The Republican presidential candidates are trying to avoid a debate on contraception and instead are looking to keep the focus of their criticism on President Barack Obama.More >>
Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are clashing on spending requests during a sharp confrontation that fellow Republican Newt Gingrich calls "silly" as the Republican presidential contenders' debate.More >>
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is explaining what he meant when he described himself as "severely conservative" at a conservative political meeting earlier this month.More >>
A federal judge has ruled that BP PLC and one of its minority partners in the blown-out Macondo well are liable for civil penalties under the Clean Water Act for their roles in the nation's worst offshore oil spill.More >>
East Texas police are seeking a beautician charged with unlicensed medical practice after a breast augmentation she's accused of performing left a customer hospitalized in critical condition.More >>
A Saudi Arabian teenager who authorities say swung his fist at a flight attendant and praised Osama bin Laden during a flight from Portland to Houston has appeared in court to hear the charges against him.More >>
Authorities say a teenager on a flight from Portland to Houston swung his fist at a flight attendant and was "speaking or singing about Usama bin Laden and his hatred of women" as the flight turned around.More >>
Residents living near the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso are mindful after a woman was struck by a stray bullet fired from the Mexican side, but say they don't plan to change their routines.More >>
The bulk of a man's childhood comic book collection that included many of the most prized issues ever published has sold for about $3.5 million.More >>
Two men arrested last fall with the nephew of the former boss of Mexico's Gulf cartel have been sentenced to time served for giving false statements to federal agents.More >>
T-Mobile USA, which just had its acquisition by AT&T blocked by regulators, is now urging the federal government to block another deal in the wireless world: Verizon's planned purchase spectrum from cable companies...More >>
A judge in Houston has been barred from hearing a neighboring county's cases in a dispute over a shoplifting charge against a friend's daughter.More >>
A hearing is set to determine whether a Texas man sentenced to death for killing his pregnant ex-girlfriend and her 7-year-old son should get a new trial.More >>
A British man who pleaded guilty is set to learn his punishment for helping a former Halliburton Co. subsidiary steer massive bribes to Nigerian officials to win more than $6 billion in construction contracts.More >>
A surging Rick Santorum is running even with Mitt Romney atop the Republican presidential field, but neither candidate is faring well against President Barack Obama eight months before Americans vote, a new survey shows.More >>
Rick Santorum is looking for another upset while Mitt Romney is hoping to keep his leading rival at bay as they prepare for the 20th debate of the race for the Republican presidential nomination.More >>
A new program hosted by the Culinary Institute of America is teaching wounded veterans who served during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to cook healthy meals.More >>
A county college in New Jersey has named a new leader to replace its former president, who resigned last year amid an investigation into allegations of financial impropriety.More >>
Three Texas men whom federal officials say were been linked to a gun used in a U.S. agent's death in Mexico have been sentenced after pleading guilty to weapons charges.More >>
Federal immigration agents are processing 87 suspected illegal immigrants found crowded into a house in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.More >>
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review appeals from two Texas death row inmates, including a man who suffocated a 2-year-old Utah girl on Christmas Day 1997 and buried her in a suitcase near Houston.More >>
One man's remarkable comic book collection that includes some of the most prized issues ever published is expected to fetch more than $2 million at auction.More >>
Los Angeles County prosecutors are opposing Dr. Conrad Murray's bid for release on bail while he appeals his conviction of involuntary manslaughter in Michael Jackson's death.More >>
El Paso's mayor is appealing for public calm after a woman was wounded while shopping downtown by what appears to be a stray bullet from neighboring Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.More >>
A uniformed officer will ride each Dallas-area commuter train after a series of violent incidents, including the shooting death of a person on a trail platform.More >>
American Airlines workers in Tulsa say they are stepping up efforts to save hundreds of local jobs that could be on the bankrupt company's chopping block.More >>
A federal judge has returned to state court a lawsuit by Montana landowners whose property was contaminated with crude oil from a broken Exxon Mobil pipeline.More >>
A natural gas driller and a pipeline company are proposing to build a new pipeline to carry natural gas from Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale to the New York and New England markets.More >>
The lawyer credited with giving Albuquerque real estate executive and admitted Ponzi schemer Doug Vaughan the idea for raising cash through promissory notes has reached a settlement in the case.More >>
Three men have been arrested and a police-issued rifle missing from a South Texas department has been recovered in a bust outside a grocery store.More >>
