When Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy called for the Legislature's next special session to be held in Wasilla, some agreed with him that a change of venue would be good for lawmakers struggling to finish their work after a drawn-out five months at the state capital. Others called it a means of intimidation or cited security and logistical concerns.

While the Winter Olympics still has issues attracting bidders, two candidates have stayed on Monday's ballot to pick the 2026 host. The contest is formally a choice between Milan-Cortina and Stockholm-Are. Effectively it is northern Italy against Sweden and Latvia as the costs and duties of Olympic hosting shift from cities to regions and multiple nations.

A decade after seemingly wrapping up "The Hunger Games," Suzanne Collins is bringing readers back to Panem. A prequel, set 64 years before the beginning of her multimillion-selling trilogy, is coming next year. The novel, currently untitled, is scheduled for release on May 19, 2020. Collins said in a statement Monday that she would go back to the years following the so-called "Dark Days," the failed rebellion in Panem.

The off-duty officer who shot and killed a man inside a Southern California Costco last week was attacked without warning as he held his toddler son, the policeman's attorney said Monday. Attorney David Winslow said his client — a Los Angeles Police Department officer whom he wouldn't name — was struck from behind without a word being spoken Friday night as he fed his son samples of teriyaki chicken.

Jennifer Pinckney was hiding under a desk holding the mouth of her then-6-year-old daughter when Dylann Roof fired more than 70 shots in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine black worshippers. The new documentary, "Emanuel," explores life after the tragic shooting on June 17, 2015, as family members, friends and the community try to heal through faith and forgiveness. Pinckney's husband, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was one of the nine killed by Roof, who sat through 45 minutes of Bible study at the church before firing shots. Pinckney and her daughter, Malana, were in the reverend's office when they heard gun shots in another room.

Uncollected thrash is piling up on the streets of the southern Bosnian city of Mostar — one of the Balkan nation's main tourist destinations — since residents begun blocking access to the city's only landfill, insisting that it poses serious health and environmental risks. The landfill, located in a residential area, has operated since the 1960s. It's supposed to be for non-hazardous household waste but protesters say authorities in recent years have allowed businesses to dump hazardous animal and medical waste in it as well as wastewater treatment sludge.

A century-old tree with a long trunk and bushy branches that some believe was the inspiration for fictional Truffula trees in Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax" has fallen in a coastal San Diego park. Officials are investigating why the wind-swept Monterey cypress toppled in Ellen Browning Scripps Park last week.

The murder of a pharmacist who was raped and strangled in her home in a South Dakota city more than half a century ago has been solved with the use of DNA technology and genealogy databases, police said. Investigators believe Eugene Carroll Field killed 60-year-old Gwen Miller in 1968 when he was a 25-year-old living in Rapid City, Detective Wayne Keefe said at a news conference Monday. He said there was enough evidence to charge Field with first-degree murder, but that he died in 2009.

After decades of improvement, America's air may not be getting any cleaner. Over the last two years the nation had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data shows. While it remains unclear whether this is the beginning of a trend, health experts say it's troubling to see air quality progress stagnate. There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980.

California attorney Michael Avenatti learned Tuesday that he faces a November trial date on charges he tried to extort millions of dollars from Nike. The Nov. 12 trial date was set by U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe at a pretrial hearing in Manhattan.

The father of a victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre has won a defamation lawsuit against the authors of a book that claimed the shooting never happened — the latest victory for victims' relatives who have been taking a more aggressive stance against conspiracy theorists. The book, "Nobody Died at Sandy Hook," has also been pulled from shelves to settle claims against its publisher filed by Lenny Pozner, whose 6-year-old son Noah was killed in the shooting.

Police are looking for a fourth person and haven't recovered the gun involved in a shooting at a rally for the NBA champion Raptors that wounded four people and sent thousands fleeing, authorities said Tuesday. Toronto Police Chief Marc Saunders said they are looking for a male who was wearing a white button down T-shirt at Monday's shooting at city hall square, less than a block from where the players and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sat on stage.

A federal watchdog agency said Tuesday that public schools have significantly underreported their use of restraint and seclusion to control students' behavior. The agency said seven out of 10 of more than 17,000 U.S. districts reported zero incidents of students being physically restrained or isolated in a separate area. The extreme measures are supposed to be used only when students are likely to hurt themselves or others but have been found to be disproportionately used on students with disabilities and on boys.

