The financially beleaguered Postal Service backpedaled on its plan to end Saturday mail delivery, conceding Wednesday that its gamble to compel congressional approval had failed.
With limited options for saving money, the governing board said the agency should reopen negotiations with unions to lower labor costs and consider raising mail prices.
Authorities say a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus elephant was hit by a bullet in a drive-by shooting in Tupelo, Miss.
Circus spokeswoman Melinda Hartline says the elephant was not seriously hurt Tuesday. She says no other animals were harmed.
Opening a final chapter to one of the most important civil rights episodes in American history, Alabama lawmakers voted Thursday to allow posthumous pardons for the “Scottsboro Boys”: nine black teens who were wrongly convicted of raping two white women more than 80 years ago.
A Montana federal judge will retire following an investigation into an email he forwarded that included a racist joke involving President Barack Obama.
U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull had previously announced he would step down as chief circuit judge and take a reduced caseload, but he informed the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that he now intends to fully retire May 3.
Jim Riches pulled his son’s mangled body out of the rubble at the World Trade Center, but the phone calls still filtered in years afterward. The city kept finding more pieces of his son.
“They’ll call you and they’ll tell you, ‘We found a shin bone,'” Riches said. “Or: ‘We found an arm bone.’ We held them all together and then we put them in the cemetery.”
Big business and labor have struck a deal on a new low-skilled worker program, removing the biggest hurdle to completion of sweeping immigration legislation allowing 11 million illegal immigrants eventual U.S. citizenship, a person with knowledge of the talks said Saturday.
A former mayoral candidate in Tucson, Ariz., is launching a privately funded program to provide residents of crime-prone areas with free shotguns so they can defend themselves against criminals.
Shaun McClusky said the program modeled after one recently launched in Houston would provide training and enough money to buy a basic shotgun to residents who pass background checks, the Arizona Daily Star reported Wednesday.
Hunters across the country say they are boycotting Colorado because of recent legislation meant to curtail gun violence.
Colorado last week became the first Western state to ratchet back gun rights in response to mass shootings at a suburban Denver movie theater and an elementary school in Connecticut.
The Supreme Court dove into a historic debate on gay rights Tuesday that could soon lead to resumption of same-sex marriage in California, but the justices signaled they may not be ready for a major national ruling on whether America’s gays and lesbians have a right to marry.
Gov. Jack Dalrymple signed legislation Tuesday that that would make North Dakota the nation’s most restrictive state on abortion rights, banning the procedure if a fetal heartbeat can be detected — something that can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.
The Republican governor also signed into law another measure that would makes North Dakota the first to ban abortions based on genetic defects such as Down syndrome, and a measure that requires a doctor who performs abortions to be a physician with hospital-admitting privileges.
Federal regulators proposed $1.7 million in civil penalties against Exxon Mobil Corp. on Monday for safety violations linked to a pipeline rupture that spilled an estimated 63,000 gallons of crude oil into Montana’s scenic Yellowstone River.
An Ohio prosecutor who light-heartedly filed a criminal indictment against the famous Pennsylvania groundhog who fraudulently “predicted” an early spring said he may consider a pardon now that the animal’s handler is taking the blame.
For almost 12 years, a Houston elementary school teacher and an illegal immigrant living in Topeka have engaged in a tug of war to claim the identity of Candida L. Gutierrez in a case that has put a face on the growing crime of “total identity theft” in the United States.
Michael Dell may have to hike the price he’s willing to pay if he wants to take the computer company he founded private, thanks to competition from two new acquisition offers.
A special committee of independent Dell Inc. directors said Monday that it will negotiate with buyout specialist Blackstone Group and activist investor Carl Icahn over bids that rival an offer of more than $24 billion from CEO and Chairman Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners.
As airport officials tried to figure out how a 300-pound arrival-departure panel fell off the wall and onto a family, the mother of a boy who was killed by the sign lay in a hospital with her own injuries, still unaware of what happened.
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear a new case from Michigan on the politically charged issue of affirmative action offers an intriguing hint that the justices will not use a separate challenge already pending from Texas for a broad ruling bringing an end to the consideration of race in college admissions.
A former tennis pro accused of fraudulently bringing four children from the African nation of Togo to the U.S. and forcing them to work as slaves in his Michigan home was sentenced Monday to more than 11 years in federal prison.
School board meetings descend into shouting matches. Accusations of racism and anti-Semitism fly. Angry parents turn their backs on board members in a symbolic stand of disrespect.
Tension in a suburban New York school district is rooted in an unusual dynamic: The families who send their children to public schools are mostly Hispanic and African-American. The school board is almost entirely made up of ultra-Orthodox Jews who send their children to private schools and are bent on keeping taxes low.
Civil unions for gay couples got the governor’s signature in Colorado on Thursday, punctuating a dramatic turnaround in a state where voters banned same-sex marriage in 2006 and restricted protections for gays two decades ago.
Michael Dell is about to find out if other bidders think his company is worth more than he does.
The answer could come Friday, which marks the end of a 45-day period that Dell Inc.’s board of directors settled on to allow for offers that might top a Feb. 5 agreement to sell the personal computer maker to CEO Michael Dell and a group of investors for $24.4 billion.
Gov. John Hickenlooper signed bills Wednesday that place new restrictions on firearms and signaled a change for Democrats who traditionally shied away from gun control debate in Colorado – a state with a moderate streak and pioneer tradition of gun ownership and self-reliance.
A mortar shell explosion killed seven Marines and injured a half-dozen more during mountain warfare training in Nevada’s high desert, prompting the Pentagon to immediately halt the use of the weapons until an investigation can determine their safety, officials said Tuesday.
Many of the tens of thousands of New Yorkers stopped, questioned and sometimes frisked by police in the past decade were wrongly targeted because of their race, lawyers for four men who claim they were illegally stopped said Monday.
A Minnesota woman at the center of a long-running court fight over the unauthorized downloading of copyrighted music said there’s still no way she can pay record companies the $222,000 judgment she owes after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal Monday.
Cigarettes would have to be kept out of sight in New York City stores under a first-in-the-nation plan unveiled by Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Monday, igniting complaints from tobacco companies and smokers who said they’ve had enough with the city’s crackdowns.
Shops from corner stores to supermarkets would have to keep tobacco products in cabinets, drawers, under the counter, behind a curtain or in other concealed spots.
A University of Central Florida drop-out planned an attack on campus but committed suicide in a dorm before carrying it out, authorities said Monday.
Materials found in his dorm room made it appear that 30-year-old James Oliver Seevakumaran planned a wider attack, authorities said in a news conference.
Two members of Steubenville’s celebrated high school football team were found guilty Sunday of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl, and Ohio’s attorney general warned the case isn’t over, saying he is investigating whether coaches, parents and other students broke the law, too.
An arrest in Arizona 50 years ago that led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision is the subject of an exhibit that includes the handwritten confession famously thrown out by the nation’s highest court.
The warning from police that suspects have the right to remain silent sprang, in part, from the arrest of Ernesto Miranda in Phoenix on March 13, 1963.
Wanted: moderate Democrats. Contact the mostly liberal House Democratic leadership if interested.
Democrats hope to take back the House of Representatives in 2014 by mirroring their last successful effort to flip the chamber in 2006.
Colorado lawmakers took a historic vote to approve civil unions for gay couples Tuesday, delivering on a campaign promise from Democrats who have capitalized on the changing political landscape of a state where voters banned same-sex marriage not long ago.