Searchers on the ground and by air have been trying to find a small airplane that disappeared from radar and lost radio contact over West Texas.More >>
Newt Gingrich is asserting that President Barack Obama pursues an "outrageously anti-American" energy policy that snubs the Keystone oil pipeline and puts too much stock in electric car technology to wean the country from...More >>
Rocker Bret Michaels and Grammy-winning singer Cyndi Lauper were expected to usher in Mardi Gras with musical performances in the wee hours of the morning Tuesday during a glitzy ball following the Orpheus parade.More >>
A federal judge in Lubbock will hear evidence and arguments on the mental competency of a Saudi man accused of trying to make a weapon of mass destruction.More >>
Testimony is resuming in the North Texas trial of a man accused of torturing his former neighbor on a deer-skinning device and chaining her to a bed after kidnapping her.More >>
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is to spend a second day reviewing Customs and Border Protection operations in the Rio Grande Valley.More >>
Officials in a Dallas suburb are warning that smoke could make driving hazardous on some major highways because of a prescribed burn at a nearby state park.More >>
With Texas in one of the worst droughts in its history, water officials are widely expected to announce March 1 that they won't release irrigation water for thousands of farmers in the state's rice-growing region.More >>
An unmistakable dynamic is playing out in the money game among Republican presidential candidates: New "super" political action committees are growing more powerful than the campaigns they support.More >>
By The Associated Press Authorities were searching early Tuesday for a small airplane that disappeared from radar and radio contact the night before.More >>
A Nuevo Leon state official says nine guards have confessed to helping Zetas drug gangsters escape from prison before other Zetas slaughtered 44 rival inmates.More >>
A San Antonio police officer is hospitalized after a pickup truck hit him as he worked an accident scene on Interstate 410 on the northwest side of the city.More >>
The rocket arcing up into the northern lights above Alaska was on its way to measure the effects of the celestial phenomenon's effects on global positioning systems.More >>
Some small business owners are complaining that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement audits touted as deterrents to hiring illegal immigrants are instead becoming a "money grab" through fines over paperwork errors.More >>
Mitt Romney's presidential campaign is not being warmly received by at least one group of Mormons. That's the fast-growing group of Latino Mormons.More >>
Officials say members of the hyper-violent Zetas drug cartel stabbed and bludgeoned 44 members of the rival Gulf cartel to death and then staged a mass escape, apparently with the help of prison authorities.More >>
Ron Paul may not win the Republican nomination for president - he has yet to win a single state - but his strategy of trying to amass delegates in caucus states could land him a prominent role at the party's national...More >>
Carnival in New Orleans is building toward the out-of-control crescendo of Fat Tuesday. But Barry Kern and his team of float-builders and artists are already planning for next year's party.More >>
Authorities say two people are dead and four others injured after a private airplane from Texas crashed just short of an airport runway during a heavy snowstorm in Colorado.More >>
The Texas Farm Bureau's head state lobbyist says state lawmakers have yet to craft a way to pay for a state water plan Texas developed in 1997 in response to a drought.More >>
Austin's city-owned electric utility says a malfunction in its bill collection system has, since October, been producing bills charging some businesses owing about $3,000 amounts of up to $300,000, instead.More >>
A South Texas sheriff's department's lavish use of forfeited drug and weapons trafficking proceeds on such items as cedar paneling for his office has prompted the state attorney general's office to launch an...More >>
A judge overseeing a lawsuit brought by the family of a California boy molested by his troop leader has ordered the Boy Scouts of America to hand over confidential files detailing allegations of sexual abuse by Scout leaders...More >>
In the first 16 days since abandoning his presidential campaign, Gov. Rick Perry has been to his office just three times and stayed no longer than three hours each time, according to a published report.More >>
A federal court's decision to delay the Texas primaries means the candidates for U.S. Senate have a long and potentially expensive slog ahead of them.More >>
Two fugitives wanted in Kentucky for rape and sexual abuse were caught in Texas, after police investigators found out they had been communicating with a friend on Facebook.More >>
The deadly office shooting in California involving a federal immigrations supervisor and a special agent is the latest mark against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency created after the 2001 terror attacks.More >>
The 8th Court of Appeals has blocked an election to recall the El Paso mayor and two council members who voted to restore benefits to city workers' domestic partners.More >>
Prosecutors are dropping a case against a soldier who was arrested after trying to go through a security checkpoint at a Texas airport with military-grade explosives.More >>
