Wire
Obama, Romney seek support from women after debate
MOUNT VERNON, Iowa (AP) — One day after their contentious, finger-pointing debate, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney vied aggressively for the support of women voters Wednesday, as they and their running mates charged across nearly a half-dozen battleground states in the close race for the White House with 20 days to run. Not even Republicans disputed that Obama’s debate performance was much stronger than the listless showing t...
full story
Defendants return to Guantanamo to be tried by military
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Five Guantanamo prisoners charged in the Sept. 11 attacks returned before a military tribunal Monday, forgoing the protests that turned their last appearance into an unruly 13-hour spectacle. But the apparent cooperation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has said he masterminded the worst terror attack on U.S. soil, and four codefendants did little to speed up proceedings that have stuck in a legal and polit...
full story
Romney crowds begin to surge
SIDNEY, Ohio (AP) — The crowds tell the story. As Election Day nears, Mitt Romney is drawing large and excited throngs. Look to dusty Iowa cornfields, rain-soaked Virginia parks, the muddy fields of the Shelby County Fairgrounds, where a crowd of 9,500 — almost half of this western Ohio town — gathered among the barns and stables on a frigid October evening this week to glimpse the Republican presidential contender. “Where else would we want t...
full story
Retired KU professor wins geology award
LAWRENCE (AP) — Paul Enos thought he’d be a dairy farmer until midway through his senior year of high school. He grew up on a farm near Perry, and he assumed he’d follow in his father’s footsteps. That was until his dad had a talk with him. “My dad persuaded me that I probably wasn’t farm material,” Enos said. “I was always thinking about something else and forgetting to do something crucial.” His father, who’d taken a college geology course a...
full story
Court sets hearing for soldier accused in Afghan rampage
JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. (AP) — A hearing for the soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in March has been set for Nov. 5 at an Army base in Washington state, with villagers expected to testify by video from Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is scheduled to appear at Joint Base Lewis-McChord for the pretrial hearing, which is expected to last two weeks, Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield said. The second week of ...
full story
Despite debt crisis, EU wins Nobel Peace Prize
OSLO, Norway (AP) — For fostering peace on a continent ravaged by war, the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The Norwegian prize jury urged all Europeans to remember those efforts as they tackle the debt crisis tearing at the 27-nation bloc. The award was hailed at EU headquarters in Brussels and by pro-EU government leaders across the continent but derided by “euroskeptics” who consider the EU an elitist superstate that stri...
full story
Chinese writer wins Nobel prize
BEIJING (AP) — Novelist Mo Yan, this year’s Nobel Prize winner for literature, is practiced in the art of challenging the status quo without offending those who uphold it. Mo, whose popular, sprawling, bawdy tales bring to life rural China, is the first Chinese winner of the literature prize who is not a critic of the authoritarian government. And Thursday’s announcement by the Swedish Academy brought an explosion of pride across Chinese socia...
full story
U.S. targets finances of violent street gang
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration declared the ultra-violent street gang MS-13 to be an international criminal group on Thursday, an unprecedented crackdown targeting the finances of the sprawling U.S. and Central American gang infamous for hacking and stabbing victims with machetes. The Treasury Department formally designated MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, a transnational criminal organization. The aim is to freeze it out of the U.S. fi...
full story
Sprint confirms talks
NEW YORK (AP) — Sprint Nextel Corp. on Thursday said Japanese cellphone company Softbank Corp. is in talks about making a potential substantial investment in the U.S. company. Sprint, the third-largest cellphone company in the U.S., said the deal could be big enough to involve a “change of control” of the company. It didn’t provide any other details. The news sent Sprint shares as high as $6.04, the highest level since 2008. In midday trading,...
full story
Court questions affirmative action
WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court justices sharply questioned the University of Texas’ use of race in college admissions Wednesday in a case that could lead to new limits on affirmative action. The court heard arguments in a challenge to the program from a white Texan who contends she was discriminated against when the university did not offer her a spot in 2008. The court’s conservatives cast doubt on the program that uses race as one among man...
