The Pentagon is lifting its ban on women serving in combat, opening hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando jobs after generations of limits on their service, defense officials said Wednesday.
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The man who was the voice of Charlie Brown in several “Peanuts” television shows was charged Wednesday with stalking and threatening his former girlfriend and a plastic surgeon who gave her a breast enhancement he apparently didn’t like.
Baylor was recently named one of the best schools in the nation for African-Americans.
M. Clayton & Associates, a company that has studied colleges and universities across the nation to find institutions committed to helping African-American students graduate, published a new list that named the “88 Best Colleges for African-Americans.” More than 800 schools were judged off of criteria that included a minimum graduation rate of 40 percent for African-American students, an African-American student population of at least 6.5 percent and a high graduation rate for African-Americans based on ACT scores and compared against the company’s determined ACT score for graduation.
Abortion opponents marked the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision Tuesday with workshops, prayers and calls for more limits on the rights established by the Supreme Court in the landmark ruling that still defines one of the nation’s most intractable debates.
Those airport scanners with their all-too revealing body images will soon be going away.
The Transportation Security Administration says the scanners that used a low-dose X-ray will be gone by June because the company that makes them can’t fix the privacy issues. The other airport body scanners, which produce a generic outline instead of a naked image, are staying.
By JOSHUA FREED Associated Press Those airport scanners with their all-too revealing body images will soon be going away. The…
The number of older people hospitalized with the flu has risen sharply, prompting federal officials to take unusual steps to make more flu medicines available and to urge wider use of them as soon as symptoms appear.
A tourist’s snapshot of a New York City police officer giving new boots to a barefoot homeless man in Times Square has created an online sensation.
Jennifer Foster, of Florence, Ariz., was visiting New York with her boyfriend on Nov. 14, when she came across the shoeless man asking for change in Times Square.
As she was about to approach him, she said the officer — identified as Larry DePrimo — came up to the man with a pair of all-weather boots and thermal socks on the frigid night. She recorded his generosity on her cellphone.
A wealthy Missouri man posing as “Secret Santa” stunned New Yorkers on Thursday, handing $100 bills to many in Staten Island who had lost everything to Superstorm Sandy.
The Kansas City businessman is giving away $100,000 this holiday season, and spent the day in New Jersey and New York giving away thousands. But he says money is not the issue.
The future of Twinkies is virtually assured.
Hostess Brands Inc. got final approval for its wind-down plans in bankruptcy court Thursday, setting the stage for its iconic snack cakes to find a second life with new owners — even as 18,000 jobs will be wiped out.
Young voters helped pass laws legalizing marijuana in Washington and Colorado, but many still won’t be able to light up.
Most universities have codes of conduct banning marijuana use, and they get millions of dollars in funding from the federal government, which still considers pot illegal.
An 80-foot Norway spruce that made it through Superstorm Sandy was transformed into a beacon of shimmering glory Wednesday when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others turned its lights on at Rockefeller Center.
U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs awarded Baylor two research grants to assist with research on Gulf War Illness.
The grants, which total nearly $1.6 million, bring the total amount Baylor has acquired for research on the illness to $2.3 million.
The illness, which affects an estimated one in four of the 700,000 military personnel who served in the Gulf War from 1990-1991, is a medical condition that seems symptom-specific to those soldiers.
Symptoms include chronic headache, widespread pain, memory and concentration difficulties and digestive abnormalities, according to an article published by Bio-Medicine.
A group of U.S. senators will ask President Barack Obama for an emergency declaration in an effort to keep barges moving on the drought-riddled Mississippi River, a spokesman for Sen. Claire McCaskill told The Associated Press Tuesday.
Senators from Mississippi River states are seeking an emergency directive that would increase the flow of water from an upper Missouri River dam and expedite removal of rock formations in the middle Mississippi River that impede barge traffic during periods of low water. McCaskill spokesman Drew Pusateri did not yet have a complete list of senators involved in the request.
Shakespeare’s Globe, the open-air London playhouse that helped win modern audiences over to all-weather outdoor theatergoing, is embracing the great indoors.
The Globe on Tuesday unveiled details of a new indoor venue that will sit alongside the O-shaped Elizabethan-style theater on the banks of the River Thames. Built from 17th-century plans, it will allow audiences to remain warm and dry as they watch candlelit performances of plays by the Bard and his successors — and, its creators hope, cast those classic plays in a new light.
States will receive more than $9 in federal money for every $1 they spend to cover low-income residents under President Barack Obama’s health care law, according to a nonpartisan analysis released Monday.
