By Karen Brooks AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - The Powerball jackpot Saturday night could exceed the $600 million figure being advertised, possibly rivaling the largest lottery payoff in U.S. history, a Texas Lottery official said on Saturday. "Oftentimes, the advertised amount is lower than what the actual jackpot ends up being," said Kelly Cripe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Lottery. "It's entirely possible this $600 million jackpot will end up being a bigger jackpot. ...
By Gary Robertson RICHMOND, Virginia (Reuters) - A car driven by an elderly man who may have lost consciousness plowed through a small-town parade of hiking enthusiasts in southwestern Virginia on Saturday, injuring dozens of people, nine seriously enough to be sent to hospitals, authorities said. The incident occurred in the Appalachian town of Damascus at the start of the annual Trail Days festival, as the main street was filled with hikers making their way from one end of town to a park at the other, volunteer fire department chief Ben Sanders told Reuters. ...
By Gary Robertson RICHMOND, Virginia (Reuters) - Virginia Republicans on Saturday formally nominated Ken Cuccinelli for governor in the nation's marquee 2013 political race, and the conservative attorney general wasted no time reminding voters of the scandals facing President Barack Obama. "I am not a true conservative because I have not been investigated by the IRS," joked Cuccinelli, referring to the controversy that has engulfed the federal tax collection agency over its targeting of conservative Tea Party groups. ...
A series of 16 violent tornadoes ransacked north Texas this week, killing six people and flattening entire neighborhoods. Seven people who were reported missing early Friday morning have now been accounted for, but the storms aren't over yet. Severe thunderstorms are expected late Friday in Alabama and Mississippi, and the Plains and the Midwest face [...]
Harrowing dash-cam footage shows officer Steve Nunez of the New Mexico State Police and some good Samaritans lifting an overturned SUV off of a little girl last week. Nunez spoke with KOAT.com about the incident. "It's always hard to see anybody in that situation, but especially children," he said. "And daddy mode kicked in." Nunez [...]
Aimee Copeland, the woman who lost her hands, one leg and her other foot to flesh-eating bacteria after a zip-line accident last year, spoke with WXIA.com and "Today" about her new bionic hands, which are helping her return to a normal life. Copeland, 24, is in the process of learning to use two state-of-the art [...]
Regular viewers of hoarding reality shows are used to being stunned by someone's clutter. But behind the sensationalistic stories of rooms buried in trash, kitchens filled with rotting food, and yards overrun by goats are people suffering from a serious mental illness –hoarding–that for many years was misdiagnosed. The upcoming fifth version of the Diagnostic [...]
The parents of two young children killed last fall allegedly by their nanny announced on Thursday that they are expecting a baby this fall. Kevin and Marina Krim broke the news on a Facebook page established in the memory of their children, Lulu, 6, and Leo, 2, who were found stabbed to death in their [...]
NEW YORK (AP) — A gunman used homophobic slurs before firing a fatal shot point-blank into a man's face on a Manhattan street alive with a weekend midnight crowd, a killing New York's police commissioner called an "anti-gay" hate crime.
BRIDGEPORT, Conn. (AP) — The commuter train derailment and collision that left dozens injured outside New York City was not the result of foul play, officials said Saturday, but a fractured section of rail is being studied to determine if it is connected to the accident.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sunbathers flocking to Southern California beaches are used to feeding the meter or paying a parking attendant. Not so along the less developed north coast where it's customary to ditch cars on the shoulder of Highway 1 to surf, swim or picnic.
DAMASCUS, Va. (AP) — About 50 to 60 people were injured Saturday when a driver described by witnesses as an elderly man drove his car into a group of hikers marching in a parade in a small Virginia mountain town.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Inmates at jails in Indianapolis, Baltimore, St. Louis and Philadelphia face the nation's highest levels of sexual abuse at the hands of guards, according to a new federal report based on surveys of inmates at U.S. jails and prisons.
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Authorities in hazardous materials suits searched a downtown Spokane apartment Saturday, investigating the recent discovery of a pair of letters containing the deadly poison ricin.
Alaska's remote Pavlof Volcano was shooting lava hundreds of feet into the air, but its ash plume was thinning Saturday and no longer making it dangerous for airplanes to fly nearby.
NEWARK, N.J (AP) — An airline official says a US Airways Express flight with 34 people aboard was forced to make a belly landing at Newark International Airport after experiencing landing gear trouble. No injuries were reported.
LOWELL, Mass. (AP) — Boston's police department and mayor's office will conduct twin reviews of the response to last month's bombing of the Boston Marathon, police commissioner Ed Davis said Saturday.
