Most Recommended U.S. News

ADEL, Ga. - A Georgia man spent more than a year behind bars for failing to pay child support for a child that wasn't his, but he was released after DNA tests showed he wasn't the father.

UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. imposed new sanctions Thursday against five North Korean officials, four companies and a state agency, and banned imports of two weapons-making materials, in a rare unified push by the world's powers to thwart Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.

NEW YORK - A New York City teenager has admitted that she failed to let a kitten out of an oven after a friend put the animal inside and left it to roast to death.

SCRANTON, Pa. - During his year as a foreign exchange student in the United States, 18-year-old Carlos Villarreal lived not with a welcoming family, but with two ex-convicts in a seedy house that smelled of dog feces and where the food was labeled "DO NOT TOUCH." He left 14 pounds lighter.

TEXARKANA, Ark. - An 18-year-old woman who says she was sexually abused by evangelist Tony Alamo is set return to the stand at his federal trial on child-sex charges.

JACKSON, Miss. - The estranged wife of former U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering claims in a lawsuit that the Mississippi Republican had an affair that ruined their marriage and derailed his political career.

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - A shootout that left two suspects dead and eight officers injured began on the street and ended in an apartment building where drugs and violence are commonplace, neighborhood residents say.

CHICAGO - Human remains strewn amid overgrown weeds have deteriorated into jumbled bones. Paper records in a rusted metal cabinet have dissolved into dust.

SAN DIEGO - Jumbo flying squid — aggressive 5-foot-long sea monsters with razor-sharp beaks and toothy tentacles — have invaded the shallow waters off San Diego, spooking scuba divers and washing up dead on tourist-packed beaches.

PITTSBURGH - The nation's first double hand transplant patient can wriggle his new fingers a litte bit now and grab a tennis ball, but what he really wants to do is be able to feel his wife's hands when he holds them.

ATLANTA - Former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller criticized President Barack Obama's recent travels overseas, telling a group of mostly Republican lawmakers Thursday that the White House Chief of Staff needs to put "Gorilla Glue" on Obama's chair to keep him in the Oval Office.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The spacesuit was one of three made for the last man to set foot on the moon, but Doug Fisher found it balled up and forgotten at the bottom of a cardboard box.

GRANTS PASS, Ore. - The Obama administration on Thursday scrapped the Bush administration's last-ditch attempt to boost logging in Northwest forests by scaling back protection for the northern spotted owl.

ORLANDO, Fla. - Officials say two buses have collided at Walt Disney World, leaving a dozen visitors with minor injuries.

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. - A 17-year-old Californian Thursday became the youngest person to sail around the world alone.

MIAMI - When Enid Pinkney was a girl in the 1940s, her grandmother would tell her stories about a black cemetery nestled in the northwest corner of Miami in an area once called Lemon City.

SAN DIEGO - A five-day trip aboard the Carnival Elation has turned into a high-seas murder mystery when a passenger was arrested after returning to port and accused of killing his wife three days into the luxury cruise to Mexico.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice to help scientists study the impact of climate change, within hours of a recommendation by the National Academy of Sciences.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Senate has confirmed former astronaut and Marines general Charles Bolden as the new administrator of NASA, making him the US space agency's first African-American chief.

COLUMBIA, S.C. - The company that runs a South Carolina poultry plant knew its managers were hiring illegal immigrants at a facility raided in October, federal prosecutors said in an indictment released Thursday.

BOISE, Idaho - Four shoppers plotted an attack against a 24-year-old man they encountered in the aisles of a Wal-Mart, then followed him to the parking lot and beat him — all because the man is black, a federal prosecutor told a jury Thursday.

PHILADELPHIA - A porn star who was accused of using a handsaw and an ax to break into stores through their rooftops while his twin brother and occasional co-star acted as a lookout is going to prison for at least three years.

OLYMPIA, Wash. - The Supreme Court in Washington state on Thursday unanimously reinstated a $14 million award to a family who sued a tavern and a bartender after one of the bar's customers drove away from the establishment and collided with their car, leaving a 7-year-old-boy a paraplegic.

DES MOINES, Iowa - Two new technologies offer the promise that corn growers could turn their cobs into cash.

DENVER - Hundreds more patients have been advised to get tested for hepatitis C as health officials in two more states launched investigations into an infected Colorado surgery tech who allegedly swapped clean needles for dirty ones to feed her painkiller addiction.

NEW ORLEANS - Extra evacuation buses. More storm shelters. A guide to doing hurricane preparation on a budget.

MINNEAPOLIS - A Somali man from Minnesota who has been indicted on terrorism charges is scheduled to be back in federal court for a detention hearing.

PHILADELPHIA - Old-style parking meters, reviled over the decades by coin-starved drivers, are currently getting plenty of love from bicyclists worried about their possible demise.

RICHMOND, Va. - A Virginia newspaper expressed regret Thursday for supporting a systematic campaign by the state's white political leaders to maintain separate public schools for blacks and whites in the 1950s.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - "Interesting fact about recessions ... they end."