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.
Browsing: National
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.
There could be progress in breaking the standoff between American Airlines and its pilots, which appears to have caused a spike in canceled and delayed flights.
American officials have been saying they wanted to resume negotiations on a new labor contract, and they put that in writing this week at the request of the pilots’ union.
What a difference four years can make.
In 2008, college campuses were filled with campaign posters and political rallies — and frenzy. Remember “Obamamania?” This year, it’s difficult to find a college student who’s truly excited about the presidential race.
The Hankamer School of Business’ undergraduate entrepreneurship program has been ranked No. 2 in the nation, up one spot from last year, and No. 1 in Texas, amid more than 2,000 schools surveyed by The Princeton Review for Entrepreneur Magazine.
Chick-fil-A is once again in the public relations fryer.
The controversy flared up this week when a Chicago poli¬tician said the company was no longer giving to groups that op¬pose same-sex marriage, angering Christian conservatives who sup¬ported Chick-fil-A this summer when its president reaffirmed his opposition to gay marriage. Civil rights groups hailed the turn¬about, yet the company never confirmed it and instead released two public statements, neither of which made Chick-fil-A’s position any clearer.
Police have arrested a suspect in the bomb threat that led to the evacuation of the LSU campus earlier this week but don’t believe he is connected to threats made against three other universities recently.
LSU police captain Corey Lalonde said officers arrested William Bouvay Jr., 42, of Baton Rouge late Tuesday night after an investigation by multiple law enforcement agencies.
His campaign at a crossroads, Mitt Romney said Tuesday the federal government should not “take from some to give to the others” as he sought to deflect a wave of criticism over recent remarks dismissive of nearly half of all Americans.
President Barack Obama is chiding Republican Mitt Romney for referring to supporters of the president as victims who depend on the government. Obama says anyone who wants to be president has to “work for everyone, not just for some.”
Classes at Louisiana State University’s main campus resumed Tuesday as police searched for the person who called in a bomb threat a day earlier, causing the evacuation of thousands of students.
Police have been tight-lipped about the call, but U.S. Attorney Don Cazayoux said the male caller talked about “multiple bombs.”
Since Apple started taking iPhone 5 orders on its website at 2 a.m. on Friday, buyers who have a two-year service agreement with AT&T, Sprint or Verizon Wireless have been able to order the phone for $199 (16 gigabyte model), $299 (32 GB) or $399 (64 GB model).
Occupy Wall Street began to disintegrate in rapid fashion last winter, when the weekly meetings in New York City devolved into a spectacle of fistfights and vicious arguments.
Valparaiso University in Indiana has increased security and posted a warning to students on its website after receiving a vague threat through some graffiti.
The school says the threat claimed “dangerous and criminal activity” would occur on campus during the university’s daily chapel break on Friday. The message provided no details.
The school says the FBI and local authorities searched the campus but found nothing suspicious.
CHICAGO — The city’s public schools will stay closed for at least one more day, but leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union and the school district kept talking Thursday, with both sides saying they were drawing closer to a deal to end the nearly weeklong strike.
GOLDEN, Colo. — The White House says the U.S. deplores the content of an amateur film that denigrates Islam, but America’s free speech rights allow such films to air.
White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters Thursday that the Obama administration also condemns the violence in several Islamic countries the film has reportedly triggered.
Is that little bit of extra money for organic foods actually worth it in the long run?
Stanford University doesn’t think so.
By Bill Barrow Associated Press ATLANTA — For decades, Southerners put a firm imprint on national politics from both sides…
Every year on the anniversary of Sept. 11, Americans do what they can to commemorate a tragedy.
Lynnette Geary, resident carillonneur (pronounced CARE-uh-lahn-oo-er), will perform a memorial carillon recital at 5 p.m. today from the tower of Pat Neff Hall.
Geary said she’s been performing this recital every year, beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, just hours after the attacks.
The Sept. 11 anniversary ceremony at ground zero has been stripped of politicians this year. But can it ever be stripped of politics?
Today, for the first time, elected officials won’t speak Tuesday at an occasion that has allowed them a solemn turn in the spotlight. The change was made in the name of sidelining politics, but some have rapped it as a political move in itself.