By Susan Guyett INDIANAPOLIS (Reuters) - Indiana has canceled subsidies for a planned $1.8 billion fertilizer plant in the state because of concerns that a Pakistani company involved in the project makes products used in improvised explosives that kill and injure U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Midwest Fertilizer Corp, which has sought to build the plant in southern Indiana, is 48 percent owned by Fatima Group, which produces a calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Pakistan known to have been used in improvised explosives in Afghanistan. Indiana Governor Mike Pence, a Republican, had put a $1. ...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sunbathers flocking to Southern California beaches are used to feeding the meter or paying a parking attendant. Not so along the less developed north coast where it's customary to ditch cars on the shoulder of Highway 1 to surf, swim or picnic.
O'BRIEN, Ore. (AP) — Jennifer Phillippi's grandparents started producing lumber in this corner of Oregon timber country in 1922, when a man could set up a mill, log the trees within range of a team of horses and move the mill to a new stand when those trees ran out.
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. (AP) — A pair of persistent wildfires continued to burn in the hills and mountains around Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles on Saturday, although authorities were slowly getting the upper hand.
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Funeral services have been held for the New Jersey woman and boy whose bodies were found in their home after a 37-hour hostage standoff last weekend.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — First lady Michelle Obama has some advice for some Tennessee high school graduates: Strike your own path in college and life and work to overcome inevitable failures with determination and grit.
ATLANTA (AP) — When President Barack Obama addresses graduates at Morehouse College on Sunday, he'll also be speaking to the broader community of historically black colleges and universities — a proud corner of higher education that has struggled more than most during the last few years of economic distress.
UNIONDALE, N.Y. (AP) — A wanted man with a criminal history dating back nearly 15 years was identified by police Saturday as the masked home invader involved in the death of a Hofstra University student early Friday morning.
DAMASCUS, Va. (AP) — Witnesses said a car drove into a crowd at a parade in a small southwestern Virginia mountain town Saturday and hurt several people, but the nature of their injuries wasn't immediately known.
FAIRFIELD, Conn. (AP) — Officials described a devastating scene of shattered cars and other damage where two trains packed with rush-hour commuters collided in Connecticut, saying Saturday it's fortunate that no one was killed and that there weren't even more injuries.
By P.J. Huffstutter (Reuters) - Texas has joined the crowd of Gulf of Mexico states to file suit against BP Plc, Halliburton Co and others for their role in one of the worst oil spills in U.S. history. The complaint, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Beaumont, Texas, alleges that the companies and others "engaged in willful and wanton misconduct" for their role in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The state has accused the firms - as well as Transocean, Anadarko and BP America in its suit - of violating Texas' environmental regulations. ...
DAMASCUS, Va. (AP) — Witnesses in southwestern Virginia say a car has driven into a crowd at a parade. Several people appear to be hurt, but the nature of their injuries wasn't immediately known.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A former Philadelphia police officer once hailed as a hero and given a seat next to the first lady at a speech by President Obama has been arrested and charged with rape and other crimes.
UNIONDALE, N.Y. (AP) — A funeral has been scheduled for Wednesday for a 21-year-old Hofstra University student who was gunned down during a break-in at her apartment near the school's Long Island campus.
CINCINNATI (AP) — For more than 100 years, the Anna Louise Inn in downtown Cincinnati has been a safe, serene place that thousands of struggling women came to know as home.
By Mary Wisniewski CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chicago will shut down part of its "L" elevated rail system's busiest line for five months starting on Sunday, forcing thousands of commuters to seek other routes and creating the biggest such U.S. transit disruption in two decades. The nation's second-largest public transit system after New York will rebuild 10 miles of the "Red Line" on the city's South Side, which passes through some predominantly poor and African-American neighborhoods. It will be the biggest U.S. ...
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A New York assemblyman accused of sexually harassing young female staffers for years says he will resign before he's expelled from the Legislature.
By Karen Brooks (Reuters) - Federal investigators on Saturday searched for the cause of a rush-hour train crash in Connecticut that injured dozens of people commuting home from New York City, three of them critically. More than 60 people were hospitalized Friday night after an eastbound commuter train derailed and collided with a westbound passenger train on an adjacent track near the Connecticut suburb of Fairfield. Eight people remained hospitalized on Saturday, three in critical condition, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy said. ...
By David Jones NEWARK, New Jersey (Reuters) - A US Airways flight made an emergency landing on its belly at Newark Liberty International Airport early on Saturday after the plane's landing gear failed to deploy, but no one was injured, airline and government officials said. Piedmont Airlines flight 4560, operating for US Airways from Philadelphia with 34 passengers and three crew members, landed safely at 1 a.m., and passengers were evacuated on the tarmac and transported to the terminal, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman said in an email. ...
FAIRFIELD, Conn. (AP) — Officials described a devastating scene of shattered cars and other damage where two trains packed with rush-hour commuters collided in Connecticut, saying Saturday it's fortunate that no one was killed and that there weren't even more injuries.