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MOSCOW – A military plane with 10 people aboard crashed late Friday in Russia’s Far East, Russian news agencies reported. ITAR Tass quoted an emergency ministry official as saying that the Tu-142-M3 anti-submarine turboprop crashed Friday in the Tatarsky Strait between the Pacific coast and Sakhalin Island. The Interfax news …

A former student at an upstate New York middle school sneaked inside Tuesday, assembled a shotgun in the bathroom and held the principal hostage before surrendering without firing a single shot, police said. Dutchess County Sheriff Adrian Anderson said Christopher Craft Sr., 42, got into Stissing Mountain Middle School just …

TRONA, Calif. – The U.S. Geological Survey says a magnitude-4.6 earthquake has shaken a remote area of the Mojave Desert in Southern California. The 1:21 p.m. Monday tremor southeast of the community of Trona is the latest of a number of small earthquakes that have occurred around Southern California over …

UNITED NATIONS – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said peacekeepers in Darfur are facing increasing threats from fighting in the vast western province and along the Chad-Sudan border, and from a spate of kidnappings. In a report to the U.N. Security Council circulated Monday, the U.N. chief also criticized the failure of …

BEIJING – Rescuers working in frigid cold and darkness tried to reach 66 people believed trapped a third of a mile (half a kilometer) underground after a huge gas explosion Saturday ripped through a coal mine in northern China, killing at least 42 people. The pre-dawn blast at the state-run …

GEORGETOWN, S.C. – Federal safety investigators found no indication that a medical helicopter malfunctioned before crashing, killing all three crew members on board, and hope to find witnesses who saw it come down in coastal South Carolina. National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said Sunday all major portions of …

ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — bills itself as the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people, with more than 400,000 member families organized within 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the U.S. Among other priorities, the organization strives for improved …

A Baptist pastor in Tennessee says he now regrets that his church distributed an anti-Catholic leaflet that a local Catholic priest decried as “hate material.” Pastor Jonathan Hatcher, who leads Conner Heights Baptist Church in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., has removed the inflammatory leaflet, “The Death Cookie,” from his congregation. He …

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine: Capitol Hell One of the Democratic lawmakers at the center of the health care fight on Capitol Hill says his life has been a living hell since coming out against the bill unless it includes strict language on abortion funding. The Hill …

What a tangled Web Wikipedia users can weave. Critics noted over the weekend that President Obama’s page on the free online encyclopedia had been edited to remove any mention of his links to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, and to allow only a brief citation of his connection to …