The Filter: Small Quake Rattles The Daily Beast

(March 16) -- With so many news aggregators out there, who can keep up? AOL News filters the filters to steer you to the headlines that really matter.

Skip Those, Read This: The Daily Beast leads with a Los Angeles Times story on a minor earthquake that hit Southern California this morning. The 4.4 earthquake struck 11 miles outside downtown Los Angeles and was felt from San Diego to Santa Clara, but there were no reports of damage. Meanwhile, more damaging earthquakes have struck Turkey, Chile and Haiti in the last couple of months. It's a veritable earthquake season, and yet scientists believe they are not necessarily connected but rather the outcome of discrete tectonic shifts. For a primer on earthquakes, read more here. (It should be noted that the Beast's second "story" of the day is a sponsored advertisement courtesy of American Express. This is the first time The Filter has noticed such a thing, the Internet equivalent of those multipage promotional brochures that appear every once in a while in magazines. It's distracting.)

Stevens' Shift: The Slatest leads with an article from this week's New Yorker in which Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who turns 90 in April, says he will retire during President Barack Obama's first term, possibly even as soon as this year. Though he was appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford, Stevens has tilted to the left during his years on the court. "His positions have evolved on such issues as civil rights and the death penalty, and he has led the Court's counteroffensive against the Bush Administration's treatment of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay," writes the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin. It's a good, long profile of Stevens, though The Slatest loses points for posting it the day after it was first available on the Web.

Taking on Wall Street: The Huffington Post leads with its own preview of a speech that Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., is expected to deliver Wednesday, going after Wall Street. In the speech, which can be read here, Kaufman says "fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis." He calls out Lehman Brothers, Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs and others for financial shenanigans. In particular, Kaufman focuses on Goldman's dealings in Greece and whether it properly disclosed their "true nature" to investors. It's interesting, as Huffington notes, that a senator from Delaware, a state that has aggressively lured big banks to set up shop in its borders, is attacking corporate America.

Catch of The Day: The Daily beast links, via The Huffington Post, to an Associated Press article on Ireland Cardinal Sean Brady, who says he won't resign despite admitting to never telling the police about a child-abusing priest he oversaw. In 1975, Brady, then a Roman Catholic priest, interviewed two children who had been abused by Rev. Brendan Smyth. The church made the children sign oaths that they would not tell anyone outside the church. Meanwhile, Smyth went on to molest and rape in Ireland, Britain and the United States before he was arrested in 1994. Meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI is drawing heat for the child abuse by priests he oversaw in Germany before being elected pope. For a scathing attack on the church in light of the latest child-abuse allegations, check out Christopher Hitchens' recent column in Slate.

Long Live the King: Just because Michael Jackson has died, doesn't mean he's not still earning money. All the aggregators pick up news that Sony has struck a $250 million deal to release 10 Jackson albums within the next seven years, drawing on unreleased material and remakes of popular hits. "The deal should give Mr. Jackson's heirs plenty of breathing room with respect to the crushing debt load he had built up in his final years," The Wall Street Journal reports.