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NEW ORLEANS – Danny Platt said he was under a lot of pressure. He apparently owed his estranged wife $4,000 in back child support. But there were no signs of stress when the 22-year-old father, accused of killing his 2-year-old son over the child support debt, went to pick up …

NEW YORK – A way of preserving the chances of having a child for women and girls facing cancer treatment that will leave them infertile has been demonstrated to work, for the first time. Specialists at McGill University in Montreal have developed a protocol in which they retrieve immature eggs …

For top seeds Pittsburgh and Louisville, Sunday should have been the day when both teams regained their swagger after some uneasy moments against 16th seeds East Tennessee State and Morehead State in the first round. But in each case, it didn’t happen. The Panthers struggled to defeat eighth-seeded Oklahoma State, …

JERUSALEM – Authorities say an Israeli hiker who was rescued from a minefield fell to his death from an army helicopter that was evacuating him. The 24-year-old man from an Arab village in northern Israel was hiking with some friends Wednesday when he inadvertently stumbled into a minefield left over …

Wait! Did you hear that whooshing sound? A small asteroid buzzed by Earth Monday, though only real astronomy geeks in the Pacific would have noticed. The rock, estimated to be no more than 200 feet wide, zoomed past our planet at an altitude of 40,000 miles at 1:44 p.m. universal …

NEW YORK – Former General Motors Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner won’t get a severance payment from the automaker, but he’ll still get a pension and other benefits worth an estimated $23 million. In nearly 32 years with the company, Wagoner accrued pension benefits that the company valued …

CHICAGO – Hundreds of Chicago firefighters worked to put out a high-rise fire that left one person dead and 12 people injured. The fire sent flames shooting out of the condo building in the city’s Streeterville neighborhood. More than 200 residents ran out into a bitterly cold Chicago morning after …

BOISE, Idaho – The Idaho Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that two orphaned children will remain with their grandmother in Argentina, not with family members in California who also wanted custody. The ruling means that Alden and Aliana Heiss will stay with Violeta Conti in Ushuaia, a region dubbed “the end …

WASHINGTON – Democrats in the Senate have beat back a GOP filibuster of must-pass legislation that wraps up the bulk of the remaining congressional agenda besides health care. The measure is anchored by a $626 billion Pentagon funding bill, but it also carries short-term extensions of unemployment benefits, highway funding, …

OMAHA, Neb. – Holiday travelers battled slick, icy roads and flight cancellations and delays on Wednesday as a major winter storm began to spread across much of the nation’s midsection — and the worst of the weather was still expected to come. The slow-moving storm was likely to intensify Thursday …