Nation and World News

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – Someone fired gunshots near the campus of Santa Monica College shortly before noon Friday, police said, and several people were reported to be wounded.

WASHINGTON – The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell 11,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 346,000, a level consistent with steady job growth.

COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France — Veterans of the 1944 Normandy landings gathered Thursday at the site of history's largest amphibious invasion for a day of ceremonies marking D-Day's 69th anniversary.

WASHINGTON — America as a whole has regained all the household wealth it lost to the Great Recession and then some, thanks to higher stock and home prices.

WASHINGTON — The top U.S. intelligence official denounced the disclosure of highly secret documents Thursday and sought to set the record straight about how the government collects intelligence about people's telephone and Internet use. He said he was declassifying some aspects of the monitoring to help Americans understand it better.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Two Ohio high school football players convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl last year will be classified as sex offenders at a hearing next week.

BEN-GURION AIRPORT, Israel – In an expansive hangar in central Israel, workers toil on one of the world’s most contentious aircraft, fitting dozens of drones with advanced sensors, cameras and lasers before they are shipped to militaries worldwide to perform highly sensitive tasks.

In suburban Atlanta, northern Idaho and a number of other places, churches have moved swiftly to sever ties with the Boy Scouts of America in protest over the vote last month to let openly gay boys participate in Scouting.

BAALBEK, Lebanon – Syrian troops and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies captured a strategic border town Wednesday after a grueling three-week battle, dealing a severe blow to rebels and opening the door for President Bashar Assad’s regime to seize back the country’s central heartland.

NEW YORK – A mom sits at her kitchen table when her grade schooler saunters up with a big box of Cheerios.

DALLAS – Susan G. Komen for the Cure is canceling half of its three-day charity walks next year because of a drop in participation levels, a spokeswoman for the Dallas-based breast cancer organization said Wednesday.

DUBAI, United Arab

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. – The American soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, many of them women and children who were asleep in their villages, pleaded guilty to murder Wednesday and acknowledged to a judge that there was “not a good reason in this world” for his actions.

WASHINGTON – Defying Republican critics, President Barack Obama named outspoken diplomat Susan Rice as his national security adviser Wednesday, giving her a larger voice in U.S. foreign policy despite accusations that she misled the nation in the aftermath of the deadly attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

WASHINGTON – A century of laws and rules curbing political activity by tax-exempt organizations has left us with this: One statute says to qualify, groups must engage “exclusively” in social welfare projects while a regulation eases the threshold to “primarily.”