Barack Obama was famously able to impose discipline and control over his presidential campaign, but it didn't take long for him to discover running a transition is quite different.

A Seattle man who had wrapped himself in dozens of false identities for years was sentenced to 30 months in prison today, a lenient term considering the nature of his offense. A federal judge said Scott Andrew Shain's mental health was the only reason he didn't get more time.

A federal judge rejects the government's claim that 5 Algerian men are dangerous enemy combatants. One will remain incarcerated.

Congressional leaders agreed Thursday to give Detroit automakers more time to make their case for a $25 billion emergency bailout, but they demanded that General Motors, Ford and Chrysler provide detailed plans for using the money.

Yellowstone is a focal point as National Park Service officials, environmentalists and people lost without their electronic connections debate whether to let cellphone antennas sprout freely in America's great outdoors.

The CIA repeatedly misled Congress and the Justice Department in their investigations of the 2001 shoot-down of a Peruvian plane carrying U.S. missionaries, according to findings of an internal CIA probe released Thursday.

President-elect Barack Obama is likely to name Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve, as Treasury Secretary in a time of intense economic turmoil as he rounds out the upper echelon of his Cabinet, a senior Democratic official familiar with the deliberations said Friday. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in line to become Secretary of State, said through a spokesman that discussions were "very much on track" for her appointment but no final arrangement had been made.

Through the televised parliamentary brawling, the battle lines are becoming clear in the Iraqi political debate over a security agreement that would govern the last three years of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. And the pact appears not to be the main problem.

Metropolitan King County Council budget leaders presented a 2009 budget today that would protect 19 endangered sheriff's deputy positions and the special courts that send drug addicts and people with mental illness to treatment instead of jail.

In 2006, Alaska desperately needed cash to complete a museum featuring a mummified bison and other natural wonders of the frozen north. So the state dipped into its share of the landmark 1998 tobacco settlement.

A new study of the global future by U.S. intelligence agencies suggests al-Qaida soon could be on the decline, having alienated Muslim supporters with indiscriminate killing and inattention to the practical problems of poverty, unemployment and education.

The U.N., African Union and Arab nations struggled Thursday to respond to the surge of attacks, authorizing sanctions and calling for international peacekeepers to address the chaos in Somalia that has spawned an upsurge in sea banditry.

In a nationally televised show of unruffled resolve, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin vowed Thursday to protect an increasingly anxious country from a return to economic chaos.

Nicaragua's ruling Sandinista party won the large majority of municipal races, including leadership of the capital, Managua, in local elections that have sparked allegations of fraud and violent clashes, authorities announced Thursday.

There, for a final time at his Senate desk, stood Ted Stevens: longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history; shepherd of Alaska statehood; felon.

With no end in sight to economic bad news, President George W. Bush on Friday ensured that millions of laid-off workers will keep getting their unemployment checks as the year-end holidays approach.

Germany is dropping its pursuit of a ban on Scientology after finding insufficient evidence of illegal activity, security officials said Friday.

Two years after the government urged making HIV tests as common as cholesterol checks, there are small gains but still one in five people infected with the AIDS virus doesn't know it, scientists said Thursday.

Gov. Dave Heineman signed into law Friday a bill adding a 30-day age limit to a safe-haven law that allowed 35 children - including teenagers as old as 17 - to be abandoned at state hospitals. The law, approved hours earlier by the Legislature in a 45-3 vote, goes into effect Saturday, and makes Nebraska the 14th state with a 30-day age cap. It had been the only state with a safe-haven law without an age limit.

A confounding and perhaps divinely inspired Inauguration Day tradition is coming to an end: Handshake Man said he can't make it to the celebration Jan. 20.

Maj. James L. Fawcett died in September at the age of 89. He wanted his ashes taken to the spot where half of his 50-man platoon was killed during the Battle of Tarawa, one of World War II's most brutal battles.

President-elect Barack Obama and his wife have chosen Sidwell Friends School for their two daughters, opting for a private institution that another White House child, Chelsea Clinton, attended a decade ago.

After pushing steep discounts throughout November that are usually reserved for the day after Thanksgiving, retailers from Kohl's to Toys "R" Us are offering even bigger cuts and promotions for Black Friday in a frantic bid to pull in shoppers.

The World Health Organization said Friday that 294 people have died from a cholera outbreak exacerbated by the country's collapsing health care system.