full story
Two U.S. scientists win Nobel chemistry prize
NEW YORK (AP) — Two Americans won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for studies of how the cells in our bodies pick up signals as diverse as hormones, smells, flavors and light — work that is key to developing better medicines. Those signals are received by specialized proteins on cell surfaces. Dr. Robert Lefkowitz and Dr. Brian Kobilka made groundbreaking discoveries about the inner workings of those proteins, mainly in the 1980s, the R...
full story
Global warming adds Antartic ice
WASHINGTON (AP) — The ice goes on seemingly forever in a white pancake-flat landscape, stretching farther than ever before. And yet in this confounding region of the world, that spreading ice may be a cockeyed signal of man-made climate change, scientists say. This is Antarctica, the polar opposite of the Arctic. While the North Pole has been losing sea ice over the years, the water nearest the South Pole has been gaining it. Antarctic sea ice...
full story
Sandusky gets least 30 years, denies wrongdoing 

BELLEFONTE, Pa. (AP) — In what sounded at times like a locker room pep talk, Jerry Sandusky rambled in his red prison suit about being the underdog in the fourth quarter, about forgiveness, about dogs and about the movie "Seabiscuit." With his accusers seated behind him in the courtroom, he denied committing "disgusting acts" against children and instead painted himself as the victim. And then, after he had said his piece, a judge sentenced hi...
full story
Students use tech for ghost-town research
INMAN (AP) — Ghost towns don’t have real ghosts, these fourth-graders have learned. “A town is a ghost town because there is nobody there,” said Inman Elementary student Dantlie Raney. “Everybody left it.” It’s part of teacher Bentley Richert’s Kansas history lesson. Most of his students didn’t know the definition of a ghost town, or that Kansas has more than 6,000 of them — towns that expanded with dreams of a future before disappearing from ...
full story
Al-Qaida makes comeback in Iraq
BAGHDAD (AP) — Al-Qaida is rebuilding in Iraq and has set up training camps for insurgents in the nation's western deserts as the extremist group seizes on regional instability and government security failures to regain strength, officials say. Iraq has seen a jump in al-Qaida attacks over the last 10 weeks, and officials believe most of the fighters are former prisoners who have either escaped from jail or were released by Iraqi authorities f...
full story
Gunmen steal Mexican drug cartel leader’s body
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican marines gunned down one of Mexico's most feared drug lords outside a baseball game near the Texas border, then handed over the body to local authorities in a town where it was snatched by armed men in a pre-dawn raid on a funeral home, officials said Tuesday. The theft of the body believed to belong to Zetas founding member Heriberto Lazcano adds a bizarre and embarrassing twist to one of the most significant victori...
full story
NATO supports Turkey in standoff
BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO is ready to defend Turkey, the alliance’s top official said Tuesday, in a direct warning to Syria after a week of cross-border artillery and mortar exchanges dramatically escalated tensions between the two countries. Ankara has sent additional fighter jets to reinforce an air base close to the frontier with Syria where shells killed five Turkish civilians last week, sparking fears of a wider regional crisis. Syria has defe...
full story
Obama looks to regroup after debate
WASHINGTON (AP) — As the White House race shows signs of tightening nationally, President Barack Obama’s campaign is banking on a massive get-out-the-vote operation and state-by-state shades of economic improvement to maintain its apparent polling edge in battlegrounds from Ohio to Virginia. Republican Mitt Romney, re-energized by last week’s debate, is flashing new confidence on the campaign trail and pressing toward the political center on b...
full story
School analyst says amount of money doesn’t matter much
TOPEKA (AP) — A Kansas school funding task force heard from a policy analyst Monday who said what matters isn’t the amount of money spent on K-12 education but how it’s spent. Dave Trabert, president of the Kansas Policy Institute, a conservative, free-market research and advocacy group, told members of the task force appointed by Gov. Sam Brownback that spending data and test scores suggest that subtle changes in yearly spending don’t greatly...
full story
Re-elected Chavez may face economic limits 

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — During his re-election campaign, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez promised to deepen the public aid programs and reforms that have formed his vaunted "21st century socialism." That message won him a surprising 11-percentage point win Sunday in what many had seen as a tight race. Still, he's set to start a fourth presidential term under the toughest circumstances he's faced with the prospect that his government's free-s...
full story