LOS ANGELES (AP) - There's no mistaking the similarities. A childhood on a dusty farm, a love of fast vehicles, a rebel who battles an overpowering empire - George Lucas is the hero he created, Luke Skywalker.
NEW YORK (AP) - More New Yorkers got power Saturday for the first time since Superstorm Sandy struck the region, but frustrations mounted over gasoline shortages as refueling sites turned into traffic jams of horn-honking confusion.
BEIRUT (AP) - Syrian rebels launched a dawn assault Saturday on a strategic airbase in the north of the country, trying to disrupt strikes by warplanes and helicopters that pound rebel-held towns and give the regime of President Bashar Assad a major edge in the civil war.
NEW YORK (AP) - For the past three years, the Internal Revenue Service hasn't been investigating complaints of partisan political activity by churches, leaving religious groups who make direct or thinly veiled endorsements of political candidates unchallenged.
MENTOR, Ohio (AP) - Reaching for the finish line, Republican Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama embarked Saturday on the final 72-hour haul of their long, grinding quest for victory, swatting at one another over what should motivate Americans to vote and making closing arguments that offer dueling pictures of what the next four years can and should bring.
SACRAMENTO (AP) - An Arizona group can continue to withhold documents related to an $11 million contribution to a California political action committee while it appeals a lower court ruling, California's 3rd District Court of Appeal ruled Friday.
PHOENIX (AP) - A federal appeals court is poised to consider Arizona's earliest-in the-nation ban of most abortions at 20 weeks of pregnancy amid debate over both its legality and its practical impact on women if allowed to take effect.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - An elephant in a South Korean zoo is using his trunk to pick up not only food, but also human vocabulary.
BROOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) - As police frantically worked to figure out how his fiancée's 24-year-old daughter had vanished, a Michigan pastor who had turned to God to shed his violent past went to his flock with a request: pray for her.
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Five women have been burned - two critically - in a kitchen fire at a dorm at California State University Los Angeles.
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) - For more than five months - while Julie Cervera struggled to pay a $600 electrical bill, feed her family and keep the cable company from shutting off her service because she couldn't pay - she was a millionaire without knowing it.
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Supporters of a ballot proposal to label cereals, sodas and other products containing genetically modified ingredients say their effort is about empowering consumers who deserve to know what's in their food.
SANTA PAULA, Calif. (AP) - A Ventura County field worker has been killed after being pulled into a machine that digs post holes.
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Prosecutors refusing to accept an appellate court's ruling in the Anna Nicole Smith case asked the court on Friday to change its decision and allow her former boyfriend and manager to be retried.
NEW YORK (AP) - From "Livin' on a Prayer" to "The Living Proof," every song Friday at NBC's benefit concert for superstorm Sandy victims became a message song.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) - The mayor of Kansas City says search crews have found a body in the rubble of a Kansas City restaurant destroyed by an explosion.
NEW YORK (AP) - The scene: Tehran's Mehrabad airport, January 1980. Six U.S. diplomats, disguised as a fake sci-fi film crew, are about to fly to freedom with their CIA escorts. But suddenly there's a moment of panic in what had been a smooth trip through the airport.
WASHINGTON (AP) - As public evidence mounts that the Chinese military is responsible for stealing massive amounts of U.S. government data and corporate trade secrets, the Obama administration is eyeing fines and other trade actions it may take against Beijing or any other country guilty of cyberespionage.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - A gas explosion that sparked a massive, block-engulfing blaze in an upscale Kansas City shopping district injured 14 people, a city official said Tuesday evening, adding it is believed that an accident by a utility contractor may have caused the blast.