According to a letter from a school district attorney to the state attorney general, surveillance cameras in a Brownsville middle school partially captured the fatal shooting by police of a 15-year old student armed with a...More >>
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Texas says Johnson's former adviser, special counsel Harry McPherson Jr., has died at the age of 82.More >>
Dozens of frustrated investors have crowded into a Houston courtroom to watch the trial of Texas tycoon R. Allen Stanford, who is accused of bilking thousands of people in a $7 billion Ponzi scheme.More >>
A train derailment in the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth area has led to the evacuations of five buildings, although initial fears of hazardous materials have eased.More >>
Investigators say DNA has linked a Colorado inmate suspected of being the "Ether Man" serial rapist to a string of sexual assaults that roiled the University of Oklahoma campus from 1985 to 2005.More >>
A minority partner in BP's blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico has agreed to pay $90 million in a settlement with the federal government and Gulf states to resolve allegations the company violated the Clean Water Act.More >>
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation says a 17-month-old Waurika girl who was allegedly abducted by her father has been found safe in Florida.More >>
An Ohio teen has pleaded not guilty to killing one man and attempting to kill a second in a deadly Craigslist robbery scheme that targeted older and single out-of-work men.More >>
A federal appeals court in Chicago is criticizing the U.S. Bureau of Prisons for sending a convicted former U.S. deputy marshal to the same prison where his father died decades ago.More >>
President Felipe Calderon on Thursday unveiled a "No More Weapons!" billboard made with crushed firearms and placed near the U.S. border. He urged the United States to stop the flow of weapons into Mexico.More >>
A University of Texas study says there's no direct link between groundwater contamination and a controversial process to extract oil and gas known as fracking.More >>
Police say two men were shot in the leg during a New Orleans parade that's part of the run-up to Mardi Gras, and a 16-year-old boy was arrested.More >>
Most people think of New Orleans when they hear the words "Mardi Gras." But the Southern tradition is celebrated in plenty of other places along the Gulf Coast.More >>
Jurors have heard an audio-recorded interview of a Texas man telling investigators he never planned to kill his ex-neighbor after he kidnapped and sexually assaulted her.More >>
Odessa city officials have announced tougher water-use restrictions to cope with reduced water deliveries by the Colorado River Municipal Water District.More >>
A federal judge will allow prosecutors to see most of a prison psychologist's personal notes pertaining to the suspect in the Tucson shooting that wounded then-U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.More >>
State transportation officials have completed a feasibility study into launching passenger rail service from Austin to Houston via Bryan-College Station.More >>
Environmental groups say a blowout at an exploratory well on Alaska's North Slope underscores the threat to the marine environment if the Obama administration gives Arctic offshore drilling the green light.More >>
Planned Parenthood's president says the group is working again with Susan G. Komen for the Cure - "great news and a wonderful ending" to what wasn't such a happy story.More >>
Refining cutbacks due to slumping demand and global political and economic tensions are being blamed for climbing gasoline prices in Texas and nationally.More >>
By ERIC OLSON AP Sports Writer A drug-testing expert says the marijuana bust at TCU this week is symbolic of a growing problem in college athletics.More >>
If Texas tycoon R. Allen Stanford decides to testify in his ongoing fraud trial in Houston, it could be the most important sales pitch he's ever had to make.More >>
More than 1,000 people attended the world premiere of the independent film Deadline, which was made in Nashville and inspired by the true story of how a newspaper helped solve a small-town racially motivated killing.More >>
Hoping to placate critics of a proposed coal swap involving a Montana American Indian tribe, U.S. Sen. Max Baucus is offering new legislation to make the deal more balanced.More >>
A Houston-area jury has returned a $20 million verdict for a rape victim who accused her apartment complex of not telling residents about other attacks.More >>
Closing statements are scheduled as State Bar of Texas wraps up its case against a West Texas attorney who has helped wrongly convicted ex-inmates get state compensation.More >>
A South Texas jury has sentenced a woman to two years in prison for driving drunk and causing a fatal 2007 wreck in which paramedics mistakenly believed a victim was dead hours prematurely.More >>
The driver of a Central Texas school bus involved in a collision that injured 32 people, including 29 children, has died of his injuries almost a month after the crash.More >>
A woman already accused of abducting her 11-year-old daughter from her Fort Worth home and taking her away to New Mexico is now accused of threatening to kill the girl.More >>
A Dallas woman has agreed to a 30-year federal prison term and a $250,000 fine, admitting that she used her cellphone to taking and sending sexually explicit images of a 6-year-old child.More >>
A man described by U.S. officials as an agent of Mexico's notorious Gulf drug cartel has been sentenced to 27 years in a U.S. prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy in a Gulf Cartel drug smuggling operation.More >>