U.S. authorities seized 33,000 pounds, or 15,000 kilograms, of cocaine from a ship at Philadelphia's port in what they described as one of the largest drug busts in American history. They said the haul could have been worth more than $1 billion on the street.

Federal authorities say a 39-year-old Connecticut man has been caught trying to smuggle nearly three dozen live finches through John F. Kennedy Airport in order to sell them for singing competitions. Francis Gurahoo was arrested after arriving on a flight from Guyana. Prosecutors say customs officials found the 34 live birds in his carry-on luggage hidden inside individual plastic hair curlers.

A California utility agreed Tuesday to pay $1 billion to 14 local governments to cover damages from a series of deadly wildfires caused by its downed power lines. The settlement is a sliver of the more than $30 billion in potential damages Pacific Gas & Electric is facing in lawsuits filed by local governments, insurance companies and private property owners.

The Chicago White Sox plan to extend the protective netting to the foul poles at Guaranteed Rate Field, becoming the first major league team to take that step since a couple of high-profile injuries this spring increased the focus on fan safety at ballparks. The White Sox and Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, which owns the ballpark, are hoping to complete the project this season.

A decorated Navy SEAL stabbed to death a wounded and captive teenage Islamic State fighter in Iraq and then bragged about it, a military prosecutor told jurors Tuesday during opening statements in a politically charged court-martial. Lt. Brian John projected photos of the dead prisoner in the military courtroom, along with a text message Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher sent to friends with the image. "Good story behind this," Gallagher wrote. "Got him with my hunting knife."

Americans gave less money to charities last year partly because the Republican tax law changes made many people ineligible for tax breaks that can inspire donations. Giving by individuals fell an estimated 3.4%, after adjusting for inflation, last year, according to a report released Tuesday by Giving USA. The numbers reflect the first year of the 2017 tax overhaul that expanded the standard deduction, a simpler way of filing taxes, but also excluded millions of taxpayers from claiming a tax break for donating to charity.

The president was named Reagan, and Iran and Iraq were locked in a horrific war with each other over control of land and the Persian Gulf. The United States and other nations entered the fringes of the conflict when the warring neighbors launched attacks on international oil tankers transiting the strategic waterway. The U.S. Navy was among several forces that began to escort the vessels, clear mines floating in the sea and patrol the shores in search of missile batteries, launching what became known as the “tanker war” of the 1980s. Today, as the Trump administration and Iran trade accusations and insults, tensions have soared once again in the volatile region, with the U.S. blaming several tanker explosions on Iran and stoking fears of a broader conflict and a new, more dangerous tanker war.

Undaunted by a dangerous journey over thousands of miles, people fleeing economic hardship and human rights abuses in African countries are coming to the U.S.-Mexico border in unprecedented numbers, surprising Border Patrol agents more accustomed to Spanish-speaking migrants. Officials in Texas and even Maine are scrambling to absorb the sharp increase in African migrants. They are coming to America after flying across the Atlantic Ocean to South America and then embarking on an often harrowing overland journey.

A man was sentenced to 24 years in prison in the 2017 deaths of two sisters who were banished to a car without food or water by members of a doomsday religious group because the girls were thought to have been impure. Ashford Archer was found guilty in March of two counts of fatal child abuse and being an accessory to a crime for the deaths of 10-year-old Makayla Roberts and 8-year-old Hannah Marshall.

A South Carolina woman who police say was driving drunk will not be cited with a DUI because her vehicle of choice was a toy truck.

An Alabama man says he has completed his quest to mow lawns for veterans in all 50 states. Rodney Smith Jr. tweeted Friday that he's headed home from Hawaii after cutting grass in Oahu.

Two decades after the name "Columbine" became synonymous with a school shooting, the suburban Denver community surrounding the school is debating whether it's time to tear down a building that also became a beacon for people obsessed with the killings. School officials said the number of people trying to get close to or even inside the school reached record levels this year, the 20th anniversary of the 1999 attack that killed 13 people. "These people, they want the building," an official said. "They want to experience it, to walk the halls ... The only way we can stop that interest in the building is to move it. Otherwise they're not going to stop coming."

