Scott Neuman

If Snigdha Nandipati, the 14-year-old who won last year's Scripps National Spelling Bee, had been asked to define her winning word, "guetapens," things might have turned out differently.

This year, a vocabulary test with word definitions is, for the first time in the bee's 86-year history, part of the competition. ...

Two U.S. officials were shot during an altercation at a strip club in the Venezuelan capital, but a State Department spokesman says their injuries were not life-threatening.

The incident occurred early Tuesday. As The Associated Press reports:

"The circumstances of the shooting were unclear, with conflicting reports over whether ...

Alan Krueger, the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, says he will step down to return to Princeton to resume his post as a professor of economics.

Krueger, who has served as CEA chairman for the past two years, will return to Princeton in time for the beginning ...

Wal-Mart Stores has agreed to pay $81 million in penalties as part of a guilty plea on criminal charges of improperly disposing of hazardous waste in California and Missouri.

Prosecutors said the violations occurred between 2003 and 2005 and included employees negligently dumping pollutants from stores into sanitation drains.

The ...

There's been a sharp rise in anti-Muslim attacks and intimidation in the U.K. since last week's hacking death of British soldier Lee Rigby by two men who said they killed him in the name of Islam.

The Guardian newspaper says that Tell Mama, a hotline for reporting such ...

A suspected U.S. reconnaissance drone has crashed in a region of southern Somalia controlled by the al-Shabab militant group, a governor of the region says.

Abdikadir Mohamed Nur, the governor of the Lower Shabelle region, told Reuters that al-Shabab had shot down the aircraft over the coastal town of Bulamareer, ...

A U.S. district court has ruled that Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio's department has violated the rights of Latino drivers by racially profiling them as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration and issued an injunction to halt the practice.

The decision on Friday marks the first time that the ...

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says he doesn't smoke crack cocaine and isn't an addict, in response to a video that surfaced recently purporting to show him using the illegal drug.

Last week Ford called the cellphone video obtained by The Toronto Star "ridiculous" and blamed the newspaper for "going ...

Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones is back-peddling from remarks he made at a symposium last month that motherhood causes women to lose the necessary focus to be successful traders.

"As soon as that baby's lips touched that girl's bosom, forget it," Jones told an audience at the University of Virginia on ...

Former Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo has been extradited to the United States, where he faces charges of laundering tens of millions of dollars through U.S. banks.

Portillo, who served as president from 2000 to 2004, was snatched from a hospital bed in Guatemala City, where he was recovering from liver ...

Media empire News Corp., parent of Fox and The Wall Street Journal, will be cleaved into two businesses starting June 28: a publishing arm and one for entertainment.

The plan was first announced a year ago. As we reported at the time:

"News Corp. is responding ...

Most of us are used to thinking that the evolution of living organisms takes millions of years. But in the case of cockroaches, scientists say the resilient pests have a developed a fast-forward mechanism to save their own exoskeleton.

In a newly published study in the journal Science, a ...

The Boy Scouts of America has agreed for the first time to allow openly gay boys as members, but a vote of the organization's National Council left in place a ban on gay Scout leaders.

The Associated Press reports that of the local Scout leaders voting at their annual meeting ...

Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversees the branch of the agency that targeted conservative groups, has been placed on administrative leave a day after she refused to answer questions in a congressional probe of the scandal.

Lerner, who invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify at a ...

Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala., says he will leave Congress effective in August to take a senior position at the University of Alabama.

Bonner, who has represented Alabama's 1st District for six terms since 2003, will become vice chancellor of government relations and economic development at Alabama. His sister, Judy ...

With memories of last year's Superstorm Sandy still fresh, NOAA is warning East Coasters and those farther inland to brace for another active Atlantic season, predicting that as many as six major storms will develop between the beginning of June and the end of November.

The National Oceanic ...

If you were hoping to cash in that Borders gift card for the latest Dan Brown novel — or at least hoping to get some cash for it — you're too late.

A Manhattan federal judge on Wednesday ruled that the bankrupt and defunct book chain owes nothing to the ...

North Korea has sent a special envoy to China, hoping to patch up relations between the two countries that have been on rocky ground over Pyongyang's nuclear program and its recent seizure of a crew of Chinese fishermen.

North Korea's Vice Marshal Choe Ryong Hae, the head of ...

A judge in Italy on Wednesday ordered the captain of the ill-fated Costa Concordia cruise ship that ran aground off the coast of Tuscany last year, killing 32 people, to face charges of manslaughter.

Francesco Schettino, 52, is accused of negligence that led to the grounding of the ship ...

A man has been killed in what reports described as a machete attack in London, and police have shot two suspects in what British Prime Minister David Cameron says is likely a terrorist incident.

The Associated Press says the incident occurred Wednesday when the suspects attacked the man near a ...