Expanding Medicaid to cover about 20 million more low-income people will cost more than $1 trillion nationally from 2013 to 2022, said the joint report from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Urban Institute. But the analysis found that states will pay just $76 billion of that, a combined share of roughly 7 percent. The feds will pay the other $952 billion.
Republican governors have resisted the Medicaid expansion, saying it adds an unacceptable burden to already strained budgets. And the Supreme Court handed the governors a victory this summer, ruling that states are free to reject the Medicaid deal.
Americans clicked away on their computers and smartphones for deals on Cyber Monday, which is expected to be the biggest online shopping day in history.
Shoppers are expected to spend $1.5 billion on Cyber Monday, up 20 percent from last year, according to research firm comScore. That would not only make it the biggest online shopping day of the year, but the biggest since comScore started tracking shoppers’ online buying habits in 2001.
More than 100 domain names were seized in an international crackdown on websites that sell counterfeit merchandise, federal authorities said Monday, just in time for the biggest online shopping day of the year.
It was the third consecutive Cyber Monday that websites selling knockoff sports jerseys, DVDs, cologne and other goods were blocked from doing business. This year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations coordinated the 132-site effort with Europol and police in Belgium, Denmark, France, Romania and the United Kingdom.
Secession recalls the American Civil War, in which 11 Southern states withdrew from the Union, citing their desire for a different government. More than 150 years later, following the re-election of President Obama, secession has again entered the national consciousness – this time with petitions from all 50 states.
Though all 50 states have submitted petitions, those petitions range in support on a state-by-state basis.
A pair of Mexican drug smugglers in camouflage pants, bundles of marijuana strapped to their backs, scaled a 25 foot-high fence in the middle of the night, slipped quietly into the United States and dashed into the darkness.
U.S. Border Patrol agents and local police gave chase on foot — from bushes to behind homes, then back to the fence.
A widow of a U.S. Army soldier killed in a blast in Afghanistan has sued Fox Cable Networks and the National Geographic Society over a documentary that showed her husband and family.
The documentary about a combat hospital called “Inside Afghan ER” featured Staff Sgt. Kevin Casey Roberts, who was serving with the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division when an improvised explosive device struck his vehicle in Khost province in Afghanistan in 2008.
CIA Director David Petraeus was shocked to learn last summer that his mistress was suspected of sending threatening emails warning another woman to stay away from him, former staff members and friends told The Associated Press Monday.
The philanthropic arm of shipping giant UPS said it will no longer give money to the Boy Scouts of America as long as the group discriminates against gays, the second major corporation to recently strip funding from the scouts.
Most undergraduates are more concerned with finding a job than preparing for retirement. However, Dr. William Reichenstein, the Pat and Thomas R. Powers Chair professor in Investment Management and co-founder of Social Security Solutions, said students should start preparing with their first job out of college.
Social Security Solutions is a Leawood, Kan., financial-planning firm. Reichenstein created a calculator with William Meyer.
Gabrielle Giffords limped to the front of the courtroom and stared silently Thursday as she came face-to-face for the first time with the man who tried to kill her.
The former congresswoman hadn’t been near Jared Lee Loughner since the deadly rampage outside a meet-and-greet at a supermarket that killed six people and left her partially blind, with a paralyzed right arm and brain injury.
We’ve got dolls that wet, crawl and talk. We’ve got dolls with perfect hourglass figures. We’ve got dolls with swagger. And we’ve got plenty that come with itty bitty baby bottles.
But it’s a breast-feeding doll whose suckling sounds are prompted by sensors sewn into a halter top at the nipples of little girls that caught some flak after hitting the U.S. market.
“I just want the kids to be kids,” Bill O’Reilly said on his Fox News show when he learned of the Breast Milk Baby. “And this kind of stuff. We don’t need this.”
The new Congress will be slightly more Democratic and more female though House Republicans still hold a majority large enough to confront and confound President Barack Obama as the nation grapples with a slow-moving economic recovery and record deficits.
David Jimenez was so elated over his wife’s recovery from cancer that he offered to clean the large crucifix outside the Hudson Valley church where he spent many hours praying for her to beat the disease.
On Memorial Day 2010, he was scrubbing grime off the cross when the 600-pound marble statuary toppled over, crushing his right leg.
Incumbent Bill Flores earned a second term in the U.S. House Tuesday defeating Libertarian Ben Easton. Flores received 85 percent of the vote.
No Democrat ran opposed to the incumbent. Flores was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for his first term in November 2010.
President Barack Obama won re-election Tuesday night despite a fierce challenge from Republican Mitt Romney, prevailing in the face of a weak economy and high unemployment that encumbered his first term and crimped the middle class dreams of millions.
