Browsing: National

The largest recall in Toyota’s 75-year history could undermine the Japanese automaker’s comeback from natural disasters and embarrassing safety problems.

The company recalled 7.43 million cars, trucks and SUVs worldwide to fix faulty power window switches that can cause fires. Wednesday’s recall affects more than a dozen models produced from 2005 through 2010 including the Camry, the top-selling car in the U.S. It’s bigger than the 7 million vehicles recalled two years ago for floor mats that can trap accelerator pedals and cause unintended acceleration.

During the next presidential debate, the candidates will be pondering the important questions of our time. But the most controversial may be “Sausage or pepperoni?”

Pizza Hut is offering a lifetime of free pizza, one large pie a week for 30 years, or a check for $15,600 to anyone who poses the question to either President Barack Obama or Republican candidate Mitt Romney during the live town hall-style debate next Tuesday.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated Montana’s campaign donation limits, telling the federal judge who struck down the limits that the panel needs to see his full reasoning so it can review the case.

Lance Armstrong said he wanted to see the names of his accusers. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency gave him 26, including 11 ex-teammates.

The world’s most famous cyclist said he wanted to see the hard evidence that he was a doper.

In what sounded at times like a locker room pep talk, Jerry Sandusky rambled in his red prison suit about being the underdog in the fourth quarter, about forgiveness, about dogs and about the movie “Seabiscuit.”

With his accusers seated behind him in the courtroom, he denied committing “disgusting acts” against children and instead painted himself as the victim.

A nude University of South Alabama freshman had taken LSD and assaulted others before he chased the campus police officer who fatally shot him, authorities said Tuesday, though the student wasn’t armed and didn’t touch the officer.

Gil Collar was a guy everybody wanted to be around in high school, friends said: The girls liked his good looks, even his opponents on the wrestling mat became buddies, and adults knew him as courteous and kind.

The nude 18-year-old who was shot to death Saturday by a police officer on the University of South Alabama campus wasn’t the young man they knew. School officials said the slightly built freshman took a “fighting stance” and chased the officer, though Collar’s mother said she was told he never touched the officer. Acquaintances said he appeared to be intoxicated, because of alcohol or something else, as he took his clothes off, ran through the streets, screamed obscenities and claimed he was on a “spiritual quest” in the moments before he was killed.

As many as 13,000 people received steroid shots suspected in a national meningitis outbreak, health officials said Monday. But it’s not clear how many are in danger.

Officials don’t know how many of the shots may have been contaminated with meningitis-causing fungus. And the figure includes not only those who got them in the back for pain — who are most at risk — but also those who got the shots in other places, like knees and shoulders.

Army veteran Don Matyja was getting by all right on the streets of this city tucked in Southern California suburbia until he got ticketed for smoking in the park.

Matyja, who has been homeless since he was evicted nearly two years ago, had trouble paying the fine and getting to court — and now a $25 penalty has ballooned to $600.

The potential scope of the meningitis outbreak that has killed at least five people widened dramatically Thursday as health officials warned that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of patients who got steroid back injections in 23 states could be at risk.

The operator of California’s ailing San Onofre nuclear power plant proposed Thursday to restart one of its shuttered reactors after concluding it could be run safely despite damage to scores of tubes that carry radioactive water.

In a showdown at close quarters, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney sparred aggressively in their first campaign debate Wednesday night over taxes, deficits and strong steps needed to create jobs in a sputtering national economy. “The status quo is not going to cut it,” declared the challenger.

Dozens of weight loss and immune system supplements on the market are illegally labeled and lack the recommended type of scientific evidence to back up their purported health claims, government investigators warn in a new review of the $20 billion supplement industry.

As the Supreme Court revisits the use of race in college admissions next week, critics of affirmative action are hopeful the justices will roll back the practice. A new report out Wednesday offers a big reason for their optimism: evidence from at least some of the nine states that don’t use affirmative action that leading public universities can bring meaningful diversity to their campuses through race-neutral means.

U.S. births fell for the fourth year in a row, the government reported Wednesday, with experts calling it more proof that the weak economy has continued to dampen enthusiasm for having children.
But there may be a silver lining: The decline in 2011 was just 1 percent — not as sharp a fall-off as the 2 to 3 percent drop seen in other recent years.

“It may be that the effect of the recession is slowly coming to an end,” said Carl Haub, a senior demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization.

Most striking in the new report were steep declines in Hispanic birth rates and a new low in teen births.

Festival-goers at this year’s Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin will be able to plan their fun day thanks to the festival’s new app, which launched yesterday.

