Scott Neuman

This post was updated at 4:50 p.m. ET

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, fresh from a stunning primary upset at the hands of a Tea Party rival, said today that he would vacate his leadership post by the end of July to make room for a successor.

"Effective July 31, ...

This post was updated at 10:30 p.m. ET

As refugees stream out of Mosul after the Iraqi city was captured by forces of the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, NPR's Deborah Amos passes along reports that Tikrit, the hometown of the late dictator Saddam Hussein, has also ...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has lost his Republican primary in Virginia's 7th Congressional District to Tea Party challenger David Brat — a stunning defeat that will upend the chamber's GOP leadership.

Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., was leading Cantor by 55 percent to ...

More than two centuries after one of the ships in British Capt. George Vancouver's flotilla lost an anchor in Puget Sound, a group of amateur divers are convinced the object they've brought to the surface is the very same.

The loss of the anchor by the HMS Chatham ...

A four-person rescue team in the German Alps has reached a trapped cave researcher who was injured in a rock fall some three-quarters of a mile below ground. But figuring out how to move him is proving a challenge.

NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports that medical workers were with ...

Japan, which earlier this year said it would scale back what it has described as "research whaling," is signaling that it wants to go back to a larger hunt.

"I want to aim for the resumption of commercial whaling by conducting whaling research," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said.

Japan, which ...

China is calling a friendly get-together between soldiers of Vietnam and the Philippines on islands in the South China Sea claimed by Beijing "a clumsy farce," demanding that the two countries cease-and-desist.

The gathering occurred Sunday on the Vietnamese-held island of Southwest Cay in the Spratly Islands. The two sides ...

A computer program masquerading as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy has reached a technological and philosophical threshold by passing the so-called Turing Test: it fooled a third of its human interlocutors into believing they were conversing with a real person instead of a machine.

The test, first proposed by British ...

A man armed with an assault rifle, several hand grenades, smoke bombs and tear gas opened fire on an Atlanta courthouse, where he was scheduled to plead guilty on drug charges Friday. The assault sparked a gunbattle with police that left the assailant dead and a deputy wounded.

The three-minute ...

A day after General Motors admitted it failed customers who owned cars with a defective ignition switch, the automaker issued a recall for 105,000 more vehicles, bringing the total number of GM recalls so far this year to 34, involving 14 million vehicles, Michigan Public Radio's Tracy Samilton reports.

The ...

President Bill Clinton's administration wondered what the legal consequences would be if the White House acknowledged that genocide was occurring in Rwanda in 1994, according to newly public documents.

In a May 26, 1994, email to Donald Steinberg, who handled the Africa portfolio in Clinton's National Security Council, legal ...

Uber and Lyft car services have said they will continue to operate in Virginia, despite a cease-and-desist letter from the state saying the service is illegal because it hasn't received authorization from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

It comes a day after Colorado became the first state to pass a ...

North Dakota is no longer the only state to have its same-sex marriage ban go unchallenged: Seven couples on Friday filed suit in federal court in Fargo seeking to overturn a 2004 voter-approved amendment to the state's Constitution prohibiting the practice.

The Associated Press reports:

"The lawsuit, filed in ...

A new analysis of rocks collected by Apollo astronauts on the moon more than 40 years ago bolsters the leading theory of our natural satellite's origin — that it formed from a collision between a nascent Earth and another object some 4.5 billion years ago.

The theory, first suggested ...

This post updated at 9:40 p.m ET.

At least three people were wounded and one was killed after a lone gunman opened fire on the campus of Seattle Pacific University, according to Seattle police. Officials say the alleged shooter is in custody.

The campus was placed on lockdown ...

The Beastie Boys have won a $1.7 million verdict against the makers of Monster Energy drink in a copyright infringement dispute over the company's use of the band's songs in a 2012 promotional video.

The Beastie Boys, who shot to prominence in the 1980s with such hits as "(You Gotta) ...

Want to know where most motorists hit deer? To answer such a question, at least in Utah, used to involve the laborious task of sifting through mountains of paperwork. And the results weren't even all that accurate.

But a team of scientists at Utah State University has developed a smartphone ...

Not the wisest of moves: A man impersonating a police officer in Florida signals a real sheriff's detective driving an unmarked car to pull over.

WESH in Orlando reports that the suspect, 20-year-old Matthew Lee McMahon, "activated a red and blue light Monday while driving behind an unmarked county ...

Senators from both parties have reached an agreement on legislation that would expand the ability of veterans to seek government-paid medical care outside the network of the VA medical system.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, was joined by Arizona Republican ...

The Senate has voted to confirm Sylvia Mathews Burwell to the post of secretary of health and human services, where she will replace Kathleen Sebelius, who presided over the troubled rollout of the HealthCare.gov website.

In a 78-17 vote, Burwell, who served most recently as White House budget director, was ...