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Answering for her own past statements, Judge Sonia Sotomayor battled her way Tuesday through grueling and sometimes critical questioning by senators. But there was little question of the verdict: She’s all but certain to win confirmation to the Supreme Court.
WASHINGTON | Despite unprecedented efforts to improve minority achievement in the past decade, the gap between black and white students remains wide, according to an Education Department report released Tuesday. There is good news in the report: Reading and math scores are improving for black students in public schools across the country. But because white students are also improving, the disparity has lessened only slightly.
PENSACOLA, Fla. | An ex-convict who taught self-defense to children. A day laborer who served prison time for killing a man in a fight. An Air Force staff sergeant attached to an elite special operations unit. Somehow, authorities say, they ended up part of a loosely connected group of seven men charged in the shooting deaths of Byrd and Melanie Billings, a wealthy Florida Panhandle couple known for adopting children with special needs.
WASHINGTON | Democrats in the House of Representatives unveiled a 1,000-page-plus health care overhaul bill Tuesday that would levy a surtax on the wealthy in a bid to pay for the program without adding to the national debt. The bill, which House committees will debate this week, would create a government program to compete with private insurance companies and would mandate coverage for all. House Democratic leaders wouldn’t put a precise price tag on their plan nor say how they were going to pay for all of it.
P ENSACOLA, Fla. | Officials in the Florida Panhandle said they were holding two men on open murder charges in the slaying of a wealthy Florida couple known for adopting children with developmental disabilities. Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan said day laborer Wayne Coldiron turned himself in Sunday night. He said Leonard P. Gonzalez Jr. was arrested later in Santa Rosa County. Morgan said Coldiron was friends with 56-year-old Leonard P. Gonzalez Sr., who was charged earlier in the day with evidence tampering.
WASHINGTON | President Barack Obama chose as his surgeon general a rural Alabama family physician who made headlines with her determination to rebuild her nonprofit medical clinic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Regina Benjamin is known along Alabama’s impoverished Gulf Coast as a country doctor who makes house calls and doesn’t turn away patients who can’t pay — even as she’s had to find the money to rebuild a clinic repeatedly destroyed by hurricanes and once by fire.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. | Thunderstorms forced NASA to call off Sunday’s launch of the shuttle Endeavour, the fourth delay for the space station construction mission. The launch team came within minutes of sending Endeavour and seven astronauts to the international space station. But storms moved in and managers, concerned about the spacecraft’s safety, halted the countdown.
WASHINGTON | Sonia Sotomayor told her up-from-the-bootstraps story Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee and said a judge’s role is “not to make law. It is to apply the law.” But skeptical Republicans warned that they would ask tough questions beginning today about her background and activism.
WASHINGTON | Doctors performed a skin graft on former Sen. Bob Dole’s left leg Monday after discovering open sores on it when he sought emergency medical care. “All is well. He is recovering nicely,” Mike Marshall, a spokesman for the former Kansas lawmaker, said in an e-mail.
BOSTON | Massachusetts lawmakers said Monday that they would try to restore $4 million in state aid for two zoos after operators suggested that without the money, some animals might have to be killed. Zoo New England, which runs the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston and the companion Stone Zoo in suburban Stoneham, warned last week that if the cuts stood, it would be forced to lay off most of its 165 workers and possibly euthanize some of its 1,000 animals.
WASHINGTON | Democrats are pushing for twin investigations into Bush-era torture and anti-terrorism policies. Two senators, including the head of the intelligence committee, suggested Sunday that the prior administration broke the law by concealing a CIA counterterrorism program from Congress.
CAPE COAST, Ghana | President Barack Obama traveled in his father’s often-troubled home continent on Saturday as a potent symbol of a new political era but also as a messenger with a tough-love theme. American aid must be matched by Africa’s responsibility for its own problems, Obama said — at times bluntly — in an address to Parliament in the capital, Accra, that was televised across the continent.
Hide-and-seek scare GREENVILLE, Pa. | A toddler did such a remarkable job of hiding during a game of hide-and-seek that the family had to call police and firefighters to help find her.
MOSCOW, Idaho | The giant Palouse earthworm has taken on mythic qualities in this vast agricultural region that stretches from eastern Washington into the Idaho panhandle. (Its very name evokes the fictional sandworms from “Dune” or those vicious creatures from the movie “Tremors.”)
W ASHINGTON | Former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden angrily struck back Saturday at assertions that the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance program was more far-reaching than imagined and was largely concealed from congressional overseers. In an interview with The Associated Press, Hayden maintained that top members of Congress were kept well-informed all along the way, notwithstanding protests from some that they were kept in the dark.
