JOPLIN, Missouri (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday praised the community spirit that helped a small town overcome devastating loss as he marked the anniversary of the most deadly U.S. tornado in six decades. Recalling the kindness of strangers shown Joplin, Missouri, after the tornado killed 161 people a few hours after Joplin High School seniors had attended their graduation ceremony, Obama said the outpouring of help was a source of national inspiration. ...
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Actress Ginger Rogers won an Oscar, McDonald's opened its first restaurant, there were only 48 U.S. states, and the average annual salary was $1,299. The year was 1940. Actor Al Pacino was an infant. James and Mary were the most popular baby names and the 132 million people living in the United States took part in a national census that was released last month by the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) after a 72-year embargo required by law. Unlike earlier censuses, which were released on microfilm, the 1940 census data is available online. ...
GREENSBORO, North Carolina (Reuters) - A North Carolina jury on Tuesday will begin its third day of deliberations on whether former U.S. Senator John Edwards committed a crime as he sought to hide his affair during his 2008 White House run. Jurors must decide if more than $900,000 funneled by two Edwards supporters to his then-pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, and his aide, Andrew Young, qualified as campaign contributions that are subject to limits and reporting requirements. ...
OKLAHOMA CITY, OK (Reuters) - Eight people were wounded, one critically, by gun shots fired as thousands of sports fans left a National Basketball Association playoff game late Monday, police said. The shooting occurred during a confrontation outside Chesapeake Arena in downtown Oklahoma City, as fans walked to parking lots after the Oklahoma City Thunder defeated the Los Angeles Lakers. One victim was in critical condition while wounds suffered by seven others were not believed to be life-threatening, said Captain Dexter Nelson of the Oklahoma City Police Department. ...
MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - Democrats and unions hoping to turf Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker out of office over his efforts to tame the power of organized labor are finding it tough going with only two weeks to go before a historic recall election. Just over a year ago, Walker set off a storm that looked like it could sweep him from power over a new law that critics labeled "union busting. ...
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook's lackluster initial public offering performance is a black eye for many on Wall Street and could have ramifications for similar upcoming deals such as an offering by Twitter, but venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are keen to shrug off Facebook's stumble - at least for now. ...
(Reuters) - ATLANTA - When he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2011, Newt Gingrich was the prosperous head of a small empire commonly known as Newt Inc, which included both for-profit consultancies and nonprofit foundations. Altogether, these entwined ventures pulled in more than $110 million over the past decade. Now the vestiges of this empire are mired in debt, as is Gingrich's campaign fund. ...
(Reuters) - Seeking to spur a bold rethinking of the American classroom, the Obama administration on Tuesday will propose divvying up $400 million among local school districts that devise new ways of reaching children, especially students from poor and rural families. The competition will reward districts that move away from the centuries-old model of a teacher standing at the front of a classroom, delivering the same lesson to all students, according to draft regulations released Tuesday. ...
MCALLEN, Texas (Reuters) - The founder of a Texas air cargo company was convicted on Monday of federal charges of possessing and distributing child pornography and attempted sexual exploitation of children, prosecutors said. The Brownsville, Texas, federal jury hearing the case of Robert L. Hedrick, 60, deliberated for less than three hours before returning guilty verdicts on all counts against him. ...
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - The first shops could throw open their doors in the redeveloped World Trade Center by March 2015, Australian mall operator Westfield said on Monday, 13-and-a-half years after the New York landmark was destroyed in the September 11 attacks. The redevelopment of the World Trade Center is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. After years of negotiation, Westfield last week signed a deal with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for a $1.25 billion joint venture to lease the retail space at the World Trade Center. ...
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Anti-war protests in Chicago dwindled on Monday to a few hundred people at the headquarters of U.S. defense contractor Boeing and President Barack Obama's re-election headquarters as the two-day summit of the NATO military alliance ended. Between 200 and 300 demonstrators, some throwing paper planes, gathered in a festive atmosphere at airplane maker Boeing. The turnout was a fraction of the thousands who attended a march on Sunday where dozens were arrested and a number of protesters and police injured during fierce clashes. ...