The 2012 edition of the application will feature a new design and is available for all iPhone models.

Pennsylvania’s divisive voter identification requirement became the latest of its kind to get pushback from the courts ahead of Election Day, delivering a hard-fought victory to Democrats who said it was a ploy to defeat President Barack Obama and other opponents who said it would prevent the elderly and minorities from voting.

Mandolin player and composer Chris Thile learned the hard way that when you get a call from the 312 area code this time of year, you should probably answer the phone.

Thile is among 23 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants,” which are given in a secrecy-shrouded process. Winners have no idea they’ve been nominated for the $500,000 awards until they get the call, and nominators must remain anonymous.

A Florida man’s bid to become the first illegal immigrant to obtain a law license in the United States met skepticism Tuesday from most of the state’s Supreme Court justices.

Jose Godinez-Samperio came to the U.S. with his parents on visitors’ visas when he was 9 years old, but the family never returned to Mexico. He graduated from New College in Florida, earned a law degree from Florida State University and passed the state bar exam last year.

“He’s somebody who has done everything he’s supposed to do. He complied with every rule,” Godinez-Samperio’s attorney and former American Bar Association president Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte, said after the hearing.

For President Barack Obama, it is a situation that he has been in before. For GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, it is the first time that he has shared a national stage with his Democratic counterpart.

For both the incumbent and the challenger, it is a night that could define the next five weeks in the 2012 race for the White House.

Gay rights advocates are making plans to get other states to join California in banning psychotherapy aimed at making gay teenagers straight, even as opponents prepared Monday to sue to overturn the first law in the nation to take aim at the practice.

Medicare routinely refilled pain pills and other restricted medications that are barred by federal law from renewal without a fresh prescription, government inspectors said in a report Thursday.

The report based on 2009 data found three-quarters of contractors who processed prescriptions for the Medicare Part D program wrongly refilled some medications classed as Schedule II controlled substances, which include strong pain killers and other drugs considered at high risk for abuse. Those refills were worth a total of $25 million.

Hog farmers are slaughtering animals at the fastest pace since 2009 as a surge in feed costs spurs the biggest losses in 14 years, signaling smaller herds next year and a rebound in pork prices.

The 73.3 million hogs processed in eight months through August were the most in three years, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. Pork supply will drop to the lowest per-capita since 1975 next year, the USDA estimates. Hog futures that fell more than any other commodity since June 30 may surge 39 per¬cent in 12 months to as high as $1.055 a pound, based on the median of 12 analyst forecasts compiled by Bloomberg.

I’m sure you’re all devastated about the news of the worldwide pork shortage.

Yes, this includes our favorite meat, bacon.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged China’s top diplomat on Thursday to peacefully resolve increasingly tense maritime disputes with Japan and its smaller neighbors in Southeast Asia.
A senior U.S. official said Clinton had pressed Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi on the importance of settling its conflicting claim with Japan over the Japanese-held Senkaku islands, called Diaoyu by China, along with numerous competing claims in the South China Sea with members of the Association of South East Asian Nations.

A federal judge gave his final approval Thursday to a $42.6 million class-action settlement between companies that made and installed government-issued trailers after hurricanes in 2005 and Gulf Coast storm victims who claim they were exposed to hazardous fumes while living in the shelters.

U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt ruled from the bench after hearing from attorneys who brokered a deal resolving nearly all remaining court claims over elevated levels of formaldehyde in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency following hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Chemist Annie Dookhan was “Superwoman,” a colleague at a Massachusetts state crime lab used to joke. She seemed unstoppable in her quest to please prosecutors, police and her bosses, testing two to three times more drug samples than anyone else, working through lunch and not bothering to put in for overtime.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the man behind a crudely produced anti-Islamic video that inflamed parts of the Middle East to be detained because he is a flight risk.

U.S. Central District Chief Magistrate Judge Suzanne Segal ordered Nakoula Basseley Nakoula held after authorities said he violated terms of his probation.

The University of California has agreed to pay $1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by demonstrators who were pepper-sprayed during an Occupy protest at UC Davis last fall, according to a preliminary settlement filed Wednesday.

Nearly 20 years after the Vermont and Texas Legislatures first agreed to have Vermont ship low-level radioactive waste to the Lone Star State, the first shipments of waste have been made.

A 30-gallon drum containing wastes from the University of Vermont and Burlington’s Fletcher Allen Health Care hospital was received and placed in its permanent home in a West Texas disposal site earlier this month, officials said Wednesday at a Statehouse meeting of the Texas-Vermont Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission.