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The fiancee of a Texas man who died of gunshot wounds after holding hostages at a northwestern Indiana realty office says he had been reeling from a financial betrayal by a man who worked in that office.

The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting Sunday afternoon to hear a briefing from the head of the U.N. observer mission in Syria on the massacre in the town of Houla, with Russia questioning whether Syrian tanks and artillery were responsible.

Rodney Berget lives in a single cell on South Dakota's death row, rarely leaving the tiny room where he awaits execution for bludgeoning a prison guard to death with a pipe during an attempted escape.

Rodney Berget lives in a single cell on South Dakota's death row, rarely leaving the room where he awaits execution for killing a prison guard.

Rain lent a hand Sunday to the 230 crew members battling a wildfire that has consumed 31.6 square miles of forest in the eastern part of Michigan's sparsely populated Upper Peninsula.

Dentist Frank Illuzzi was stunned when Vermont tax collectors began demanding a 6 percent sales tax on the value of toothbrushes and floss he hands out to patients. Senior care facility operator Jay Grimes was similarly surprised to get a $350,000 bill slapping a 9 percent restaurant tax on the meals served to residents in the dining room. Landscaper Richard "Buckwheat" Lowe got $18,000 in bills taxing him for the first time ever on the mulch he sells.

Gay students at America's military service academies are wrapping up the first year when they no longer had to hide their sexual orientation, benefiting from the end of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that used to bar them from seemingly ordinary activities like taking their partners openly to graduation events.

Sen. Charles Schumer is urging airlines to allow families with young children to sit together without paying extra.

Subtropical Storm Beryl continues to trek toward the Southeast coast, threatening dangerous surf and drenching rain from northeast Florida to parts of the Carolinas. Beryl is expected to make landfall with tropical storm strength winds as early as Sunday night. This storm will not be a signficant wind threat, and the rain associated with it will help a region that has suffered through an exceptional drought.

Authorities have discovered human remains near a campsite believed to have been used by a hiker from Chicago who has been missing since October 2010.

Subtropical storm Beryl crept Sunday toward the Southeast U.S. coastline, threatening to churn up dangerous surf and drenching rains for a soggy close to the long Memorial Day weekend along beaches from northeast Florida to South Carolina.

Slinging a pickax under a blazing sun as he dug a hole behind the ninth green at Timberlake Country Club, Michael Kletter, 68, conceded that this was not the golf course retirement life he had envisioned.

The U.S. Postal Service said late Friday that it was offering buyouts to about 45,000 mail handlers, part of the financially troubled agency's efforts to cut its staff and reduce its operating costs.

Besieged by identity theft, Florida now faces a fast-spreading form of fraud so simple and lucrative that some violent criminals have traded their guns for laptops. And the target is the U.S. Treasury.

Tropical Storm Beryl already was wrecking some Memorial Day weekend plans on Sunday, sending shoreline campers packing to head inland and canceling some events in the southeastern U.S.

West Virginia State Police said late Saturday they had found four bodies in a wooded area and believe they are those of a missing man, his girlfriend and his two young children.

A Miami police officer on Saturday fatally shot a naked man who was chewing on the face of another man on a downtown causeway off-ramp, police and witnesses said.

Critics are crying foul over a plan to control bird populations near New York City's JFK Airport.

The pilot and passenger of a banner-towing plane made an emergency landing on San Diego Bay and were plucked out of the water before the aircraft sank, authorities said Saturday.

Sweden's Loreen clinched the top spot at this year's Eurovision Song Contest with her dance hit "Euphoria," pushing aside competition from a sextet of Russian grannies and a Serbian balladeer.

A famed battleship that saw action during World War II and the Korean War and carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a wartime summit traveled along the California coast Sunday on its final voyage.

Authorities have released the names of four young men killed in a small plane crash at a southern Utah airport.

Authorities say a small plane has crashed near a municipal airport in southern Utah, killing all four people on board.

A Colorado man serving a 48-year prison sentence for the death of his 2-year-old son now faces a murder charge stemming from the disappearance of his wife.

A 21-year-old woman who was shot in the hip by a Colorado homeowner after police said she drunkenly wandered into a house now faces a felony trespassing charge, prosecutors said.

A former high school football star whose rape conviction was thrown out this week plans to file a claim against the state but will not sue the woman who recanted the sexual assault accusation she made a decade ago, his lawyer said.

Boy Scouts carry a large American flag through the Memphis National Cemetery in Tennessee, where scouts also placed flags on 42,000 graves. In Little Rock, Ark., a 4-year-old girl fills her arms with flags to place on graves.

Crews fighting a wildfire in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico planned to take advantage of lighter winds Sunday by building protection lines on key flanks of the blaze and preparing to send water-dropping helicopters into the air for the first time in several days.

A Texas man who took hostages in a northwestern Indiana realty office and held police at bay for several hours suffered three gunshot wounds before dying, likely from two different weapons, a coroner said Saturday.