(Reuters) - The University of Notre Dame and dozens of other Catholic institutions sued President Barack Obama's administration on Monday to block a government regulation that requires employers to provide health insurance coverage for contraceptives to employees. The regulation, which is part of the president's healthcare reform law, has sparked a nasty fight between the administration and the Roman Catholic Church, which opposes artificial contraception. ...
GREENSBORO, North Carolina (Reuters) - Former U.S. Senator John Edwards must wait at least another day to learn the verdict in his federal campaign finance trial, as jurors ended deliberations on Monday without deciding whether he broke the law during his 2008 presidential bid. Edwards is accused of using illegal political funds to hide his pregnant mistress during the campaign, and legal experts have said the outcome of the case could expand the scope of what qualifies as contributions in future elections. ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A prostitution scandal in Colombia involving U.S. Secret Service and military personnel ahead of a presidential visit has spawned a separate investigation into the behavior of Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Cartagena, officials said on Monday. A spokesman for the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General said in a statement that its investigators were probing "allegations about potential misconduct" by DEA staff. ...
BUFFALO, New York (Reuters) - A man survived a 174-foot (53-meter) plunge over Niagara's Horseshoe Falls on Monday but sustained life-threatening injuries, Canadian police said. The man, whose name has not been released, became only the third person known to have lived through a fall over the massive cataract without safety devices. Canada's Niagara Parks Police said witnesses reported seeing the man climb over a retaining wall about 20 feet above the brink of the falls at mid-morning and deliberately jump into the swift waters. ...
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Ronald Reagan's foundation expressed outrage on Monday at a British company's auction of what it says is a vial of the late U.S. president's blood taken at the hospital where he was treated after a 1981 assassination attempt. PFC Auctions, a company based in Guernsey in the United Kingdom, announced on Sunday that it would sell the vial of blood in an online auction set to end on Thursday. The vial was taken at George Washington University Hospital on March 30, 1981, after Reagan was wounded by John Hinckley Jr. in Washington, D.C., PFC Auctions said on its website. ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More middle-class Americans will be able to work out their debts to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service because of changes in a tax payment forgiveness program, the agency announced on Monday. The "Offer in Compromise" program lets taxpayers negotiate agreements with the IRS to pay less than the full tax owed. The announced changes make the program more flexible for taxpayers, with some people able to pay off their debts faster, according to the IRS. The IRS announcement focused on the financial analysis used to determine which taxpayers qualify for an Offer in Compromise. ...
(Reuters) - A Chinese company has agreed to pay $10.5 million to U.S. purchasers of vitamin C who accused it of conspiring to raise prices by limiting exports, a proposed settlement showed. The proposed settlement, filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn on Monday, is the first in a long-running legal battle brought by commercial buyers of vitamin C against four Chinese companies. If it is approved by the judge overseeing the case, it would be the first civil settlement reached with a Chinese company under U.S. antitrust cartel law, lawyers for the purchasers said. ...
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A 22-year-old college student who went missing in Yosemite National Park in California two days ago has been found safe about five miles (eight kilometers) from the campsite where he was last seen, a park spokesman said on Monday. Authorities combing the nearly 1,200-square-mile (3,100-square-km) park spotted John Paul Chaufan Field by helicopter at about 3:15 p.m. on Monday and made contact with him, Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said. ...
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A task force advising the U.S. government on Monday recommended against routine use of the prostate-cancer screening test called PSA, or prostate specific antigen, for lack of a discernible health benefit. Like a draft proposal last October, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force gave PSA screening a D, for "don't recommend" in healthy men. The reaction was fast and furious. Screening advocates warned that the recommendation will cost lives, but critics of PSA testing said thousands of men will be spared impotence and incontinence as a result of needless cancer treatment. ...
SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - A bomb threat forced the evacuation of a National Security Agency facility under construction in Utah on Monday but investigators found nothing suspicious and declared the site safe, an FBI spokeswoman said. The spy agency facility is being built at Camp Williams, a military base just south of Salt Lake City. The Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing the $1.2 billion project. FBI spokeswoman Deborah Bertram declined to say how the threat was received but said it led to an evacuation at the site. FBI agents spent several hours at the site after the threat was ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One or more unauthorized users gained access to the inner workings of a website run by the U.S. Justice Department, a department spokeswoman said on Monday after the hacker group Anonymous said they were behind the incident. The hackers accessed a server that operates the Bureau of Justice Statistics' website, the spokeswoman said. The bureau is responsible for collecting and analyzing data about crime — including computer security incidents — from throughout the United States. ...
(Reuters) - A bomb threat forced the evacuation of a National Security Agency facility under construction in Utah on Monday but investigators found nothing suspicious, an FBI spokeswoman said. The site for the spy agency is being built at Camp Williams, a military base just south of Salt Lake City. The Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing the project. FBI spokeswoman Deborah Bertram declined to say how the threat was received but said it led to an evacuation at the site. FBI agents spent several hours at the site after the threat was received. "We found nothing suspicious," Bertram said. U.S. ...
NEW BRUNSWICK, New Jersey (Reuters) - A former Rutgers University student was sentenced on Monday to 30 days in jail for a bias crime after he spied on his roommate's gay encounter in a case that drew national attention to bullying. Dharun Ravi, 20, had faced a possible maximum sentence of 10 years behind bars for using a webcam to invade the privacy of his roommate, Tyler Clementi, and an older man in their college dorm room. ...
(Reuters) - A federal judge on Monday dismissed parts of a securities fraud case against two top executives of failed mortgage lender IndyMac Bancorp, according to a lawyer for one of the executives. U.S. District Judge Manuel Real in Los Angeles dismissed claims based on five of seven securities filings at issue in the case, a lawyer for former IndyMac chief executive Michael Perry said. The ruling substantially narrows the Securities and Exchange Commission's case against Perry and former finance chief Scott Keys ahead of a scheduled June trial. ...
CLEVELAND (Reuters) - An Ohio man was sentenced on Monday to more than six years in federal prison after pleading guilty to plans to ship $200,000 to the Muslim militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hor Akl, 39, of Toledo had pleaded guilty to planning to send the money inside a sport utility vehicle to Hezbollah to target Israel. Akl was sentenced by U.S. District Judge James Carr in Toledo to 75 months in prison, followed by 10 years of supervised release, the U.S. attorney's office said in a statement. He had pleaded guilty to five counts. ...
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Authorities combed Yosemite National Park in California on Monday for a 22-year-old college student who disappeared after walking away from the rest of his group during a weekend trip into back-country areas of the park. John Paul Chaufan Field, a senior at the University of California at Santa Cruz, was last seen at mid-morning on Saturday at a campsite near Kibbie Lake in the park's Hetch Hetchy area, Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said. ...
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A record 188 school districts in California are in "financial jeopardy," the office of the state's top schools official said on Monday, just a week after Governor Jerry Brown warned of the potential for deep cuts in education spending. Another 61 local education agencies have been added since February by the state superintendent of public instruction's office to its list of districts with either negative or qualified certifications. Local education agencies include school districts, county offices of education and joint powers agencies. ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said on Monday that he would resign, following a year of intense criticism over his abrasive management style. Jaczko, 41, did not give a reason for stepping down more than a year before his term expired. The move comes after a year in which Jaczko drew headlines from a series of reports and congressional hearings that painted him as a bully who had reduced some senior female employees to tears. ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fifteen states asked the U.S. Justice Department on Monday for help in obtaining an anesthesia drug they use in executions but that a federal judge said in March was illegally imported. The dispute is playing out in a lawsuit over whether the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has the authority to allow shipments of the sedative sodium thiopental into the country, even though the drug is not approved for U.S. use. The group of 15 state attorneys general said in a letter to U.S. ...
