Bee Nation/World News

Gov. Jerry Brown called on the California Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday to send specialists from California's Urban Search and Rescue teams to aid in search efforts following Monday's devastating tornado in Oklahoma.

MOORE, Okla. – At the end of the day Monday, in the last week of the school year, students at Plaza Towers Elementary in this blue-collar suburb were zipping their backpacks. A fifth-grade class had just finished watching a movie about a boy who survives the crash-landing of a plane in the Canadian wilderness.

The White House acknowledged Monday that senior aides to President Barack Obama knew a month ago that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative groups, expanding on previous administration statements about who in the White House knew about the inquiry and when they knew about it.

Police departments and federal agencies across the country are using a type of polygraph despite evidence of a technical problem that could label truthful people as liars or the guilty as innocent, McClatchy has found.

With four out of every five possible combinations of Powerball numbers in play, someone was almost sure to win the game's highest jackpot – and someone did.

There was a time when Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani seemed to have it all. A founder of the Islamic Revolution, he headed a family empire that owned the second biggest Iranian airline, Mahan, had a near monopoly on the lucrative pistachio trade and controlled the country's largest private university, Azad.

Tough congressional grilling Friday of fired IRS chief Steven Miller failed to get answers about which agency employees subjected applications from tea party groups to special scrutiny but yielded a startling new admission: The Internal Revenue Service actually planted the question posed at a legal conference a week earlier that triggered the current political firestorm.

President Barack Obama, struggling to find his footing after one of his most turbulent weeks in office, will try to push past the moment's political furor with a focus on the few pieces of legislation he believes have a chance in Congress and on executive actions that do not require Republican approval.

In a one-two punch from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue on Thursday, lawmakers introduced a sweeping revision of military sexual assault law and the president summoned his uniformed service chiefs.

The black flag of jihad flies over much of northern Syria. In the center of the country, pro-government militias and Hezbollah fighters battle those who threaten their communities. In the northeast, the Kurds have effectively carved out an autonomous zone.

He arrived at the meeting with two wigs – the blond one on his head held in place by a baseball cap, a brown one in his knapsack, which also held a compass, a Moscow street atlas and $130,000 in cash. He was an operative for the CIA, Russian officials say, and his goal was to recruit a Russian security officer as a spy.

The Internal Revenue Service asked “unnecessary, burdensome questions” of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, questions that unfairly delayed the applications, according to an investigative report obtained by McClatchy.

In the month before attackers stormed U.S. facilities in Benghazi and killed four Americans, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens twice turned down offers of security assistance made by the senior U.S. military official in the region in response to concerns that Stevens had raised in a still secret memorandum, two government officials told McClatchy.

The victory of Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan's parliamentary elections will usher in a new period in Pakistan's relationship with the United States, with Secretary of State John Kerry likely to assume the lead role in relations long dominated by the Pentagon.

Lost in the controversy over who requested revisions of CIA-written talking points on September's attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans is one key fact: In every iteration of the document, the CIA asserted that a protest of a video preceded the assaults, and no official reviewing the talking points suggested that was in error.

WASHINGTON – Money has played a major role in the drama to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, with millions of dollars spent in the past year trying to influence or kill proposals that could affect a variety of special interests.

Those who resent the powerful ruling class of this country have coined colorful slang phrases for the rich and entitled. The sons of the elite are called "juniors," or worse "papaloys," a Spanish language contraction of the words "papa" and "lords." Upper-class young women are known as "lobukis" or simply "ladies."

The government of South Korea hired a former CIA analyst, two White House veterans and a team of ex-congressional staff members to help secure a few paragraphs in the giant immigration bill.

A pair of car bombs killed at least 42 people and raised tensions between Turks and Syrians in this city on the Syrian-Turkish border that is a hub for refugees fleeing the fighting and rebels who use the area to resupply fighters inside Syria.

Day after day, the drudgery of digging for bodies had progressed at Rana Plaza. Talk of rescuing survivors had faded. This was the recovery phase, and what was being recovered were corpses, the numbers spinning remorselessly forward: 700 dead became 800, then 900, with no end in sight.

Three worked as bus drivers for special-needs children, two worked at a Kmart, and another delivered pizza.

A New York federal judge on Friday denied a request by the Obama administration to delay his April 5 court order that allows emergency contraceptives to be sold without age limits or a prescription.

The Obama administration insisted Friday that it acted in good faith and not to protect itself when it eliminated references to al Qaida and an allied group in talking points about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Yemen's human rights minister breezed into Washington this week expecting to lobby U.S. officials for the release from Guantánamo of Yemeni detainees, who make up more than half the population at the controversial U.S.-run prison that President Barack Obama has pledged to close.

