For Laura Geraghty, April 1, 2009, started out just as any other day. It was sunny but cool, she remembers. The mother of two, also a grandmother, was at her job, driving a school bus for the Newton Public School District in suburban Boston, Massachusetts. Her passengers, special-needs children, were wheelchair-bound. Seemingly in good health and in good spirits, Geraghty was finishing up her late-morning run, transporting a student and teacher back to Newton South High School, when she realized ...

Six people were sentenced to death for murder and other crimes in riots that killed about 200 people in western China, state media reported Monday. The southern California artist rode the waves in Indonesia, India and Morocco, and on dry land, his curiosity piqued about the religion practiced there. He visited mosques and eventually, acquired a translated copy of the Quran, Islam's holy book. Then came the chilling attacks of September 11, 2001, and Birk realized that Americans knew very ...

A legal tug-of-war over Ohio's execution procedures grew more confused Monday as Ohio's governor granted a temporary reprieve to a murderer scheduled for lethal injection this week. The action came just hours after the state's attorney general's office asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and allow Thursday's execution of Lawrence Reynolds Jr. after a federal appeals court blocked it. Gov. Ted Strickland announced he would delay Reynolds's execution until next March at the earliest. Reynolds was sentenced to die ...

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission issued a finding of probable cause Tuesday that racism was involved in the decision last June by a suburban Philadelphia swim club to revoke privileges of a largely minority day care center. The commission ordered monetary damages for humiliation and embarrassment and a civil penalty of not more than $50,000. The decision noted that none of the club's 155 paid members this year was African-American. Last year, according to the decision, there were "179 paid ...

Seydi Burciaga just finished her overnight shift at Sam's Club, where she worked for the past 10 years. She made her way through the pouring rain in her minivan and turned onto her cul-de-sac in suburban Atlanta. She was three-tenths of a mile from home. The mother of two young children never made it. Floodwaters from a swollen creek swept her Nissan Quest from Desiree Drive around 5 a.m. Monday. On a normal day, the creek is only a few ...

The crib in Ellen Darcy's Boston home has sat empty for more than a year. And in suburban Washington, Laura Teresinski has prepared a nursery for a baby that may never arrive. They and thousands of prospective parents, eager to adopt children from abroad, have found themselves in an emotional legal limbo since two of the most popular countries for international adoptions -- Guatemala and Vietnam -- recently halted their programs. Now would-be mothers and fathers around the United States ...

Beneath seven flat-screen TVs and one large pulldown screen, members of the Racquet Club of the South gathered Monday to watch and celebrate one of their own. Melanie Oudin, 17, of Marietta, Georgia, has been taking the tennis world by storm at the U.S. Open. The 70th-ranked female has been handing out upsets to some of the sport's biggest female stars, including Russian aces Elena Dementieva (No. 4 seed) and Maria Sharapova (No. 29 seed, who has been ranked ...

Venezuelan federal investigators raided the suburban Caracas home of the president of Globovision, a privately run television station that has frequently opposed President Hugo Chavez's policies.