Eyder Peralta

An Egyptian court has canceled the sentences and ordered a retrial of three Al-Jazeera journalists who have been in jail for more than a year.

NPR's Leila Fadel, who was in the courtroom, tells Morning Edition that while this is good news for the men, their family members worry that ...

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is set to commute the death sentences of the final four prisoners on death row.

Maryland abolished the death penalty in 2013, but that left an open question as to what would happen to prisoners sentenced to the death penalty before the law was passed.

With a few hours left before we turn the page on 2014, we decided to get nostalgic.

We ran numbers — we swear, we only do this once a year — to reveal what the NPR.org audience most appreciated.

Here are three top five lists, using different metrics.

Cuban artist Tania Bruguera had a plan to test just how tolerant Cuba had become of dissident voices.

She planned a performance at Havana's Revolution Square for Tuesday afternoon. She would provide a microphone and Cubans were encouraged to speak about their vision for the island.

NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro spoke ...

The United States has released five more detainees from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Pentagon said the three Yemenis and two Tunisians were transferred to Kazakhstan. The detainees are the latest in what's been a flurry of releases over the past few months.

In a statement, ...

Former President George H.W. Bush has left a Houston hospital and is now "resting at home, grateful to the doctors and nurses for their superb care," his spokesman Jim McGrath said on Twitter.

Bush, 90, was taken to a hospital in Houston a week ago after he experienced shortness ...

The number of police officers killed in the line of duty increased in 2014, a report by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund finds.

In total, 126 officers were killed in 2014. That's a 24 percent increase from 2013, when 102 officers were killed. According to the report, ...

Updated at 2:14 p.m. ET

Rep. Steve Scalise, the recently elected House majority whip, has acknowledged that he spoke at a gathering of white supremacists more than a decade ago, calling it "a mistake" that he regrets.

"Twelve years ago, I spoke to many different Louisiana groups as a state ...

Rescue crews scouring the waters off Indonesia say they have found dozens of bodies and have spotted wreckage that belongs to AirAsia QZ8501, the jetliner that went missing Sunday, carrying 155 passengers and seven crew members.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp. quotes an Indonesian navy spokesman:

" 'Based on ...

Adding to an already tense situation, police cadets heckled New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio at a graduation ceremony on Monday.

CBS News describes the scene at Madison Square Garden:

" 'Let's be honest about the realities of our society,' de Blasio told the graduating class of ...

The Los Angeles Police Department says two suspects opened fire on a patrol car with a rifle Sunday evening.

KTLA-TV reports:

"Several rounds were shot in the direction of the officers, LAPD Capt. Lillian Carranza said.

"'This was a completely unprovoked attack,' she added.

"One of the officers ...

Update at 5:49 p.m.

Indonesia has asked the U.S. for help in locating the missing AirAsia jetliner, the State Department said today.

State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said the U.S. was reviewing the request. The Defense Department said the U.S. assistance could include "some air, surface and sub-surface ...

Update at 7:50 pm. Death Toll Rises To 10:

The death toll has climbed to 10, but dozens of passengers are still missing from a Greek ferry that caught fire. Authorities have been unable to determine exactly how many people were on board.

The Associated Press reports that 427 were ...

Updated at 6:00 p.m. ET

President Obama called Sony's decision to pull its film The Interview, following threats to movie theaters, a "mistake."

"We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States," the president said in his year-end news ...

Soccer's governing body is sticking to its guns.

FIFA has voted not to revisit the bidding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. It also decided to release, at some later date, at least part of a 430-page confidential report produced by American lawyer Michael Garcia.

Garcia, who had been ...

President Obama will close out 2014 with his traditional end-of-year press conference.

The press conference is scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. ET., and it's bound to be eventful because Obama has a lot to talk about.

Among the news events that will likely come up:

-- The normalization ...

Two days after the U.S. and Cuba decided to end a more than 50-year estrangement, the natural question is: What's next?

On Morning Edition, NPR's Michelle Kelemen reports that the process of normalizing diplomatic relations will be pretty straight forward and is likely to be done quickly.

"We can do ...

There was a significant drop in the number of executions and death penalty sentences in 2014, a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center finds.

The group's year-end accounting finds that:

-- States conducted 35 executions in 2014 — the lowest since 1994.

-- And the justice system sentenced ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin lashed out at the West in a year-end news conference today, blaming international sanctions and a steep plunge in oil prices for the precipitous drop in the value of the ruble.

Putin, speaking during a more than three-hour news conference attended by some 1,200 journalists, "promised ...

Just hours after the United States and Cuba announced they were moving toward normalizing relations, crowds gathered in Havana and Miami trying to come to grips with a historic shift.

NPR covered the reaction in those two places with two pieces on Morning Edition.

NPR's Greg Allen reported from Miami: