Bill Chappell

From 2009 to 2014, more than 73,000 guns that were seized in Mexico were traced to the U.S., according to a new update on the effort to fight weapons trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The figure, based on data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, represents about ...

They only met last summer — but now media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 84, and former supermodel Jerry Hall, 59, say they're planning a wedding. The pair announced their upcoming nuptials in Britain's The Times, which Murdoch owns.

Murdoch, the billionaire executive chairman of News Corp., and Hall, the former partner ...

At least 10 people are dead and more than a dozen wounded after an explosion struck a historic district in Istanbul on Tuesday morning. Civilians and tourists are among the victims from what officials say was a suicide blast in Sultanahmet Square, site of the famed Blue Mosque.

After the ...

Nearly six months after his most recent escape from a maximum security prison in Mexico, drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán has been caught, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced via Twitter.

"Mission accomplished: we got him," Nieto wrote Friday afternoon, informing the public that El Chapo had been ...

After news emerged that a commonly used American missile wound up in Cuba following a training exercise in Europe, a U.S. official said the Hellfire missile is inert, lacking key components. The missile arrived in Cuba in 2014; since then, U.S. requests for its return have gone unheeded.

It's still ...

To many, the life and career of Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister personified heavy metal. Now his fans want his name on one of the four new "superheavy" elements on the periodic chart. An online petition has attracted more than 100,000 signatures in just a few days.

The new elements

Both men are Palestinians who were born in Iraq and came to the U.S. as refugees. And in Houston and Sacramento, federal authorities arrested them Thursday, on charges ranging from making false statements to giving support to ISIS.

Law enforcement officials say there was no sign of a plot to ...

A fingerprint of Paris bombing suspect Salah Abdeslam has been found in an apartment in the Schaerbeek district of Brussels, officials say, along with traces of explosives and handmade belts.

The federal prosecutor's office says that after the apartment was rented under an assumed name, people involved in November's deadly ...

Settling two lawsuits that alleged discriminatory and unjustified surveillance of Muslims, the New York City Police Department has agreed to new safeguards against overly broad surveillance. The deal calls for a civilian representative to monitor police investigations involving political or religious activity.

The settlement deal promises a new chapter in ...

The ethics commission of track and field's governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, has issued a five-year ban on the former head of its anti-doping unit — and lifetime bans on the former president of Russia's athletic federation and two others.

The case centers on doping violations by ...

Seventeen miners at a salt mine in western New York were freed early this morning after they were trapped hundreds of feet underground when the elevator they were in stopped working late Wednesday night.

Officials used a crane with a basket to bring them to the surface at the Cargill ...

Another sharp fall forced China's stock market to close less than 30 minutes after trading began Thursday, setting up another rough day for investors. In the first half-hour of U.S. trading, the Dow Jones index fell by more than 1.2 percent — and that was after clawing back 90 points ...

Chinese media say it's the first legal case to center on the rights of same-sex couples to marry: a gay man has sued a civil affairs bureau in Hunan province for rejecting his attempt to register his marriage to his boyfriend. A court accepted the case Tuesday.

The local court ...

Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor whose career spanned from the avant-garde post-World War II era to the computer age, has died, according to the French culture ministry. He was 90. Boulez famously challenged his peers and his audience to rethink their ideas of sound and harmony.

In his ...

With North Korea announcing it conducted a nuclear test of a hydrogen bomb, China, India, Russia and other nations are condemning the move. The U.S. says it has yet to verify the claim, but it also reiterated its stance that North Korea can't be allowed to become a nuclear state.

The masked militant who acted as the spokesman for ISIS in a new propaganda video is believed to be Siddhartha Dhar, also known as Abu Rumaysah, according to U.S. law enforcement sources who were briefed by U.K. officials.

Authorities suspect that he is a British Muslim convert from London who ...

Saying that America faces a "gun violence epidemic," President Obama is taking "a series of common-sense executive actions" to reduce gun violence Tuesday, the White House says. First among the measures: tighter rules on background checks for gun buyers.

President Obama made his case during a live address from the ...

When your gondola gets stuck in midair at a ski resort with one of the highest vertical drops on the continent, you'd be forgiven for having pangs of fear or even panic. For teenager Kody Lapointe and his dad, it was a chance to take an "insane ride" on a ...

Saudi Arabia's allies continue to move against Iran, with Kuwait withdrawing its ambassador and delivering a protest over this weekend's attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran.

It's the latest development in a regional Sunni-Shiite feud that NPR's Greg Myre says could complicate "every major issue from the Iranian ...

Volkswagen's use of a "defeat device" to fool U.S. regulators has resulted in a federal lawsuit against the company. Volkswagen has acknowledged that millions of its diesel cars worldwide relied on a ruse to skirt emissions controls.

The civil complaint was filed in federal court in Detroit, with the Department ...