DAVID ESPO and ROBERT FURLOW
Associated Press
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — His re-election in doubt, President Barack Obama conceded only halting progress Thursday night toward fixing the nation’s stubborn economic woes, but vowed in a Democratic National Convention finale, “Our problems can be solved, our challenges can be met.”
“Yes, our path is harder — but it leads to a better place,” he declared in a prime-time speech to convention delegates and the nation that blended resolve about the challenges ahead with stinging criticism of Republican rival Mitt Romney’s proposals to repair the economy.
He acknowledged “my own failings” as he asked for a second term, four years after taking office as the nation’s first black president.
“Four more years,” delegates chanted over and over as the 51-year-old Obama stepped to the podium, noticeably grayer than four years ago when he was a history-making candidate for the White House.
The president’s speech was the final act of a pair of highly scripted national political conventions in as many weeks, and the opening salvo of a two-month drive toward Election Day that pits Obama against Republican rival Romney. The contest is ever tighter for the White House in a dreary season of economic struggle for millions.
Vice President Joe Biden preceded Obama at the convention podium and proclaimed, “America has turned the corner” after experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Obama didn’t go that far in his own remarks, but he said firmly, “We are not going back, we are moving forward, America.”
With unemployment at 8.3 percent, the president said the task of recovering from the economic disaster of 2008 is exceeded in American history only by the challenge Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced when he took office in 1933.
“It will require common effort, shared responsibility and the kind of bold persistent experimentation” that FDR employed, Obama said.
In an appeal to independent voters who might be considering a vote for Romney, he added that those who carry on Roosevelt’s ers
His re-election in doubt, President Barack Obama conceded only halting progress Thursday night toward fixing the nation’s stubborn economic woes, but vowed in a Democratic National Convention finale, “Our problems can be solved, our challenges can be met.”
The last time the stock market was this high, the Great Recession had just started, and stocks were pointed toward a headlong descent.
But on Thursday, the Dow Jones industrial average hit its highest mark since December 2007, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index soared to its highest level since January 2008 in a rally that marked a milestone: American stocks have come almost all the way back.
Laboratory tests show that globs of oil found on two Louisiana beaches after Hurricane Isaac came from the 2010 BP spill.
Tests run by Louisiana State University for state wildlife officials confirmed that oil found on Elmer’s Island and Grand Isle matched the biological fingerprint of the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that spewed from BP’s Macondo well.
The parents of 7-year-old Sierra Jane Downing thought she had the flu when she felt sick days after camping in southwest Colorado.
When she had a seizure, her father rushed her to the local hospital in Pagosa Springs. An emergency room doctor who saw Sierra Jane for the seizure and a 107-degree fever late Aug. 24 wasn’t sure what was wrong either, and called other hospitals before the girl was flown to Denver.
The “bugs” of late summer are biting. The nation is having its worst West Nile virus season in a decade, and up to 10,000 people who stayed in California cabins are at risk of hantavirus. A second case of bubonic plague in the West has been confirmed — in a girl in Colorado — and scientists fear that a bumper crop of ticks could spread Lyme disease, the nation’s most common bug-borne malady.
Mitt Romney launched his fall campaign for the White House in a Republican National Convention finale Thursday night, declaring “what America needs is jobs, lots of jobs” and promising he has a plan to create 12 million of them.
Louisiana officials said Wednesday they may have to intentionally breach a levee in a flooded area as Hurricane Isaac made a slow, drenching slog inland before weakening to a tropical storm and a dusk-to-dawn curfew was declared in New Orleans.
Hurricane Isaac raked the Louisiana coast and headed for a shuttered New Orleans late Tuesday, with brutal timing that made up for much of what it lacked in punch.
Just hours shy of the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Isaac’s approach left deserted streets from New Orleans’ famous French Quarter to Tampa 480 miles away, where Republican conventioneers pressed on with only a passing mention of the storm’s arrival.
Hurricane Isaac spun into the southern Louisiana coast late Tuesday, sending floodwaters surging and unleashing fierce winds as residents hunkered down behind boarded-up windows. New Orleans calmly waited out another storm on the eve of Hurricane Katrina’s seventh anniversary, hoping the city’s strengthened levees will hold.