An infant boy who was cut from a Chicago woman's womb with a butcher knife died Friday at a hospital where he had been in grave condition since the April attack that killed his mother, family spokeswomen said. Yovanny Jadiel Lopez died at Christ Medical Center in suburban Oak Lawn from a severe brain injury, according to a statement posted on Facebook by family spokeswoman Julie Contreras, who expressed "great sadness" in announcing the baby's death.

A new elevated bridge and boardwalk across the Brooks River in Katmai National Park and Preserve is expected to halt heart-stopping encounters between human pedestrians and brown bears both using the old bridge. The replacement for the old floating bridge was more than a decade in the making.

A surprise decision by Michigan prosecutors to drop all pending charges in the Flint water crisis and restart a three-year investigation is a reminder of the legal complexities surrounding the disaster. Seven of 15 people had taken plea deals with no jail time, and their records will eventually be scrubbed clean. Eight others saw their charges dismissed Thursday, including two who served in former Gov. Rick Snyder's Cabinet. Here are some key questions and answers about the probe.

More than one million apartment dwellers in and around New York City are getting new protections against big rent increases under a landmark tenants' rights bill signed into law Friday. The measure, which passed the Democrat-controlled Senate and Assembly Friday afternoon and was immediately signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, strengthens the existing rent stabilization and rent control rules that govern rental increases and evictions in many older, multi-unit apartments.

Jurors in a federal death-penalty trial heard secretly recorded audio Friday in which a former University of Illinois doctoral student describes to his girlfriend how he killed a visiting scholar from China, calling the 26-year-old woman "valiant" as she tried to fight back. The recording of Brendt Christensen was made by his girlfriend when she wore a wire for the FBI as the two attended a campus vigil on June 29, 2017, for the missing scholar, Yingying Zhang.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is recommending attendance be capped at existing levels for the next 10 years at the annual Burning Man counter-culture festival in the desert 100 miles north of Reno. Burning Man organizers had proposed raising the current 80,000 limit as high as 100,000 in coming years. But the BLM said in releasing the final environmental impact statement on Friday its preferred alternative for the proposed 10-year renewal of Burning Man's special recreation permit would stick with the cap that's been in place since 2017.

New York City police say a 29-year-old officer died Friday in the department's third suspected suicide in less than two weeks.vPolice say he shot himself in the head on a Staten Island street near the 121st Precinct to which the officer was assigned. Last week, two longtime officers died in suspected suicides within 24 hours of each other. Deputy Chief Steven Silks was found dead in a police vehicle in Queens on June 5. Detective Joseph Calabrese was found the next day at a Brooklyn beach.

About 100 protesters gathered outside a police agency in northern Utah to demand an officer who pulled his gun on a 10-year-old child last week be fired. The officer's actions drew criticism after Jerri Hrubes said the white police officer pulled his gun on her son, DJ, who is black, while he was playing on his grandmother's front lawn June 6 in a state where African Americans make up just 1.4% of the population

The U.S. Census Bureau has released a new report showing more than 60% of the 121 million men in the U.S. are fathers. The data in the report comes from 2014 when the bureau for the first time asked both men and women about their fertility histories. The goal of the report was to shed greater light on men's fertility, a topic less known than that of women's fertility. "In recent decades, there has been growing public and academic interest in fathers and fatherhood given the importance of fathers in children's lives," the report said.

The family of a former Arkansas state senator who was found dead outside of her home says they are "sickened and upset" by the thought that one of her friends could have been involved in her killing. Authorities on Friday announced the arrest of 48-year-old Rebecca Lynn O'Donnell, of Pocahontas, in connection with the killing of 57-year-old Linda Collins, whose body was found June 4 outside her home.

A U.S. Border Patrol facility in Texas came under new scrutiny Saturday after a teenage mother was found there with a premature baby. The 17-year-old mother was from Guatemala and had an emergency cesarean section in Mexico in early May before crossing the border with the baby in June, said Hope Frye, a volunteer with an immigrant advocacy group.

A Babe Ruth road jersey dating to 1928-30 has sold at auction for $5.64 million. The price breaks a record for the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia ever sold

At least one Washington state waterfront landowner has said yes to a request to allow dead gray whales to decompose on their property. So many gray whale carcasses have washed up this year that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries says it has run out of places to take them. In response, the agency has asked landowners to volunteer property as a disposal site for the carcasses.

The warnings came in text messages from her friends: He's outside the dorm. He's at the student center. He's at Starbucks. But for Alicia Gonzales, sometimes it didn't matter where he was. She would often hide away in her room on the campus of Marshall University, overcome with fear that she'd run into him — or be subjected to his ridicule — even after reporting that he raped her on school grounds, and even after he was convicted of battery. Months later, she left the school altogether.

A former Southern Baptist pastor who supported legislation in Texas that would have criminalized abortions has been arrested on charges of child sex abuse, accused of repeatedly molesting a teenage relative over the course of two years. Stephen Bratton is accused of subjecting the relative to inappropriate touching that escalated to "sexual intercourse multiple times a day or several times a week" from 2013 to 2015.

A North Carolina burglary suspect who was fought off by an 11-year-old boy with a machete was caught Sunday, nearly two days after he slipped away from the hospital where he was treated for a head wound. His capture came after a manhunt and finger-pointing about who was to blame for his escape.

NASCAR overturned a victory for the first time under its toughened new policy on cheating when Brett Moffitt was declared the winner of the Truck Series race at Iowa Speedway after Ross Chastain failed a post-race inspection. Chastain led the final 141 laps of Sunday's 200-lap race, but series managing director Brad Moran said the winning No. 44 was too low when it was measured with NASCAR's height sticks.

The Pentagon on Sunday accused Iran of shooting a missile at a U.S. drone on June 13 as the unmanned surveillance aircraft was flying near one of two crippled tankers in the Gulf of Oman. The Pentagon also said Iranian-backed Houthi rebels shot down a high-flying U.S. Reaper drone in Yemen on June 6. He blamed unspecified “Iranian assistance” for the successful attack.

Emma Chalott Barron remembers June 15, 2012. She huddled around the TV that day with her parents and watched as President Barack Obama announced the creation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that would change hundreds of thousands of lives. Chalott Barron, then 14, didn’t understand the technical aspects of the program. But she knew life was about to get better. Seven years later, June 15 is a bittersweet reminder for Chalott Barron and close to 700,000 active DACA beneficiaries that their quasi-legal status is founded on shaky ground that is vulnerable to the changing politics around it.

Nicole Brown Simpson detailed the fear and violence that framed her marriage to charismatic football star and TV pitchman O.J. Simpson in a letter that surfaced after her 1994 death. “Her murder hurled into the forefront a conversation that advocates had been having for years, that it could happen anywhere, to anyone,” said Rachel Louise Snyder, who wrote “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us."

With jobs unfilled and young people moving away, some rural states are doubling down on efforts to attract new blood by expanding programs that offer incentives to live there. Over the past decade, states including South Dakota, Maine and Vermont have lured new residents with financial incentives or job help in areas that need a boost. Vermont launched its program last year, and it's already beefing up for 2020. Vermont's existing program seeks to entice new residents by paying them up to $10,000 over two years to move to a state with an aging population of about 626,000 and a low unemployment rate.

Two backers of a pioneering Nevada law to prevent employers from rejecting job-seekers based on a pre-employment marijuana test cast the effort Wednesday as an anti-discrimination measure in a state where recreational pot sales are booming and rules about legal marijuana consumption are evolving. The law, which goes into effect in January, won't ban testing job applicants for cannabis chemicals. But it will prohibit many employers from using the results to turn someone away.

Moments after a North Carolina man pleaded guilty to gunning down three Muslim university students, a prosecutor played a cellphone video of the slayings in court Wednesday as one of the victims' relatives fainted, others wept and a man cursed the confessed killer openly. Craig Stephen Hicks, 50, pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder more than four years after the February 2015 slayings and two months after incoming District Attorney Satana Deberry dropped plans to seek the death penalty in hopes of concluding a case she said had languished too long.

A big-rig truck driver has been arrested after authorities spotted a phony license plate on his rig. Tthe 1960s-style yellow-on-black plate had wobbly letters and numbers. Also, instead of "CALIFORNIA," it read "CALIFAS."

A man charged with murder in the 1987 killings of a young Canadian couple is facing trial in Washington state beginning this week, but the case won't challenge the new investigative technique authorities used to link him to the crime. William Earl Talbott II is one of dozens of men authorities have arrested for old, unsolved crimes in the past year using genetic genealogy. The practice involves identifying suspects by entering crime-scene DNA profiles into public databases that people have used for years to fill out their family trees.