Candidate Barack Obama pledged that he’d close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Easier said than done. As president, Obama has failed to shut down the facility he calls “expensive,” and “inefficient” and a “recruitment tool for terrorists.”

NEW YORK – It was a huge bank heist, a 21st-century version in which the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault.

Five days after an explosion at a fertilizer plant leveled a wide swath of town, Gov. Rick Perry tried to woo Illinois business officials by trumpeting his state's low taxes and limited regulations.

With Pakistanis heading to the polls Saturday, the man who's expected to be the country's next prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, has signaled his determination to seize control of policy toward longtime foe India from Pakistan's overbearing military and prevent militants from staging attacks on India from Pakistani soil.

China's most celebrated film director, Zhang Yimou, is being investigated for a potential violation of family planning laws, an official said Thursday, confirming reports in state news media.

Erik Garcia arrived at the metal gate of a migrant shelter, deported from Los Angeles just hours earlier. After 23 years in the United States illegally, he suddenly found himself separated from the country where he had moved as a boy, and from his two teenage daughters, who are U.S. citizens.

A congressional hearing Wednesday on the September attacks on U.S. diplomatic compounds in Benghazi, Libya, produced no major revelations but plenty of partisan fireworks as Republicans renewed charges that the Obama administration had covered up details of what happened while Democrats retorted that politics are driving the GOP-run investigation.

An aviation commander for the Navy was raped by a co-worker, but there was no prosecution and the female accuser was denied re-enlistment. A noncommissioned officer was assaulted by a captain, who was found guilty but then granted clemency without explanation.

During a six-month visit to his Russian homeland last year, Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent his time reading novels and reconnecting with family, not venturing into the shadowy world of the region's militants, his parents said.

The United States and Russia agreed Tuesday to try to convene an international conference on ending Syria’s brutal civil war – possibly by the end of May – but the effort appeared to run into trouble within hours of its announcement with the key U.S.-backed opposition group reiterating that it won’t attend talks involving top Assad regime officials.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that it’s still not clear enough that Syria crossed a chemical weapon red line, at least not clear enough to warrant U.S. action.

President Mohammed Morsi named nine new ministers to his government Tuesday, including three members of the Muslim Brotherhood, in a move that his prime minister, Hesham Kandil, said was intended to re-energize efforts to reverse Egypt’s prolonged economic spiral.

Despite rising calls for some kind of increased U.S. military involvement in Syria, scant evidence exists, at least in public, that Syria's vicious civil war has breached President Barack Obama's "red line" on the use of chemical weapons.

The television advertisement that hit the airwaves in Florida last month featured the Republican Party's rising star, Sen. Marco Rubio, boasting about his get-tough plan for border security.

Confronted with evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, President Barack Obama now finds himself in a geopolitical box, his credibility at stake with frustratingly few good options.

Even for China's scandal-numbed diners, news that the lamb simmering in the pot may actually be rat took the country's endless outrages about food hazards into a new realm of disgust.

The retirement of Tom Harkin, a Democrat who has represented Iowa in the Senate for nearly 30 years, should be the kind of rare opportunity that sends the best and brightest of his state's political class scrambling to get on the ballot.

When Katherine Russell arrived as a freshman at Suffolk University just over five years ago, she seemed to bond so well with her new roommates in their lively dorm opposite Boston Common that one classmate likened them to sitcom characters.

They were perhaps Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's closest friends during his two years at college: an American classmate from high school and two Russian-speaking students from Kazakhstan.

It was 45 minutes into Sen. Kelly Ayotte's town hall-style meeting Tuesday, and the local Republican official screening questions had allowed just one query on gun control. A few in the crowd of about 150 started to get agitated.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he’d redouble efforts on a failed first-term campaign promise to close the prison for terrorism suspects at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Federal prosecutors just lost a quarter of a million dollars trying to take away the Mongols Motorcycle Club trademark. Now they’re trying again.

U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan remain at the lowest levels in recent years. The number so far this year, 33, is the lowest at this point since 2008. After air accidents, the next biggest cause of death was improvised bombs, which claimed at least eight service members.

Even as President Barack Obama insisted Tuesday that the United States knows very little about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, dueling reports surfaced of a new chemical attack in a town near the Turkish border, demonstrating how complex the issue can be.

Paul Kevin Curtis and Everett Dutschke have a lot in common, though they would probably not like to think of it that way.