DALLAS A white Texas police officer was not targeting minorities when he wrestled a black teenage girl to the ground and brandished his gun outside a pool party, his lawyer said, but rather was fraught with emotion after responding earlier to two suicide calls. As activists demanded Wednesday that prosecutors charge former officer David Eric […]

AUGUSTA On Wednesday, May 28, the legislature’s most powerful committee — the one that effectively controls the state’s $6 billion budget — was scheduled to meet in Room 228 in the statehouse. The printed calendar posted outside the large chamber said the meeting of the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee would start at 1 p.m., […]

PORTLAND (AP) — A newspaper is attempting to force the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention to identify four schools where chickenpox outbreaks occurred this school year. The Portland Press Herald reported that it filed a formal Freedom of Access Act request after the CDC declined to identify the schools last week. Four outbreaks […]

SALEM, Mass. (AP) — A 39-year-old Saugus woman already facing rape charges for an alleged sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy is now accused of having sex with the boy’s twin brother when he was 14. Heather Salines pleaded not guilty Tuesday to the new charges, just days before her lawyer says she was due […]

COLUMBIA FALLS (AP) — Maine fire officials say a Columbia Falls man died in a fire inside his home after trying to light his wood stove with gasoline. Police say 65-year-old Charles Rathburn died in the Tuesday afternoon fire. Police say a neighbor reported the fire at about 4 p.m. when they saw smoke coming […]

PORTLAND (AP) — A fishing oversight committee plans to ask federal regulators to call for emergency action to suspend the at-sea monitoring program required of the New England groundfishing industry. Groundfishermen fish for important food species such as cod and haddock. The National Marine Fisheries Service has said groundfishermen will likely have to start paying […]

DANNEMORA, N.Y. Authorities searching for two escaped killers who have been on the loose for the better part of a week acknowledged being in the dark about their whereabouts or doings, even as the hunt for the men expanded past state borders into Vermont. At a news conference outside the maximum-security prison on Wednesday, New […]

LOS ANGELES Pssst. Ready to water that beautiful lush lawn of yours? The one that’s the envy of the entire neighborhood. If you live in Southern California you’d better wait until after midnight. Preferably on a cloudy, new-moon night during a power outage when it’s so dark even nightvision goggles won’t give away your position. […]

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A district attorney in an increasingly volatile northern province in Afghanistan was killed today by a sticky bomb that was attached to his car, an Afghan official said. The bomb went off while Hamidullah Khan, a prosecutor in Shirin Tagab, a district near the border with Turkmenistan, was on his way […]