National News

BRUSSELS -- The World Health Organization's Europe director expressed deep concern Thursday after the region again recorded the highest-ever weekly incidence of cases, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned of a "difficult winter" as residents in France braced for life under a new month-long lockdown and Spain's parliament voted to extend a state of emergency...

BOSTON -- Federal agencies warned that cybercriminals are unleashing a wave of data-scrambling extortion attempts against the U.S. health care system designed to lock up hospital information systems, which could hurt patient care just as nationwide cases of COVID-19 are spiking...

ROME -- Pope Francis is halting his public general audiences and will limit participation at Christmas and other upcoming Masses amid a surge of coronavirus cases in Italy and the Vatican, officials said Thursday. Starting next week, Francis will resume livestreaming his weekly catechism lessons from his library in the Apostolic Palace, as he did during the Vatican's COVID-19 lockdown during the spring and summer, the Vatican said...

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. economy grew at a record 33.1% annual rate in the July-September quarter but has not fully rebounded from its plunge in the first half of the year -- and the recovery is slowing as coronavirus cases surge and government aid dries up...

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a scolding assessment of COVID-19 relief talks Thursday, blaming Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for failing to produce answers to her demands for Democratic priorities as part of an almost $2 trillion aid package...

NEW ORLEANS -- Zeta sped across the Southeast on Thursday, leaving a trail of damage and more than 2.6 million homes and businesses without power in Atlanta and beyond after pounding New Orleans with winds and water that splintered homes and were blamed for at least three deaths...

TAMPA, Fla. -- Pressing against stiff headwinds from the pandemic, President Donald Trump steered toward what he hoped was safer political ground with the U.S. economy Thursday, as Democratic rival Joe Biden kept up his assault on Trump's handling of the coronavirus...

Today is Thursday, Oct. 29, the 303rd day of 2020. There are 63 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On Oct. 29, 1929, "Black Tuesday" descended upon the New York Stock Exchange. Prices collapsed amid panic selling and thousands of investors were wiped out as America's "Great Depression" began...

MILAN -- Protesters set trash bins afire and police responded with hydrant sprays in downtown Rome on Tuesday night, part of a day of public outpouring of anger against virus-fighting measures such as evening shutdowns for restaurants and bars and the closures of gyms and theaters -- a sign of growing discontent across Europe with renewed coronavirus restrictions...

WARM SPRINGS, Ga. -- Joe Biden traveled to the hot springs town where Franklin Delano Roosevelt coped with polio on Tuesday to declare the U.S. is not too politically diseased to overcome its health and economic crises, pledging to be the unifying force who can "restore our soul and save this country."...

AUSTIN, Texas -- A record surge in coronavirus cases is pushing hospitals to the brink in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, confronting health officials in Texas and Mexico with twin disasters in the tightly knit metropolitan area of 3 million people...

NEW ORLEANS -- Residents of the storm-pummeled Gulf Coast steeled themselves for yet another tropical weather strike Tuesday as Tropical Storm Zeta took aim at southeast Louisiana, fraying the nerves of evacuees from earlier storms and raising concerns in New Orleans about the low-lying city's antiquated drainage pump system...

WASHINGTON -- Amy Coney Barrett was formally sworn in Tuesday as the Supreme Court's ninth justice, her oath administered in private by Chief Justice John Roberts. Her first votes on the court could include two big topics affecting the man who appointed her...

LONDON -- Four years after Donald Trump's election reframed how many nations interacted with the United States, the way the world's foremost superpower moves forward after its presidential election stands to impact many geopolitical pressure points -- whether the victor turns out to be Trump or his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden...

Today is Wednesday, Oct. 28, the 302nd day of 2020. There are 64 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On Oct. 28, 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev informed the United States that he had ordered the dismantling of missile bases in Cuba; in return, the U.S. secretly agreed to remove nuclear missiles from U.S. installations in Turkey...

WASHINGTON -- Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court late Monday by a divided Senate, with Republicans overpowering Democrats to install President Donald Trump's nominee days before the election and secure a likely conservative court majority for years to come...

