Washington Post Top Online Stories: Fri 9/10/10

The Washington Post lead headline online early Friday morning says "Fla. pastor reconsiders plan on burning Korans." The paper says the pastor of a small Florida church who had planned to burn copies of the Koran on the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks said Thursday that he would cancel the event - at least for now - hours after President Obama condemned it as a "recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda" and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates telephoned the minister as a worldwide fury grew.

The paper says President Obama plans to return to the campaign trail in a big way this fall, with four major rallies planned in the crucial states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada, as well as a "tele-town hall" in which he will talk to core supporters at thousands of gatherings across the country and over the Internet.

It says a federal judge in California said Thursday that the U.S. military's ban on openly gay service members violates the Constitution, the most recent in a string of court rulings overturning restrictions on the rights of the country's gay men and lesbians.

The paper says President Barack Obama has chosen one of his longtime economic advisers, Austan Goolsbee, to be the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, a White House official said.

It says in the span of several months, U.S.-backed investigative teams have assembled alarming evidence of rampant corruption in Afghanistan and the extent to which it reaches the highest ranks of that nation's government.

And the most read story says a law approved four years ago by Hazleton, Pa., clamping down on illegal immigrants, which prompted similar moves in towns across the country, has been declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court.