Sarah Palin announced Friday she plans to resign as governor of Alaska in a few weeks, saying she will try to "affect positive change" from outside government.

With the recession eating away at state and local budgets everywhere, it will be a silent Fourth of July across the country for many communities that have canceled their annual fireworks shows.

National Guardsmen are coming home from Iraq to face a new enemy – a swooning economy that has landed like a KO’d heavyweight on the canvas of their home towns.

Authorities in South Carolina are looking for a serial killer they believe has shot four people to death within 10 miles of each other over the past six days.

Television product pitchman Billy Mays is remembered as a pop culture icon at his funeral near Pittsburgh.

A Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency help in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks is proceeding, according to current and former government officials.

Federal agents busted a drug-trafficking ring that distributed methamphetamine and cocaine from Mexico in Washington state and carried unusually powerful weaponry.

Tina Meier had hoped to see her neighbor and former friend, Lori Drew, go to prison for her role in the online hoax that caused Meier's 13-year-old daughter, Megan, to end her life. But even though a judge is throwing out Drew's conviction, Meier believes Drew didn't get away with anything.

Vice President Dick Cheney talked with top White House officials about how to respond to reporters' inquiries into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative, according to a court filing.

One of the NYPD's newest officers made his first arrest just minutes after graduating from the Police Academy in a ceremony at Madison Square Garden.

The nation's police departments are clamoring for an unprecedented amount of federal aid to forestall big local tax hikes or the possible layoff of nearly 40,000 police officers.

The chairman the House Veterans Affairs Committee is calling for a Defense Department and Marine Corps probe to see if the killing of a gay sailor at Camp Pendleton was a hate crime.

An Oregon woman obsessed with bunnies has been ordered back behind bars after police found her in a hotel room with more than a dozen rabbits.

Police in suburban Chicago say a taxi driver who didn't have Mace handy when he was attacked by a knife-wielding passenger instead disarmed the man with a can of aerosol deodorant.

U.S. Marines moved into villages in Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan on Friday, meeting little resistance as they tried to win over local chiefs.

A top Iranian cleric said Friday that some of the detained Iranian staffers of the British Embassy in Tehran will be put on trial.

A military helicopter crashed in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing 26 security personnel, a Pakistan military official said.

Honduras' Supreme Court rebuffed a personal appeal from the Americas' top international diplomat Friday, refusing to restore ousted President Manuel Zelaya before a Saturday deadline.

Doctors have determined that John Demjanjuk is fit to stand trial on charges that he was an accessory to murder at a Nazi death camp, prosecutors said Friday.

Protesters linked arms across an entrance at Paris' main airport on Friday to try to keep passengers off a Yemeni flight to Comoros that saw a deadly crash this week after years of complaints.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with Myanmar's top military ruler Friday but failed to win any concessions or to get permission to visit opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Newly released documents and memos about the first years of operation of the jail at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, portray a chaotic operation that its own commanders described as dysfunctional.

Mexican authorities say two professional wrestlers found dead in a low-rent hotel in the capital may have been drugged to death by female robbers.

The institute obtained the FBI summaries through a Freedom of Information Act request and posted them on its Web site Wednesday.

The government will not dismantle overseas locations where a former Guantanamo detainee claims he was interrogated by the CIA, a prosecutor says.

The coup that deposed the president of Honduras exposed the small leverage that even millions of dollars in aid and longtime military cooperation will buy.

The Obama administration authorizes the seizure of assets of an extremist organization in Iraq and an Iranian backer of insurgents, saying both are responsible for deadly Iraqi attacks.