BOISE, Idaho -- Deaths per day from the coronavirus in the U.S. are on the rise again, just as health experts had feared, and cases are climbing in practically every state, despite assurances from President Donald Trump over the weekend that "we're rounding the turn, we're doing great."...

MIAMI -- A strengthening Tropical Storm Zeta is expected to become a hurricane Monday as it heads toward the eastern end of Mexico's resort-dotted Yucatan Peninsula and then likely move on for a possible landfall on the central U.S. Gulf Coast at midweek...

Today is Tuesday, Oct. 27, the 301st day of 2020. There are 65 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On Oct. 27, 1904, the first rapid transit subway, the IRT, was inaugurated in New York City. On this date: In 1787, the first of the Federalist Papers, a series of essays calling for ratification of the United States Constitution, was published...

LONDONDERRY, N.H. -- The coronavirus has reached the upper echelons of the White House again, with an outbreak among aides to Vice President Mike Pence just over a week from Election Day. A top White House official declared: "We're not going to control the pandemic."...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans voted overwhelmingly Sunday to advance Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett toward final confirmation despite Democratic objections, just over a week before the presidential election. Barrett's confirmation today was hardly in doubt, with majority Republicans mostly united in support behind President Donald Trump's pick. ...

With eight days before Election Day, more people already have cast ballots in this year's presidential election than voted early or absentee in the 2016 race as the start of in-person early voting in big states led to a surge in turnout in recent days...

Preslie Paur breaks down in tears when she thinks of her state's refusal to mandate face masks. The South Salt Lake City, Utah, woman can't work at her special education job due to an autoimmune disease. Her husband, also a special ed teacher, recently quit because his school district would not allow him to work remotely to protect her and their 5-year-old son, who has asthma...

WASHINGTON -- Washington D.C. Archbishop Wilton Gregory is set to become the first Black U.S. prelate to assume the rank of cardinal in the Catholic Church, a historic appointment that comes months after nationwide demonstrations against racial injustice...

Today is Monday, Oct. 26, the 300th day of 2020. There are 66 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On October 26th, 1774, the First Continental Congress adjourned in Philadelphia. On this date: In 1825, the Erie Canal opened in upstate New York, connecting Lake Erie and the Hudson River...

WASHINGTON -- U.S. officials said that Russian hackers have targeted the networks of dozens of state and local governments in the United States in recent days, stealing data from at least two servers. The warning, less than two weeks before the election, amplified fears of the potential for tampering with the vote and undermining confidence in the results...

WILMINGTON, Del. -- President Donald Trump and his allies fought for momentum in election battleground states on Friday after a debate performance that gave new hope to anxious Republicans. Democrat Joe Biden tried to clean up a debate misstep while urging voters to stay focused on the president's inability to control the worsening pandemic...

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump announced Friday that Sudan will start to normalize ties with Israel, making it the third Arab state to do so as part of U.S.-brokered deals in the run-up to Election Day. The deal, which would deepen Sudan's engagement with the West, follows Trump's conditional agreement this week to remove the North African nation from the list of state sponsors of terrorism if it pays compensation to American victims of terror attacks...

Today is Saturday, Oct. 24, the 298th day of 2020. There are 68 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On Oct. 24, 1972, Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson, who'd broken Major League Baseball's modern-era color barrier in 1947, died in Stamford, Connecticut, at age 53...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden fought over how to tame the raging coronavirus in Thursday's final 2020 debate, largely shelving the rancor that overshadowed their previous face-off in favor of a more substantive exchange highlighting their vastly different approaches to the major domestic and foreign challenges facing the nation...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans powered past a Democratic boycott Thursday to advance Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate, keeping President Donald Trump's pick on track for confirmation before the Nov. 3 election...

WASHINGTON -- With vaccines against COVID-19 inching closer, U.S. regulators took an unusual step Thursday in asking outside scientists: Are the government's standards high enough to adequately judge the shots? The Food and Drug Administration may have to decide by year's end whether to allow use of the first vaccines against the coronavirus, amid growing public fears that politics are overriding science. ...

WASHINGTON -- The number of laid-off Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell last week to 787,000, a sign job losses may have eased slightly but are still running at historically high levels. Last week's figure was down from 842,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said Thursday. ...

