A former Texas prosecutor and one-time candidate for Congress was convicted Friday of accepting bribes in exchange for court favors, including an $80,000 payment in a scheme that allowed a convicted murder to escape.

A small airplane operating as a volunteer Angel Flight crashed in upstate New York on Friday evening, killing at least two people, authorities said.

Playful sea lions and trusty penguins are welcoming visitors back to the New York Aquarium for the first time since the Coney Island marine haven was damaged by Superstorm Sandy.

The people of the Oklahoma town where a deadly tornado struck could use just about everything - cleaning supplies, food, water, shelter.

Three men accused of fatally stabbing five people at a Denver bar that authorities say was set on fire to cover up the killings have pleaded not guilty.

A baby gorilla has been born to first-time parents at an Ohio zoo.

Key figures in a lawsuit that alleges that an Arizona sheriff's office has racially profiled Latinos in its immigration patrols. A judge ruled Friday that Arpaio's office systematically racially profiles Latinos:

The man who famously put aside his Big Mac to help rescue three women held captive in a Cleveland house said Friday that he's not endorsing a group of restaurants that are offering him free burgers for life and wants his name kept out of it.

The Horace Mann School, one of New York City's most prestigious private schools, has apologized for more than three decades of sexual abuse perpetrated by some of its teachers and administrators, according to a letter posted on its website Friday.

Haynes Johnson, a pioneering Washington journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the civil rights movements and migrated from newspapers to television, books and teaching, died Friday. He was 81.

Authorities are scaling back their search for a missing Iowa teenager abducted from a rural school bus stop this week.

A parolee was indicted by a federal grand jury in the theft of a valuable Gold Rush-era jewelry box from the Oakland Museum of California, authorities said Friday.

A federal judge ruled Friday that the office of America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff systematically singled out Latinos in its trademark immigration patrols, marking the first finding by a court that the agency racially profiles people.

Bryce Kenning saw the void before him in an explosion of dust, and there was nothing he could do.

Haynes Johnson, a pioneering Washington journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the civil rights movement and migrated from newspapers to television, books and teaching, died Friday. He was 81.

A regional garbage collection agency has tossed out plans to build a mega-landfill for Los Angeles' trash less than two miles from Joshua Tree National Park in the remote Southern California desert.

After their 2-year-old son died of untreated pneumonia in 2009, faith-healing advocates Herbert and Catherine Schaible promised a judge they would not let another sick child go without medical care.

The ex-girlfriend of a man suspected of kidnapping two Iowa girls this week worried that he would harm her and her family before his impending release from prison in 2011, citing prior sexual and physical abuse and threats, according to court records released Friday.

Teachers and students at Plaza Towers Elementary School hunkered down against the storm just as they had been taught in countless tornado drills, their principal said Friday, recounting how she walked the halls until the twister was on the doorstep, then announced on the intercom, "It's here."

They were 12 ordinary citizens who didn't oppose the death penalty. But unlike spectators outside the courthouse who followed the case like a daytime soap opera and jumped to demand Jodi Arias' execution, the jurors faced a decision that was wrenching and real, with implications that could haunt them forever.

Sabrina Mitchell is used to looking for silver linings.

A former police officer, accused of killing two people during a robbery at an east Tennessee pharmacy, gunned down his victims after they complied with his demands for painkillers, a prosecutor said Friday.

A 34-year-old man accused of killing five members of a central Illinois family with a tire iron took the witness stand Friday, wiping away tears as he painted a horrifying picture of the murder scene.

In the wind-swept prairie called Tornado Alley, the scene is eerily familiar: Homes smashed to splinters. Trees and telephone poles snapped like twigs. Piles of bricks, overturned cars and dazed survivors sifting through rubble in search of a precious photo or heirloom. A town in ruins.