Merrit Kennedy

Chicago police fatally shot a 19-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman when responding to a domestic disturbance call early Saturday.

Family members of 19-year-old victim Quintonio LeGrier told The Chicago Tribune that he was acting "agitated" and holding a baseball bat. "His father became worried and called the police," ...

Fast-moving wildfires on Christmas Day destroyed more than 100 homes in southern Australia. Now, residents and officials in Victoria State are beginning to assess the scale of the damage as firefighters work to contain the still-raging fires.

Victoria State's Premier Daniel Andrews told the BBC that the scale of the ...

Parts of the South are facing possible flash floods, even as they survey the damage from a wave of severe weather that killed at least 15 people across Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas.

The National Weather Service says flash flooding is "possible today from the Southern Plains, the middle Mississippi ...

Zahran Alloush, the leader of a prominent Syrian rebel group, is believed to have been killed in an airstrike near Syria's capital Damascus.

The rebel leader was at odds with the Syrian regime, ISIS, and secular activists.

NPR's Alice Fordham in Beirut told our Newscast unit that the strike in ...

The photo of a 3-year-old child named Aylan Kurdi, face-down on a Turkish beach, has become emblematic of the suffering of refugees fleeing Syria's civil war.

Nearly four months later, Aylan's father Abdullah Kurdi delivered a Christmas message on U.K.'s Channel 4, calling for "the whole world to open its ...

Flooding has hit parts of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. The hardest-hit country, Paraguay, has declared a state of emergency.

NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro in Rio de Janeiro tells our Newscast unit that the flooding has killed five people and displaced 150,000. Here's more from Lourdes:

"In Paraguay's capital, Asuncion, 125,000 ...

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a visit to Pakistan on Friday. It's the first trip to the country by an Indian head of state in a decade — and could be a sign of improving relations between the two neighbors.

The visit was unexpected. Earlier Friday, Modi tweeted from ...

More than 100 people are feared dead following a fire Thursday at a crowded industrial plant in southeast Nigeria.

NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton tells our Newscast unit that the fire started as crowds were lined up to refill cooking gas cylinders on Christmas Eve in this predominately Christian area:

"Witnesses ...

All is not calm weatherwise, but it will be extra bright this Christmas.

"A rare full moon will be an added gift for the holidays," NASA says. A full moon on Christmas hasn't happened since 1977, and it won't happen again until 2034.

You'll have to get up early ...

Are successful people's sleep patterns giving them a leg-up on average people?

"Successful" people get more shut-eye than you might expect, with more than 50 percent of 21 surveyed clocking in at 6-8 hours every night. An infographic put together by a U.K. furniture store called HomeArena (which coincidentally ...

Members of a British Muslim extended family of 11 with legitimate U.S. visas were stopped in London as they were about to fly to Los Angeles to visit Disneyland.

All the British border control agent could tell the family was "they've had a phone call from Washington, D.C., telling them ...

Virginia will no longer recognize concealed handgun permits from 25 other states with less stringent gun permit laws starting next February, the state's Attorney General Mark Herring says.

The new regulations mean that "more than 6.3 million people who could legally carry concealed handguns into Virginia today will lose ...

A Minnesota court has granted a restraining order requested by the Mall of America against three people tied to a planned Black Lives Matter protest. But it did not grant a restraining order against the broader organization, Black Lives Matter Minneapolis.

The group has vowed to go forward with ...

Iraq's military has launched an offensive to wrest control of the city of Ramadi from Islamic State militants.

NPR's Alison Meuse told our Newscast unit that the operation is backed by U.S.-led airstrikes. Here's more from Alison:

"A 72-hour government deadline for civilians to leave Ramadi is over. Now, ...

This year will likely surpass all previous years' records for global forcible displacement, according to a new study from the U.N.'s refugee agency.

"As the number of refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) worldwide continued to grow in 2015, it is likely that this figure has far surpassed ...

The White House says it is commuting the federal prison sentences of 95 men and women who committed nonviolent offenses.

President Obama has now commuted 184 sentences total. That's more than the previous five presidents combined, the White House says in a blog post.

The administration says Friday's commutations ...

More than a year and a half ago, children sheltering in a camp for internally displaced people in the Central African Republic said French peacekeepers were offering them food or money for sex acts.

Now, the U.N. is coming under fire for "gross institutional failures" in handling the allegations,

A remote Northern California prison has seen a pattern of abuses of inmates by guards, according to a new state study.

NPR's Richard Gonzales tells our Newscast unit that the investigation, conducted by the inspector general of the California Department of Corrections and released Wednesday, found that "a code of ...

Eligible veterans with spinal cord injuries may soon be able to walk again.

The Department of Veterans Affairs will now pay for robotic leg devices for eligible paralyzed veterans, VA officials tell The Associated Press.

Dr. Ann Spungen, who led VA research on the device, told AP that the ...

The United Nations says that members of Libya's two rival governments have signed a U.N.-brokered agreement in Skhirat, Morocco, meant to unify them into one.

This comes after months of U.N.-led diplomacy between the two governments and other stakeholders.

U.N. envoy Martin Kobler hailed this as a turning point in ...