A top Russian anti-AIDS coordinator on Friday lambasted the government's approach to fighting HIV, saying the number of registered cases was growing 10 percent a year despite increased federal funding.

Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer's books.

A radical Islamic group in Somalia said Friday it will fight the pirates holding a Saudi supertanker loaded with $100 million worth of crude oil.

Bob Jones University has apologized for racist policies including a one-time ban on interracial dating that wasn't lifted until nine years ago and its unwillingness to admit black students until 1971.

If only we could be a fly on the wall when our enemies are plotting to attack us. Better yet, what if that fly could record voices, transmit video and even fire tiny weapons?

Inmates with open, bleeding wounds routinely use communal showers and suicidal prisoners are sometimes kept for hours inside small cages, witnesses testified in a lawsuit over state prison crowding.

After the wedding in a Scottish castle, the mansion on a green English estate and the drinks in their own pub, Madonna and Guy Ritchie's eight-year marriage ended Friday in a dreary London courtroom.

Myanmar's courts continued a crackdown on activists Friday, handing out a 45-year prison sentence to a comedian who went to the delta to help cyclone victims and criticized the junta's slow relief response.

Gov. Sarah Palin has granted the traditional Thanksgiving pardon to one lucky turkey, but the video that shocked some viewers captured what was happening in the background.

Celebrity gossip, famous birthdays and other tidbits, compiled from Seattle Times news services.

A Chinese official said today that 19,065 of the people who died in May's massive earthquake in Sichuan province have been identified. Li Jiang, from the...

Fire investigators say they have found no sign of arson in a blaze that killed 27 horses at a thoroughbred training facility in western Kentucky.

NASA's revolutionary new space water recycling system is having serious hiccups.

Palestinians fired a rocket at an Israeli city near the Gaza Strip on Friday but caused no casualties, police said, as the Israeli military continued its closure of all crossings into the coastal territory because of ongoing rocket fire.

Looting soldiers tried to rape one woman and fatally shot another at a refugee camp, witnesses said Friday, as the United Nations prepared to send more peacekeepers to help protect traumatized civilians in eastern Congo.

One man has died of injuries from an oil refinery explosion and fire in Tyler, Texas.

FBI agents arrested a Boston city council member Friday after he was videotaped allegedly taking a $1,000 bribe from an undercover agent in an expanding investigation into corruption at City Hall and the Massachusetts Statehouse.

Four Camp Pendleton-based Marines, including one known as "Psycho," have pleaded not guilty in the execution-style slayings of a fellow Marine and his wife.

A suicide bomber drove his car into the gate of an army base in southern Afghanistan on Friday and detonated his explosives, killing three civilians, a provincial official said.

An all-black Civil War infantry unit honored in the Oscar-winning movie "Glory" with Denzel Washington is making a real-life comeback.

As more Americans turn to charity amid worsening economic gloom, operators of food banks and other aid groups are relying on the surprisingly resilient generosity of their neighbors and finding that even when times are tough, people still give.

Amsterdam will close almost a fifth of its marijuana cafes to comply with a national ban on having them near schools, the mayor said Friday.

The Associated Press has named two veteran editors to leadership positions in a new regional editing operation for the Eastern United States.

Top-seeded Russia held off the United States in the 38th Chess Olympiad in round eight of open division play Friday, but the Armenian team crushed France and stayed in first place.

American farmers have long worried about the declining population of honeybees, a key crop pollinator. But honeybees originally came from Europe, so can't U.S. farms get by without them - with a little help from good old American bugs whose ancestors were here before Columbus?

The BBC's governing body ruled Friday that the broadcaster acted appropriately when it suspended its star disc jockey and accepted the resignation of a fellow performer for leaving lewd messages on an actor's phone about his granddaughter.

Britain's foreign policy chief said Friday that Iran continues to pose the most serious threat to the world, warning that Tehran's suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons risks an arms race across the Middle East.

A Malaysian technology conglomerate pledged Friday to repay $900,000 to Hollywood star Bruce Willis, but denied any wrongdoing after he took legal action to demand a refund of his investment.

Archaeologists have unearthed an elaborately decorated 1,800-year-old chariot sheathed in bronze at an ancient Thracian tomb in southeastern Bulgaria, the head of the excavation said Friday. "The lavishly ornamented four-wheel chariot dates back to the end of the second century A.D.," Veselin Ignatov told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the site, near the southeastern village of Karanovo.

