Scott Neuman

Updated at 3 p.m. ET

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon ordered the National Guard to begin withdrawing from the city of Ferguson after a night of relative calm in the wake of days of unrest surrounding the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Guard members were first deployed on Monday ...

Capt. Ron Johnson, the Missouri Highway Patrol officer in charge of security in Ferguson, Mo., told a thousand-strong audience gathered in a local church that he has a "heavy heart" over the violence and anger in the city in the wake of the police shooting of unarmed black teen Michael ...

With the clock ticking on the expiration of the latest cease-fire in Gaza, representatives of Israel and Hamas resumed talks in Cairo today but appeared divided over an Egyptian proposal to ease the closing of the territory.

As NPR's Jackie Northam reports from Jerusalem, at the heart of the talks ...

Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET

Kurdish forces say they've retaken areas near the country's largest dam in Mosul from Islamic separatists, a day after U.S. officials acknowledged conducting airstrikes in the region.

The Associated Press, quoting Kurdish peshmerga leader Gen. Tawfik Desty, said his fighters, backed by Iraqi and U.S. ...

Updated at 2:20 p.m. ET.

The Kenyan government has taken the step of closing its borders to travelers from West African countries affected by the growing Ebola outbreak.

The suspension applies to Kenyan ports of entry for people traveling from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, the country's Health Ministry says. ...

Updated at 3:05 p.m. ET

Ukrainian officials acknowledge that one of the country's MiG-29 fighter jets has been shot down by rebels, but they say the incident follows a major push in the east against pro-Russia separatists that could prove a breakthrough in the four-month conflict.

An official Ukrainian ...

Update at 3:30 p.m. ET

The Justice Department has ordered a second autopsy of Michael Brown, the black teen who was fatally shot by police last week in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, sparking off a week of angry and frequently violent protests.

Justice, which is leading an independent ...

Updated at 1:19 a.m. ET, Sunday.

Hundreds of demonstrators went home peacefully as a midnight curfew approached in Ferguson, Mo., but "a couple hundred defiant protesters remained," reports the Associated Press.

The crowd was gathered in the St. Louis suburb at the site where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot ...

Updated at 3:30 p.m. ET.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has been charged with felony counts of abuse of power over his veto of funding for a public corruption office, fired back today, calling the indictment politically motivated.

"I did nothing wrong," the potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate said at ...

Thousands of protesters flooded the streets of the Pakistani capital today in mass demonstrations against the government. The protests were led by fiery Islamic cleric Tahir-ul-Qadri and former cricket star turned politician Imran Khan.

Demonstrators are demanding that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif step down over alleged fraud in the country's ...

Germany's foreign intelligence eavesdropped on the phone conversations of Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, according to the magazine Der Spiegel.

The magazine said the German equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, known by its acronym BND, tapped a satellite conversation Kerry made in ...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, considered a possible GOP presidential candidate in 2016, was indicted on felony abuse-of-power charges late Friday in connection with his veto of funding for state public corruption prosecutors.

The case, which has been bubbling for months, is complicated. Here's a closer look at what we ...

Updated at 1:00 p.m. ET.

A couple from upstate New York has been charged with two counts of first-degree kidnapping in connection with the abduction of two Amish girls from a roadside farm stand earlier this week.

Stephen Howells II, 39, and Nicole Vaisey, 25, appeared in a court in ...

Update at 1:25 p.m. ET.

U.S. F/A-18s and drones are conducting airstrikes around the Mosul Dam in northern Iraq, a senior U.S. official tells NPR.

The region has seen stepped up fighting in recent days between Kurdish peshmerga forces and Islamic State, or ISIS, militants.

Residents living near the Mosul ...

Updated at 5 p.m. ET.

European Union foreign ministers condemned "atrocities and abuses" carried out in Iraq by Islamic insurgents against religious minorities, and gave the green light to its members to provide arms to combat the militants.

In an emergency meeting in Brussels, the EU's top diplomats did not ...

Police in Indonesia say that a U.S. couple being held in connection with the brutal killing of a 62-year-old Chicago woman while the three vacationed in Bali could face the death penalty if they are charged with premeditated murder.

The body of Sheila von Wiese-Mack was found stuffed in a ...

Updated at 1:20 p.m. ET.

Ukraine's president says Kiev's artillery destroyed a "significant" part of a Russian armored column that is said to have crossed the border overnight.

Russia called the claim a "fantasy."

President Petro Poroshenko told British Prime Minister David Cameron that Ukrainian forces had hit the column, ...

Updated at 6:30 p.m. ET.

Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced today that he will step down and endorse his nominated successor, state television says.

Maliki, who has been under increasing pressure to step aside, will be succeeded by Haider al-Abadi, from the prime minister's own Dawa Party, who was ...

The wife of Robin Williams, who took his own life on Monday, says the actor/comedian was sober at the time of death, but suffering from the early stages of Parkinson's disease, a progressive and debilitating neuromuscular condition.

"Robin's sobriety was intact" at the time of his suicide, Susan Schneider said. ...

It's been a cutthroat existence for Colorado's state fish.

The rare greenback cutthroat trout, for years on the receiving end of a well-meaning, but taxonomically misguided attempt to save it, now seems to be back on track (though not out of the woods).

Two years ago, wildlife biologists confirmed ...