staffers' Twitter accounts blasted a Washington Post story on Mitt Romney releasing only parts of his tax returns and financial investment statements. "So what's Romney hiding?" asked the president's Twitter. It wasn't long before Team Mitt hit back. "President Obama will do anything to try and distract Americans from his record of chronic unemployment, lower incomes, and higher gas prices," said a spokeswoman. 

Despite agreeing to a ceasefire that would have gone into effect at 6 a.m. Thursday, Syrian government troops broadened an offensive against opposition fighters in three Damascus neighborhoods on Friday, with fierce fighting breaking out. There was hope last week when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad agreed to a brokered plan, which calls for his forces to pull out of towns by next Tuesday. But United Nations special envoy Kofi Annan told the General Assembly on Thursday that the ceasefire is now in jeopardy. “Clearly the violence is still continuing at alarming levels daily," he said. “Military operations have not stopped.”

The Weinstein Co. announced Thursday that it had come out on top after a tussle with the Motion Picture Association of America to have the rating for the documentary Bully lowered to PG-13 from R. The film began appearing in a limited release on March 30 without a rating, and the company had to yield some ground to earn the MPAA’s PG-13 stamp, removing three uses of the F-word from the final cut. The film has already won several positive reviews for its dark portrayal of students who are targeted by their peers.

Today fans can rest a little easier knowing that NBC has signed Matt Lauer to a new multiyear contract. A formal announcement will be made during the show on Friday, but Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, confirmed the news on Thursday evening. There had been rumors that Lauer would leave once his contract was up later this year—perhaps to join his former co-host Katie Couric in a syndicated talk show. NBC has watched ABC’s rival program Good Morning America creep up in the ratings, and keeping Lauer was seen by many industry insiders as Today’s key to staying on top.

In a TV interview on Friday, George Zimmerman's lawyer cited "Shaken Baby Syndrome" in his defense, backing Zimmerman's argument that he shot Trayvon Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman says Martin attacked him and pounded his head in the pavement, and his lawyer maintains this could have caused temporary brain damage and explains his reaction. Meanwhile, his family has set up a website, zimmermandefense.com, to raise money for “their living expenses and for his defense,” the family’s attorneys said in a statement Friday. The neighborhood-watch captain has yet to be charged with a crime.

Bosnian burghers lined up 11,541 red chairs through the streets of Sarajevo on Friday, one for each victim of the war, as the city marked the 20th anniversary of the start of the war. Sarajevo mayor Alija Behmen said the chairs symbolize the “line of blood that ran through the streets on April 6, 1992 until 1995.” Empty chairs stretched for 800 meters, with smaller chairs representing the more than 600 children killed. On the 20th anniversary of the Serbian siege—resulting in one of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II—Bosnia remains scarred and deeply divided.