In a final diplomatic dash, President George W. Bush on Friday moved to steady a shuddering economy and speed up the demise of North Korea's nuclear weaponry.

While President-elect Barack Obama fills his Cabinet, many foodies are wondering who will fill the ones in his kitchen.

China launched a new verbal attack on the Dalai Lama's drive for Tibetan autonomy on Friday, vowing not to compromise with leaders of the Tibetan exile community meeting to debate the future of their movement.

A little over a quarter of the 70,000 people who died in a massive earthquake that struck Sichuan province in May have been identified, a Chinese official said Friday, as authorities rushed to prepare stricken areas for the coming winter.

A little over a quarter of the 70,000 people who died in a massive earthquake that struck Sichuan province in May have been identified, a Chinese official said Friday, as authorities rushed to prepare stricken areas for the coming winter.

A Chinese writer and journalist who was arrested after protesting against a power plant in southwest China was sentenced Friday to three years in prison on charges of subverting state power, his lawyer said.

In a Nov. 12 story, The Associated Press reported that the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was among the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit claiming racial discrimination by the Louisiana Road Home program, which provides rebuilding grants to Gulf Coast hurricane victims. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is providing legal representation for the plaintiffs in the suit, but is not a plaintiff itself.

Three people are dead after a fire that destroyed a restaurant and a home in the small Colorado town of Springfield.

Landslides triggered by a volcanic eruption injured nine people and destroyed more than 20 homes and five bridges in southwest Colombia, prompting a red alert for more activity.

In a Nov. 20 story about African negotiations on global warming, The Associated Press erroneously reported that China refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. China has signed and ratified the pact, but like other developing nations was not asked to reduce its emissions under the 1997 protocol.

European culture went digital - but it only lasted a day.

A former president of the Atlantic City Council has pleaded guilty to helping set up a political rival in a videotaped sex session.

FBI officials said Friday they arrested a man who threatened to blow up Cincinnati's football stadium, two airports, Ohio River bridges, and other landmarks.

Stocks are down, down, down. But student interest in economics appears to be trending upward.

Gov. Charlie Crist continued to veer away from his previous opposition to raising tuition with a proposal this week allowing for increases of up to 15 percent a year at all state universities. But a top Democratic lawmaker said it's the wrong time for that course as people struggle with foreclosures and layoffs.

A college student committed suicide by taking a drug overdose in front of a live webcam as some computer users egged him on, others tried to talk him out of it, and another messaged OMG in horror when it became clear it was no joke.

A French judge has filed preliminary anti-terrorist charges against the suspected leader of the Basque separatist group ETA, a judicial official said Thursday.

The son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi says Libya wants to put some of its $100 billion investment fund into American business and send thousands of students to study in the United States.

Germany has banned Hezbollah's television station on grounds that it violates the country's constitution, an Interior Ministry spokesman said Friday.

A federal grand jury has returned a 12-count indictment against a kosher slaughterhouse and some its managers on charges including conspiracy, harboring illegal immigrants and bank fraud.

Sure, there's plenty of pressure on Barack Obama. But imagine being his wife.

Greece, Turkey and Belarus have missed deadlines to destroy their land mine stockpiles, as required under an international treaty, said a report Friday by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

The U.S. military says a group of Iraqi soldiers has donated $500 to help California wildfire victims.

The party that Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi created more than a decade ago moved ahead with a plan to abandon its name and dissolve into another conservative bloc.

Police said Friday they were investigating whether stabbings that targeted two former Health Ministry officials and their wives was connected to the ministry's mishandling of millions of pension records.

Samurai warriors, housewives and children were crucified, thrown into hot springs and tortured, but refused to renounce their religion. Japan's extraordinary but relatively unknown history of Christian persecution is finally receiving recognition in a beatification of 188 martyrs.

The last plea has been entered in a brawl between rival biker gangs that left three people dead and dozens injured at a southern Nevada casino in 2002.

A school district in the state where HIV-positive Ryan White fought for the right to attend classes two decades ago is being sued by the family of a 14-year-old girl who says she was bullied so badly over her positive status that she left school.

Lebanese soldiers clashed with gunmen in a northern port city on Friday, killing one and wounding others, the army said.

Connecticut has become the first state in the nation to set standards for one of today's cooking staples - olive oil.

