US News

The Senate is debating cuts to the federally subsidized crop insurance program as it considers a massive farm bill this week.

At least 20 of the 51 people killed by a devastating monster tornado that ripped through Moore, Okla., were children, the Oklahoma Chief Medical Examiner said this evening, as searchers picked through the rubble of schools, homes and businesses leveled by the storm.

New details emerged of what the White House knew about the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups, with spokesman Jay Carney disclosing Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was among the top officials made aware of the matter late last month.

It was, the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan said on Monday, "a case of inviting and paying for foxes in the henhouse." Three researchers at the New York University School of Medicine who specialized in magnetic resonance imaging technology had been working on research sponsored by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide cases concerning prayers at the start of town meetings and a patent dispute over heart monitors.

It also issued an important administrative law decision that said the Federal Communications Commission was entitled to deference in determining the scope of its own jurisdiction.

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

Rescue workers raced against time and darkness Monday night looking for survivors after a powerful tornado blasted an area outside of Oklahoma City, leveling homes and leaving at least 51 people dead.

From the first time he turned a wrench on a car in his native France more than 60 years ago, Marcel... This frame grab courtesy KFOR TV shows the aftermath of a massive tornado as much as a mile wide with winds up to 200 mph roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, May 20, 2013.

Apple Inc. employs a group of affiliate companies located outside the United States to avoid paying billions of dollars in U.S. income taxes, a Senate investigation has found.

Monday afternoon's devastating tornado in the Oklahoma City suburbs brought to mind a May 1999 E5 twister that killed 36 people and smashed some of the same communities.

White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior presidential advisers knew in late April that an upcoming report was likely to find that IRS employees had inappropriately targeted conservative political... White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior advisers knew in late April that an impending report was likely to say ... (more)

A national atheist group says it will place its literature in cabins and lodges in Georgia's state parks after the governor's recent decision to allow Bibles in them.

An outspoken and provocative conservative who emerged from Saturday's Republican Party of Virginia Convention as the party's nominee for lieutenant governor once compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan and blasted African-Americans for their "slavish devotion" to the Democratic Party.

An internal Justice Department inquiry found that a former Arizona federal prosecutor improperly disclosed information to a reporter related to a botched Mexican gun-trafficking investigation in an attempt to "undermine'' a Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives agent who went public with his criticisms of the gun case.

Four Montgomery County residents are hoping to fill two open seats in the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas in January, but the first step is making it past the Primary Election, in which all of the candidates are cross-filed. Republican candidates Sharon Giamporcaro and Maureen Coggins will be on the Republican and Democrat ballots, as will ... (more)

The frame of a mobile home is pictured with debris after a tornado hit a mobile home park near Dale, Okla., Sunday, May 19, 2013. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki). Oklahoma, other tornado-hit states brace for more. Sue Ogrocki ...

Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an expose of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called "Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream." It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th.

It's not as far off as you think. In just the past several weeks, the Kansas legislature passed a sweeping new bill that says life begins at conception. This follows on the heels of North Dakota's ban on abortions after a fetal heartbeat is found (typically about week six, before many women know they are pregnant), Arkansas's prohibition of abortions after week 12, and Alabama's tightened regulations on abortion providers.

On the other side of the issue, a federal court in New York ordered that the so-called "morning-after pill" be made available to women and girls of all ages, instead of requiring a prescription for girls under a certain age. (This is currently being appealed by the Justice Department.)

With the stock market setting new highs on a nearly daily basis, even as the real economy just slogs along, there seems to be one question on everyone's mind: are we in the middle of yet another market bubble? For a growing chorus of money managers and market analysts, the answer is yes: the market is a house of cards, held up by easy money and ... (more)

A lot of what's known about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be traced back to a chemist named Charles David Keeling, who, in 1958, persuaded the U.S. Weather Bureau to install a set of monitoring devices at its Mauna Loa observatory, on the island of Hawaii.

By the nineteen-fifties, it was well understood that, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, humans were adding vast amounts of carbon to the air. But the prevailing view was that this wouldn’t much matter, since the oceans would suck most of it out again.