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Actress Ginger Rogers won an Oscar, McDonald's opened its first restaurant, there were only 48 U.S. states, and the average annual salary was $1,299. The year was 1940. Actor Al Pacino was an infant. James and Mary were the most popular baby names and the 132 million people living in the United States took part in a national census that was released last month by the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) after a 72-year embargo required by law. Unlike earlier censuses, which were released on microfilm, the 1940 census data is available online. ...
MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - Democrats and unions hoping to turf Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker out of office over his efforts to tame the power of organized labor are finding it tough going with only two weeks to go before a historic recall election. Just over a year ago, Walker set off a storm that looked like it could sweep him from power over a new law that critics labeled "union busting. ...
GREENSBORO, North Carolina (Reuters) - A North Carolina jury on Tuesday will begin its third day of deliberations on whether former U.S. Senator John Edwards committed a crime as he sought to hide his affair during his 2008 White House run. Jurors must decide if more than $900,000 funneled by two Edwards supporters to his then-pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, and his aide, Andrew Young, qualified as campaign contributions that are subject to limits and reporting requirements. ...
(Reuters) - ATLANTA - When he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2011, Newt Gingrich was the prosperous head of a small empire commonly known as Newt Inc, which included both for-profit consultancies and nonprofit foundations. Altogether, these entwined ventures pulled in more than $110 million over the past decade. Now the vestiges of this empire are mired in debt, as is Gingrich's campaign fund. ...
OKLAHOMA CITY, OK (Reuters) - Eight people were wounded, one critically, by gun shots fired as thousands of sports fans left a National Basketball Association playoff game late Monday, police said. The shooting occurred during a confrontation outside Chesapeake Arena in downtown Oklahoma City, as fans walked to parking lots after the Oklahoma City Thunder defeated the Los Angeles Lakers. One victim was in critical condition while wounds suffered by seven others were not believed to be life-threatening, said Captain Dexter Nelson of the Oklahoma City Police Department. ...
(Reuters) - Seeking to spur a bold rethinking of the American classroom, the Obama administration on Tuesday will propose divvying up $400 million among local school districts that devise new ways of reaching children, especially students from poor and rural families. The competition will reward districts that move away from the centuries-old model of a teacher standing at the front of a classroom, delivering the same lesson to all students, according to draft regulations released Tuesday. ...
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Ronald Reagan's foundation expressed outrage on Monday at a British company's auction of what it says is a vial of the late U.S. president's blood taken at the hospital where he was treated after a 1981 assassination attempt. PFC Auctions, a company based in Guernsey in the United Kingdom, announced on Sunday that it would sell the vial of blood in an online auction set to end on Thursday. The vial was taken at George Washington University Hospital on March 30, 1981, after Reagan was wounded by John Hinckley Jr. in Washington, D.C., PFC Auctions said on its website. ...
MCALLEN, Texas (Reuters) - The founder of a Texas air cargo company was convicted on Monday of federal charges of possessing and distributing child pornography and attempted sexual exploitation of children, prosecutors said. The Brownsville, Texas, federal jury hearing the case of Robert L. Hedrick, 60, deliberated for less than three hours before returning guilty verdicts on all counts against him. ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A prostitution scandal in Colombia involving U.S. Secret Service and military personnel ahead of a presidential visit has spawned a separate investigation into the behavior of Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Cartagena, officials said on Monday. A spokesman for the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General said in a statement that its investigators were probing "allegations about potential misconduct" by DEA staff. ...
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - The first shops could throw open their doors in the redeveloped World Trade Center by March 2015, Australian mall operator Westfield said on Monday, 13-and-a-half years after the New York landmark was destroyed in the September 11 attacks. The redevelopment of the World Trade Center is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. After years of negotiation, Westfield last week signed a deal with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for a $1.25 billion joint venture to lease the retail space at the World Trade Center. ...
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