The spectacular fireworks were long over and the Olympic athletes had all gone home. But for Cai Shanhai and his wife, He Jingfeng, it was still a moment to savor as they stared up at the soaring steel arches of the Bird's Nest national stadium this week.

A man accused of beating his stepdaughter so severely that she suffered a permanent brain injury - triggering a right-to-die case - testified Friday that he never hit her and believed his wife's claims that the girl injured herself.

A federal appeals court has upheld a Michigan law designed to prevent oceangoing freight ships from bringing invasive species to the Great Lakes.

Michael Jackson's former personal assistant told a British court Friday that a Bahraini sheik who is now suing the singer was a generous friend, eager to give Jackson money and other gifts.

Former NFL star Michael Vick is back in Virginia to face state dogfighting charges.

A federal regulation aimed at preventing mad cow disease from getting into the food supply could create health risks of its own: many thousands of cattle carcasses rotting on farms, spreading germs, attracting vermin and polluting the water.

Thirty-one Nobel Peace Prize recipients have joined with the non-profit group Save the Children in calling for help for millions of children trapped in war zones around the world.

A mother and her three children were among the six people killed after a mudslide triggered by days of heavy rain buried houses in a southern Philippine gold mining town, officials said Friday.

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's plane made an emergency landing in Japan on Friday after her husband fell ill on board, officials said.

A high-ranking Vatican official says Pope Benedict XVI is considering introducing a change to the Mass liturgy.

A county prosecutor who brought indictments this week against Vice President Dick Cheney and others pounded his fist and shouted at the judge Friday during a routine hearing. Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra asked Presiding Judge Manuel Banales to recuse himself from the case, which alleges abuse at federally run prisons.

The director of Congo's Virunga Park says rangers who fled fighting between rebels and soldiers are returning to protect its endangered mountain gorillas.

George and Martha Washington, Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz" and other costumed characters greeted thousands of visitors Friday as the National Museum of American History reopened after a two-year, $85 million renovation.

An unstable cliff prompted officials Friday to permanently close some cabins in a popular Yosemite National Park lodge complex that has a long history of rockslides.

The lower house of Russia's parliament has given its final approval to a bill extending the presidential term from four to six years.

The voyage of the cruiser Peter the Great, scheduled to arrive in Venezuela next week with a squadron of other Russian warships, was meant to showcase the Kremlin's ability to project naval power abroad and reassert its claim to great power status.

Somali security forces and Islamic insurgents engaged in one of the fiercest gunbattles in recent weeks in the capital Friday, killing at least 17 people and wounding six, police and witnesses said.

Al-Qaida's offshoot in Algeria has carried out fewer terror attacks this year but some of those had a high number of casualties, an academic study said Friday.

Authorities say they have caught a gunman suspected of shooting a fellow student at Savannah State University.

A senior Syrian official on Friday all but ruled out new visits by U.N. inspectors probing allegations that his country had a covert program that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Out of the hundreds of Tibetan leaders who have flocked here for a pivotal summit on Tibet's future, few understand the hardships there better than a recently arrived barley farmer.

A U.N. panel urged the Chinese government on Friday to apologize to the victims of its crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square 19 years ago.

NATO is unlikely to follow the European Union in quickly re-establishing contacts with Russia that were suspended after the war in Georgia, senior U.S. officials said Friday.

A truck-driving thief made off with more than $3 million worth of merchandise from a venerable maker of cowboy boots and other footwear, authorities said.

A white teenager has received four life sentences for a shooting spree that killed four blacks and wounded eight, re-igniting racial tensions in post-apartheid South Africa.

A Missouri woman knew her 13-year-old neighbor was depressed and suicidal when she sent cruel Internet messages to the teenager, her former assistant testified. The girl killed herself after being told the world would be better off without her.

Japanese millionaire Daisuke Enomoto had planned to dress up as his favorite cartoon character in outer space and spent a $21 million to make it happen. Now he claims the company that was supposed make his dream come true brushed him aside with little more than a "sorry, no refunds."

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the release of five Algerians held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the continued detention of a sixth in a major blow to the Bush administration's strategy to keep terror suspects locked up without charges.

What Robert Gates once called "inconceivable to me" - his remaining as defense secretary beyond Inauguration Day - is looking a bit more conceivable to the rest of Washington.

