Scott Neuman

The situation in eastern Ukraine remains on edge Monday, following a weekend of violence that reportedly left up to five pro-Russian separatists dead at the hands of Ukraine nationalists. Moscow has used the killings to press its case that Ukraine's Russian speakers are threatened and to accuse Kiev of not ...

Rescue workers still searching for bodies from the March 22 landslide that killed at least 39 people near the town of Oso, Washington, erected a simple, but moving memorial to the victims of the tragedy. Four people are still listed as missing.

NPR's Martin Kaste, who took the photo, ...

Japan says it will kill fewer whales when its seasonal Pacific hunt begins next week and will only observe whales in the Antarctic, after a U.N. court ordered it to stop taking the marine mammals from the Southern Ocean.

Fisheries Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said the Pacific catch target would be ...

A powerful magnitude 7.2 earthquake that struck near Mexico's resort town of Acapulco could be felt as far away as Mexico City, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or major damage.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the epicenter of Friday's quake was located about 80 miles northwest of ...

Unbridled industrialization with almost no environmental regulation has resulted in the toxic contamination of one-fifth of China's farmland, the Communist Party has acknowledged for the first time.

The report, issued by the ministries of Environmental Protection and Land and Resources, says 16.1 percent of the country's soil in general and ...

In the wilds of Africa, chimpanzees consistently choose to make their sleeping nests in a particular tree that offers the "just right" kind of comfort that Goldilocks famously preferred.

That's according to a new study in the journal PLOS ONE that could also bolster a theory that solid shut-eye ...

Chelsea Clinton announced Thursday that she and husband Marc Mezvinsky are expecting their first child, also a first grandchild for former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"Mark and I are very excited that we have our first child arriving later this year," Chelsea Clinton, who ...

Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, has died in Mexico City. He was 87.

The Associated Press says:

"Garcia Marquez's magical realist novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality.

"Widely ...

President Obama says that enrollment under the Affordable Care Act has reached 8 million after the March 31 sign-up deadline was extended by two weeks.

"This thing is working," he told reporters at a White House briefing on Thursday.

The president said that 35 percent of those signing up through ...

A former BP executive who led the company's cleanup of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill has agreed to pay $224,000 in penalties and restitution in a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly trading on inside information on the disaster.

SEC regulators say Keith A. Seilhan, ...

Two firetrucks speeding toward the same blaze in a Los Angeles suburb collided, with one of the vehicles then plowing into a restaurant, injuring 15 people, including six firefighters.

Monterey Park Fire Chief Jim Birrell said trucks from his city and neighboring Alhambra were responding to a house fire shortly ...

A 19-year-old alleged hacker has been arrested and his computer equipment seized by Canadian police after he purportedly exploited the "Heartbleed" bug vulnerability to steal confidential information from the country's tax collection agency.

"Heartbleed," which takes advantage of a security gap in a popular open-source encryption program, was discovered last ...

Robert Rizzo, the former city manager of Bell, Calif., who pleaded no contest to conspiracy, misappropriation of public funds and falsification of public records, has been ordered to serve 12 years in state prison and repay nearly $9 million.

Rizzo, who was city manager of Bell until 2010, apologized during ...

The "Good Book" could become the official book of Louisiana if a bill sent to the state's Legislature passes in a vote that could come as early as this week.

The Municipal, Parochial and Cultural Affairs Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives voted 8-5 last week to forward ...

A federal judge has struck down a North Dakota law banning abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, calling the law "invalid and unconstitutional."

The law, passed by lawmakers in the state just over a year ago, bans abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy and is ...

The death toll in last month's fatal mudslide in Washington state has risen to 39, officials say, after two more bodies were recovered from the debris.

Search efforts following the mudslide, near the community of Oso in the Cascades foothills, have been hampered by rain and the difficulty in ...

Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison that became the center of a 2004 prison-abuse scandal during the U.S. occupation, is being closed temporarily because of security concerns, according to the country's Justice Ministry.

The infamous prison, located on the outskirts of Baghdad near Sunni-dominated Anbar province, is being shut because of ...

The New York Police Department said Tuesday it would disband a special unit charged with detecting possible terrorist threats by carrying out secret surveillance of Muslim groups.

The squad that conducted the surveillance, known as the Demographics Unit, was formed in 2003. It brought the NYPD under fire from community ...

It's not like Saturn needs another moon to look after — it's already got 53 officially, with nine more labeled as "provisional" (and those are just the ones we know about). But the tiny, icy object nicknamed "Peggy" could prove hard to resist.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft spotted evidence of ...

El Al, Israel's national airline, wants you to get down when you fly UP, its budget carrier that took to the skies just two weeks ago. UP has joined the list of airlines doing away with the boring safety video in favor of something more lively and, at least ...