Christi Brouder had finally gotten her 10-year-old daughter settled on the hallway floor with a laptop and signed into a video class on Google Meet when the girl's 6-year-old brother leaped over the computer screen "in his birthday suit" to get a juice box...

Today is Friday, Oct. 23, the 297th day of 2020. There are 69 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On Oct. 23, 1983, 241 U.S. service members, most of them Marines, were killed in a suicide truck-bombing at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon; a near-simultaneous attack on French forces killed 58 paratroopers...

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett served for nearly three years on the board of private Christian schools that effectively barred admission to children of same-sex parents and made it plain that openly gay and lesbian teachers weren't welcome in the classroom...

WASHINGTON -- Drugmaker Purdue Pharma, the company behind OxyContin, the powerful prescription painkiller that experts say helped touch off an opioid epidemic, will plead guilty to federal criminal charges as part of a settlement of more than $8 billion, the Justice Department announced Wednesday...

WASHINGTON -- Washington negotiations on a huge COVID-19 relief bill took a modest step forward on Tuesday, though time is running out and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, President Donald Trump's most powerful Senate ally, is pressing the White House against going forward...

NASHVILLE -- President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden are set to square off in their final debate Thursday, one of the last high-profile opportunities for the trailing incumbent to change the trajectory of an increasingly contentious campaign...

Today in History Today is Thursday, Oct. 22, the 296th day of 2020. There are 70 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On Oct. 22, 1979, the U.S. government allowed the deposed Shah of Iran to travel to New York for medical treatment -- a decision that precipitated the Iran hostage crisis...

WASHINGTON -- It's deadline day for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on COVID-19 relief, with the contours of a potential deal taking shape behind the scenes even as President Donald Trump's GOP allies are recoiling at the administration's tolerance for a $2 trillion package...

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump portrays the hundreds of people arrested nationwide in protests against racial injustice as violent urban left-wing radicals. But an Associated Press review of thousands of pages of court documents tells a different story...

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump shunned formal debate practice Tuesday and was heading instead for another of his big rallies, two days ahead of the final presidential debate that may be his last, best chance to alter the trajectory of the 2020 campaign. Democrat Joe Biden took the opposite approach, holing up for debate prep...

MOSCOW -- Russia said Tuesday it's ready to accept a U.S. proposal to freeze the number of nuclear warheads and extend the two nations' last arms control pact for one year and Washington responded that it's prepared to make a quick deal. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus welcomed the Russian offer and said that the U.S. is ready to quickly clinch an agreement...

The Republican Party has cut into Democrats' advantage in voter registration tallies across some critical presidential battleground states, a fact they point to as evidence of steady -- and overlooked -- enthusiasm for President Donald Trump and his party...

Matthew Davidson was beating his heroin addiction. The 31-year-old was attending group recovery meetings. He had a restaurant job he liked. He was a doting uncle to a baby nephew. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. Davidson lost his job. He started staying home alone in his apartment near Georgetown, Kentucky -- depressed and yearning for his recovery support group that had stopped gathering in person, said his cousin Melanie Wyatt...

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Google for antitrust violations, alleging that it abused its dominance in online search and advertising to stifle competition and harm consumers. The lawsuit marks the government's most significant attempt to protect competition since its groundbreaking case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. ...

Today is Wednesday, Oct. 21, the 295th day of 2020. There are 71 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On Oct. 21, 1879, Thomas Edison perfected a workable electric light at his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J. On this date: In 1797, the U.S. Navy frigate Constitution, also known as "Old Ironsides," was christened in Boston's harbor...

OKLAHOMA CITY -- A second excavation begins today at a cemetery in an effort to find and identify victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and shed light on violence that left hundreds dead and decimated an area that was once a cultural and economic mecca for African Americans...

CARSON CITY, Nev. -- President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden went on offense Sunday, as both campaigned in states they are trying to flip during the Nov. 3 election that is just over two weeks away. Trump began his day in Nevada, making a rare visit to church before a fundraiser and an evening rally in Carson City. Once considered a battleground, Nevada has not swung for a Republican presidential contender since 2004...