Global warming could be a boon to Russia, a European country could be overrun by organized crime and the U.S. and its dollar could further decline in importance during the next two decades, says a U.S. intelligence report with predictions for the world in 2025.

Thousands of contractors, both private Americans and non-Iraqi foreigners working in key roles for the United States in Iraq, will lose immunity and be subject to Iraqi law under new security arrangements, Bush administration officials say.

A judge denied bail on Thursday for a woman accused of killing an FBI agent during a drug raid that led to her husband's arrest on cocaine-dealing charges.

A Metrolink commuter train sideswiped a freight train Thursday, causing no serious injuries but bringing back still-vivid memories of a deadly train wreck in the region just two months ago.

A defense contractor who once provided personal security for Afghanistan's president was charged with shooting a handcuffed Afghani civilian after hearing the man had inflicted serious burns on a fellow contractor, prosecutors said.

In 2006, Alaska desperately needed cash to complete a museum featuring a mummified bison and other natural wonders of the frozen north. So the state dipped into its share of the landmark 1998 tobacco settlement.

This ancient land is telling the world that it has a trendy, new replacement for its dreaded poppy crop: sweet, juicy pomegranates.

A man who was convicted as a juvenile of killing nine people at a Buddhist temple near Phoenix could go free after a federal appeals court threw out his confession Thursday, ruling that it was coerced.

Conjoined twin baby girls from Liberia who were traveling to New York for medical treatment died aboard a plane that was diverted to Canada on Thursday.

French authorities allege an Ottawa university professor bought a motorcycle used in a bombing that killed four people and injured 20 at a Paris synagogue in 1980, according to court documents released Thursday.

Retired Dallas police detective Jim Leavelle still gets letters from strangers because of that 1963 photo of him standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald.

Three former child soldiers from Africa announced the launch of a new U.N.-backed advocacy group Thursday to help other kids escape and heal from war.

A Federal Aviation Administration employee from Southern California took illegal perks from his job - including a plane, yachts and heavy-duty trucks - and an investigation continues into how widespread the practice was, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

A judge dismissed felony gun charges Thursday against Drew Peterson after prosecutors refused to hand over internal documents leading to their decision to arrest the former Bolingbrook police sergeant, who is suspected in the disappearance of his wife.

A man convicted of killing and beheading the 3-year-old daughter of the woman he would marry and dumping her body in the woods was sentenced Thursday to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Two white supremacists accused of plotting to kill President-elect Barack Obama and dozens of others face more federal charges in Tennessee.

The killing of an Ecuadorean immigrant by seven high school students was part of a spree in which the teenagers tormented other immigrants while armed with knives and BB guns, prosecutors said.

Matthew J. Cianciulli

City and state police have closed their investigations into last summer's shooting of Arkansas' Democratic Party chairman without offering an explanation of why the attack occurred.

Water regulators have taken a step toward banning septic tanks in the heart of Malibu, Calif., after a battle over bacterial pollution at popular beaches.

An agency director improperly used state computers to find personal information on "Joe the Plumber," a government watchdog said in a report released Thursday.

Texas executed a killer Thursday who was on parole when authorities say he stabbed his ex-girlfriend in a jealous rage after beating down the door to her Dallas-area apartment nearly a decade ago.

Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday called the federal government's efforts to help Texas recover from Hurricane Ike "underwhelming" and announced the formation of a state commission to help move the process along.

A grenade attack on protesters occupying the offices of Thailand's prime minister killed one person and wounded 29, dimming hopes that the country's fractious political crisis might ease.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Thursday to impose sanctions on pirates, arms smugglers, and perpetrators of instability in Somalia in a fresh attempt to help end years of lawlessness in the Horn of Africa nation.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Thursday to extend the European Union's peacekeeping force in Bosnia for a year, emphasizing the importance of the country's progress towards Euro-Atlantic integration.

The U.N. General Assembly's human rights committee voted Thursday for the second year in a row to urge a global moratorium on the death penalty.

A federal appeals court says parents cannot sue school districts to force them to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act.

Utah's chief federal judge will not be disciplined for donating money to Barack Obama's campaign.

The U.S. military says an American soldier has died of non-combat-related causes in Iraq.

As of Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008, at least 4,201 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

A doctor and his wife have been convicted of treating patients with a Botox knockoff at their Las Vegas clinic.

A Vermont legislator plans to introduce a bill to allow gay marriage in the state that first approved civil unions for same-sex couples.