Eyder Peralta

Former President George H.W. Bush has left a Houston hospital and is now "resting at home, grateful to the doctors and nurses for their superb care," his spokesman Jim McGrath said on Twitter.

Bush, 90, was taken to a hospital in Houston a week ago after he experienced shortness ...

The number of police officers killed in the line of duty increased in 2014, a report by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund finds.

In total, 126 officers were killed in 2014. That's a 24 percent increase from 2013, when 102 officers were killed. According to the report, ...

Updated at 2:14 p.m. ET

Rep. Steve Scalise, the recently elected House majority whip, has acknowledged that he spoke at a gathering of white supremacists more than a decade ago, calling it "a mistake" that he regrets.

"Twelve years ago, I spoke to many different Louisiana groups as a state ...

Rescue crews scouring the waters off Indonesia say they have found dozens of bodies and have spotted wreckage that belongs to AirAsia QZ8501, the jetliner that went missing Sunday, carrying 155 passengers and seven crew members.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp. quotes an Indonesian navy spokesman:

" 'Based on ...

Adding to an already tense situation, police cadets heckled New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio at a graduation ceremony on Monday.

CBS News describes the scene at Madison Square Garden:

" 'Let's be honest about the realities of our society,' de Blasio told the graduating class of ...

The Los Angeles Police Department says two suspects opened fire on a patrol car with a rifle Sunday evening.

KTLA-TV reports:

"Several rounds were shot in the direction of the officers, LAPD Capt. Lillian Carranza said.

"'This was a completely unprovoked attack,' she added.

"One of the officers ...

Update at 5:49 p.m.

Indonesia has asked the U.S. for help in locating the missing AirAsia jetliner, the State Department said today.

State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said the U.S. was reviewing the request. The Defense Department said the U.S. assistance could include "some air, surface and sub-surface ...

Update at 7:50 pm. Death Toll Rises To 10:

The death toll has climbed to 10, but dozens of passengers are still missing from a Greek ferry that caught fire. Authorities have been unable to determine exactly how many people were on board.

The Associated Press reports that 427 were ...

Updated at 6:00 p.m. ET

President Obama called Sony's decision to pull its film The Interview, following threats to movie theaters, a "mistake."

"We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States," the president said in his year-end news ...

Soccer's governing body is sticking to its guns.

FIFA has voted not to revisit the bidding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. It also decided to release, at some later date, at least part of a 430-page confidential report produced by American lawyer Michael Garcia.

Garcia, who had been ...

President Obama will close out 2014 with his traditional end-of-year press conference.

The press conference is scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. ET., and it's bound to be eventful because Obama has a lot to talk about.

Among the news events that will likely come up:

-- The normalization ...

Two days after the U.S. and Cuba decided to end a more than 50-year estrangement, the natural question is: What's next?

On Morning Edition, NPR's Michelle Kelemen reports that the process of normalizing diplomatic relations will be pretty straight forward and is likely to be done quickly.

"We can do ...

There was a significant drop in the number of executions and death penalty sentences in 2014, a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center finds.

The group's year-end accounting finds that:

-- States conducted 35 executions in 2014 — the lowest since 1994.

-- And the justice system sentenced ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin lashed out at the West in a year-end news conference today, blaming international sanctions and a steep plunge in oil prices for the precipitous drop in the value of the ruble.

Putin, speaking during a more than three-hour news conference attended by some 1,200 journalists, "promised ...

Just hours after the United States and Cuba announced they were moving toward normalizing relations, crowds gathered in Havana and Miami trying to come to grips with a historic shift.

NPR covered the reaction in those two places with two pieces on Morning Edition.

NPR's Greg Allen reported from Miami:

On Tuesday, President Obama picked up the phone and talked to Cuban President Raul Castro.

The call came a day before Obama publicly announced the decision to normalize diplomatic relations between the two foes. Just how surprising would a call of that sort be? Remember, it was just a ...

Updated at 3:42 p.m.

The Obama administration announced today that it would begin the process of re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba.

It's a contentious issue, and reaction has been swift. Here's a roundup:

-- Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida with Cuban roots, issued a blistering statement. ...

With the movies Interstellar and The Theory of Everything out, black holes are in the news, exciting people's imagination.

Black holes bring up possibilities as crazy-sounding as time travel, tunnels through space called wormholes, even parallel universes. It's amazing that when I started my career in the 1980s, ...

The Church of England has named its first female bishop.

The Rev. Libby Lane, who has been a parish priest for 20 years, will be consecrated on Jan. 26, becoming the first woman to hold that position since the church was founded five centuries ago.

"This is unexpected and very ...