Mark Memmott

Comet Pan-STARRS is putting on a bit of a show for those in the Northern Hemisphere through the end of this month. We're seeing some beautiful photos, such as those taken this week by AFP/Getty's Stan Honda. He pointed his camera skyward near Magdalena, N.M.

The best viewing came earlier ...

A Maryland man who died two weeks ago contracted rabies "through [an] organ transplantation done more than a year ago," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed Friday morning.

The CDC adds that:

"In early March, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene initiated an ...

Consumer prices jumped 0.7 percent in February from January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The increase was fueled by a 9.1 percent surge in gasoline prices. Gas prices alone accounted for about two-thirds of the overall rise, MarketWatch says.

The 0.7 percent increase was the ...

Saying that he has reconsidered the issue in the two years since learning that his son is gay, Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio announced Thursday that he no longer opposes same-sex marriage.

His son Will's coming out, "allowed me to think of this issue from a new perspective, and ...

Putting a more specific estimate that he has in the past on the issue of how long it might take Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, President Obama has told Israel's Channel 2 TV that it could happen in "over a year or so" if efforts to dissuade Iran do ...

The man who videotaped 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney infamous comments about the "47 percent" has stepped out of the shadows.

He's bartender Scott Prouty, who was working last May at the Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla., when the candidate made comments that in September would ...

Kevyn Orr, "a high-powered Washington, D.C., lawyer and University of Michigan graduate who worked on Chrysler's 2009 bankruptcy restructuring," has been given the job of straightening out the city of Detroit's desperate financial mess, the Detroit Free Press writes.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), who earlier this month ...

Talk about having a powerful hincha on your side.

As the website of Buenos Aires soccer club San Lorenzo declares, the team now has "Papa Cuervo" (Papa Crow) among its card-carrying fans.

"Los Cuervos" ("the crows") is one of the San Lorenzo club's nicknames (others include "El Ciclón" ...

By a 10-8, party-line vote with Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed, the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday moved legislation that would revive the ban on assault-style weapons that expired in 2004.

The vote, while expected, remains noteworthy because it is among a handful of legislative responses so far to ...

The death of Ieng Sary, co-founder of the Khmer Rouge that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and killed an estimated 1.7 million of that nation's people in the process, has dashed the hopes "among survivors and court prosecutors that he would ever be punished for his alleged war crimes," ...

"Scientists working with data from a large particle accelerator in Europe are now almost certain they have pinned down the elusive sub-atomic particle known as the Higgs Boson," NPR's Joe Palca tells our Newscast Desk.

Or, as it's also known, the "God Particle" (more on that moniker below).

Joe reports ...

A deadly drama in central New York State ended early Thursday when police killed the man suspected of shooting to death four people and injuring two others on Wednesday, Utica's Observer-Dispatch reports.

According to the newspaper:

"After a nearly 19-hour standoff, police officers this morning swarmed the ...

The number of people filing first-time claims dropped by 10,000 last week from the week before, to 332,000, the Employment and Training Administration says.

That means claims continue to run at their lowest pace since January 2008. They've now fallen for three straight weeks.

In other ...

The decision to embalm the body of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez so that it could be put on permanent display in the country's Museum of the Revolution was made too late, acting President Nicolas Maduro said Thursday in Caracas.

So, The Associated Press reports, it is ...

(We most recently added to this post at 2 p.m. ET, when we embedded video of Thursday's mass in the Sistine Chapel.)

On the morning after he changed from Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to Pope Francis, the new head of the Roman Catholic Church quietly slipped out of ...

The world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics have a new spiritual leader, and for the first time is is someone from the Americas.

As afternoon turned to evening in Vatican City on Wednesday, a little after 7 p.m. local time, white smoke rose from a chimney above the Sistine Chapel and ...

Following up last month's news about reports that tie hackings of American defense contractors' websites to operations run — or at least encouraged — by the Chinese government, the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday told the tale of a Shanghai man who used to blog about ...

It's taken about a month to hit the mainstream media's websites.

But now that it has, this clip of Vanderbilt University student Michael Pollack accompanying Billy Joel on "New York State of Mind" is spreading quickly.

We think you'll agree it makes for a nice break ...

Retail sales rose an estimated 1.1 percent in February from January and were up 4.6 percent from February 2012, the Census Bureau says.

Kathy Bostjancic director of macroeconomic analysis at the The Conference Board research group, says in an analysis sent to reporters that the report's a sign ...

The case has already been "tried" in the social media, as The New York Times writes.

But Wednesday in Steubenville, Ohio, a real court will be the setting as two high school football players in a town that's obsessed with high school football go on trial for the ...