LOCKHART, Texas The pilot of a hot air balloon that crashed in Texas and killed all 16 people aboard had been arrested in Missouri for driving while intoxicated in 2000, police said, and the Better Business Bureau there had warned consumers about doing business with him after complaints about his balloon touring company. Alfred “Skip” […]

WASHINGTON President Barack Obama is touting strides in reducing homelessness among military veterans as his administration reaches the halfway point in building a massive database on veterans’ health. Overall veteran homelessness has been cut nearly in half, by 47 percent, although that’s still short of Obama’s long-held goal of getting it to zero by 2015. […]

Ahead of the second anniversary of the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, that touched off a wave of protests nationwide, a coalition of more than 60 organizations affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement has issued a list of demands calling policing and criminal justice reforms. The agenda, titled […]

CINCINNATI An Ohio man accused of plotting to attack the U.S. Capitol in support of the Islamic State group is due in court for a change-of-plea hearing. Christopher Lee Cornell, 22, has pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from his January 2015 arrest. A change-of-plea hearing notice was filed on Friday in U.S. District Court […]

LOS ANGELES After leaping from an airplane, Luke Aikins rocketed toward earth for two minutes, and then calmly flipped onto his back at the last second and landed in a 100-by-100-foot net in California. Cheers rose from those who gathered at the Big Sky movie ranch on the outskirts of Simi Valley to watch the […]

A group of militants, including a suicide truck bomber, targeted a Kabul guesthouse for foreign contractors early today, killing one policeman and wounding four, Afghan authorities said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. The Interior Ministry said “terrorists” used a truck full of explosives to breach the perimeter wall of the Northgate Hotel around […]

WASHINGTON The picturesque Main Street of Ellicott City, Maryland, faces a months-long recovery that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars after devastating flooding that damaged nearly every home and business along the road, officials said. Two people were killed when the town about 14 miles west of Baltimore took on 6.5 inches of water […]

MOSCOW A Russian transport helicopter was shot down in Syria today and all five people onboard were killed, the Kremlin said, in the deadliest single incident for the Russian military since its involvement in Syria’s civil war. The Mi-8 helicopter was shot down in Idlib province while returning to the Russian air base on Syria’s […]

Pope Francis on Sunday said he won’t label Islam as “terrorist” because that would be unfair and not true. Reporters aboard the papal plane flying him home after a pilgrimage to Poland asked him why he never uses the world “Islam” to describe terrorism. While in Poland, Francis made an unscheduled stop at a church […]

BEIRUT The sit-com is a little like “I Love Lucy,” starring a comic housewife who gets into shenanigans and bickers with her husband. Except children play all the roles. And it all takes place in one of the historic stone houses in the old city of Aleppo, besieged by government forces in one of the […]