U.S. : Top Stories

AP - The self-dubbed "Jihad Jane" who thought her blond, all-American profile would help mask her plan to kill a Swedish cartoonist is a rare case of a U.S. woman inciting foreign terrorism and shows the latest evolution of the global threat, authorities say.

AP - Students across the nation might eventually use the same math and English textbooks and take the same tests if states adopt new rigorous standards proposed Wednesday by governors and education leaders.

AP - When Juanita Goggins became the first black woman elected to the South Carolina Legislature in 1974, she was hailed as a trailblazer and twice visited the president at the White House.

AP - As they scrambled recently to trace the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds around the country, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention successfully used a new tool for the first time — the shopper cards that millions of Americans swipe every time they buy groceries.

AP - For soldiers patrolling in Iraq and Afghanistan, death can come from a bomb hidden in a trash pile or an innocent-looking face in the crowd. Returning home alive can depend on the quick turn of a steering wheel or pull of a trigger.

AP - The FBI arrested a reputed U.S. mobster Wednesday on charges he provided protection for a Sicilian counterpart mapping out criminal turf in Florida — part of an international sweep aimed at further crippling the storied Gambino organized crime family and disrupting its ties to the Italian mob.

AP - Ohio State University says a background check on a janitor who shot two supervisors didn't reveal a criminal record, even though he had spent five years in prison.

AP - Cindy Hickey had rehearsed what she would say to her son when she finally got to talk to him months after he was detained in Iran. When the time came, the conversation lasted only about a minute, she said, "so it was hard to say a lot."

AP - Even under the rough-and-tumble rules of the sea that Maine lobstermen live by, staring down the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun is extreme.

AP - It was 2005 when Bruce Barcomb received the call he'd been awaiting for nearly three decades: Police had finally identified the man who raped and murdered his little sister in a remote canyon on a dark night in 1977.