W ASHINGTON | The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday. In issuing the report, the inspectors general questioned the legal basis for the effort but shielded almost all details on grounds they’re still too secret to reveal.
The latest Department of Defense identifications of casualties: •Army Spc. Gregory J. Missman, 36, of Batavia, Ohio, died July 9 at Bagram, Afghanistan, of small-arms wounds suffered the previous day in another location.
People who appreciate small moments of happiness are more likely to be resilient against adversity and more successful in jobs, relationships and health outcomes. Researchers at the University of North Carolina reached this conclusion after a series of studies that required 86 participants to submit daily “emotion reports.”
GARY, Ind. | The city where Michael Jackson spent his first 11 years bade him farewell Friday as several thousand people showed up to watch performers sing and dance to his hits. The biggest applause from the crowd of more than 6,000 gathered at Gary’s minor league baseball park came before the two-hour event, when Jackson’s hits played and people mimicked his dance moves.
Guest lineup for today’s TV news shows: •ABC’s “This Week,” 9:30 a.m. on Channel 9, 9 a.m. on Channel 49 — Guests: Sens. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat, and Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican.
HUNTINGDON VALLEY, Pa. | Parents of minority children who were asked not to return to a suburban private pool are considering legal action, according to a Philadelphia day camp director. The Creative Steps camp in northeast Philadelphia had paid $1,950 for 65 children to go each Monday afternoon this summer to The Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley. But after the first outing on June 29, the money was refunded with no explanation.
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A fire broke out on the roof of a high-rise apartment building west of downtown Dallas on Wednesday, but no serious injuries were reported.
A finance committee at the University of California has approved a budget plan that would force most of the system's 180,000 employees to take unpaid leave and pay cuts to address a steep reduction in state funding.
Prosecutors nationwide filed 189 legal actions Wednesday against loan modification consultants accused of bilking homeowners who are desperate to make their mortgage payments more affordable.
An Illinois Republican political consultant says Rep. Mark Kirk will announce Monday that he is running for the Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama.
Soldiers from a Colorado unit accused in nearly a dozen slayings since returning home - including a couple gunned down as they put up a garage sale sign - could be showing hostility fueled by intense combat in Iraq, where the troops suffered heavy losses and told of witnessing war crimes, the military said Wednesday.
All those warmups in the Rose Garden gave the lanky left-hander just enough oomph.
One of two Somali men indicted in Minneapolis for providing support to terrorists pleaded guilty months ago and has been cooperating with the FBI's investigation.
Closing arguments are under way in the trial of a former Orange County woman accused of arranging her husband's murder because she was afraid his cancer treatment would eat up their retirement savings.
A look at economic developments and stock market activity around the world Wednesday:
A Pennsylvania man is being extradited to Peru to stand trial for the murder of a 21-year-old woman he married there.
Democrat Judy Chu is going to Congress.
A judge will allow a recording of a police interrogation to be used as evidence in the murder trial of a Washington woman accused of killing her four daughters.
Sara Lipe glanced at her southern Illinois peach orchard after winds topping more than 100 mph tore through in May and felt dread in the pit of her stomach.
Life in Postville wasn't easy before federal agents raided the area's largest employer and detained 389 people on immigration charges.
It's easy to forget 2-year-old Florida toddler Caylee Anthony was slain after all the plot twists and turns in her story.
Ready or not, states are getting a tenfold boost in federal money to weatherize drafty homes, an increase so huge it has raised fears of waste and fraud and set off a scramble to find workers and houses for them to repair.
Hoping stormy skies clear in time, NASA fueled space shuttle Endeavour for a sixth launch attempt Wednesday, the eve of the 40th anniversary of the liftoff for the first moon landing.
When it brokered the restructuring of Chrysler and General Motors, President Barack Obama's auto task force repeatedly pledged that it would steer clear of running a car company.
In one of the least Jewish states in the country, a traditional Jewish group working to revive religious observance has built a mikvah, a ritual bath for spiritual purification.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski hasn't officially announced she's running for re-election next year, but the Alaska Republican has built up more than $1 million in her war chest.
In one of the least Jewish states in the country, a traditional Jewish group working to revive religious observance has built a mikvah, a ritual bath for spiritual purification.
Summer camps are contending with more than bug bites and poison ivy this year: They're on the lookout for swine flu.
A Democratic New York state senator who was stripped of a committee chairmanship after he was charged with assaulting his girlfriend has been quietly reappointed to the job.
More than four decades after political wrangling and recession ran a mass transit rail plan for Seattle off the tracks, trains are finally running.
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