NASHVILLE, Tenn. A crash that killed five children in Tennessee is reviving discussion over whether school buses — considered among the safest vehicles on the road because of their height and bulk — should also be equipped with seat belts. Only six states require seat belts on large buses. Many others, including Tennessee, have considered […]

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. The injured children were so young that many couldn’t spell their names. Some couldn’t remember their birthdays or their parents’ names — just “Momma” when asked. As survivors of a Chattanooga school bus crash began to arrive in the pediatric emergency room, Dr. Darvey Koller could see the devastation in their eyes. “Many […]

CHICAGO Laquan McDonald’s life seemed to be headed nowhere. A ward of the state who had been shuffled between relatives’ homes and foster care, he was 17 when, high on the hallucinogenic drug PCP, he wandered down the street slashing tires with a knife. This week marks the one-year anniversary of the release of the […]

DENHAM SPRINGS, LA. Before the floods came, Ashleigh Dickerson’s family lived in a three-bedroom house on a private road with plenty of room for her children to play. These days, the school bus drops her 10-year-old daughter off at a motel in Denham Springs, Louisiana, where a parking lot next to a truck stop is […]

GREENVILLE, Miss. Back in the 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week in America, a fact that remains true in many communities today. But three weeks after their church in the Mississippi Delta was mostly destroyed by arson and someone spray-painted “Vote Trump” […]

PANAMA CITY An unusually late Hurricane Otto swirled over the Caribbean just off Central America, heading toward a possible landfall in Costa Rica, which hasn’t seen such a storm since reliable recordkeeping began in 1851. Heavy rains from the storm were blamed for three deaths in Panama on Tuesday, and officials in Costa Rica ordered […]

BANGKOK The head of a powerful Buddhist sect in Thailand will be indicted next week on charges of money laundering and related crimes involving millions of embezzled funds that allegedly reached the temple’s coffers, prosecutors said today. The Office of the Attorney-General announced its decision to bring to court Wat Dhammakaya abbot Phra Dhammachayo and […]

MOSUL, Iraq An airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition today “disabled” the fourth bridge on the Tigris River in Mosul, leaving the northern Iraqi city with a single functioning bridge and further disrupting the Islamic State group’s supply lines amid the government offensive against IS militants. The extremist group’s media arm, the Aamaq news agency, and […]

IGUALA, Mexico In the two years since dozens of families in the southern Mexico state of Guerrero banded together to search for relatives who have disappeared, Maria Carmen Figueroa Acevedo has missed only one weekly gathering. Without hesitation she says she believes her son Ricardo is alive. She dreams regularly of his homecoming. Spending each […]