Michelle Obama rallies supporters as early voting opens in Ohio

Michelle Obama rallies supporters as early voting opens in Ohio
Pennsylvania judge: Voter ID law a no-go for November 6
Key witness in Sandusky sex abuse case sues Penn State
Palins yet to claim Exxon Valdez oil spill compensation money
Detroit police chief suspended after reports of affair with officer
Utah's top court deals blow to polygamous sect in property case
Strike vote due at American Airlines, but result may be secret
Deportees flown to Mexico City in new program to bypass border towns
NY lawyer pleads guilty to stealing $10 million from clients
Women lawmakers call for tough measures to combat sex abuse in military
New York prisons' use of solitary confinement "unjustified": report
Chicago teachers vote on ratifying deal that ended strike
Judge sets October 2013 trial date for ex-Madoff backroom staff
Strike vote due at American Airlines, but result may be secret
New Yorkers still dine out but are spending less: Zagat
Federal review to keep Mississippi voter ID law on hold for election
U.S. to buy prison once viewed as a Guantanamo successor
Lawsuit challenges California ban on gay conversion therapy for youth
Republicans seize on Biden middle class comment ahead of debate
U.S. bank website hackers used advanced botnets, diverse tools
Video appears to show missing U.S. journalist alive in Syria
Border Patrol agent shot dead in Arizona, another wounded
Kansas judge blocks auction of "In Cold Blood" records
Experts puzzled by increase in U.S. traffic deaths
U.S. government accounting board chairman to retire
Florida weighs case of illegal immigrant who passed bar exam
Teen drinking and driving rate cut in half in 20 years
Search for Jimmy Hoffa yields no remains behind Michigan house: police
Insight: Delays dog U.S. government loans to green energy projects
Gun training for tax cops is off target: IRS watchdog
Palins yet to claim Exxon Valdez oil spill compensation money
Utah's top court deals blow to polygamous sect in property case
NY lawyer pleads guilty to stealing $10 million from clients
Strike vote due at American Airlines, but result may be secret
Deportees flown to Mexico City in new program to bypass border towns
Women lawmakers call for tough measures to combat sex abuse in military
New York prisons' use of solitary confinement "unjustified": report
Detroit police chief suspended after reports of affair with officer
Key witness in Sandusky sex abuse case sues Penn State
Pennsylvania judge: Voter ID law a no-go for November 6

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 06:27 PM PDT

CINCINNATI, Ohio (Reuters) - First lady Michelle Obama rallied supporters to back her husband as early voting began on Tuesday in the key electoral swing state of Ohio where the Democrats hope to take advantage of a lead in opinion polls. "Are we going to just sit back and watch everything we worked for and fought for just slip away?" she asked a boisterous crowd of 6,800 in downtown Cincinnati. ...

Pennsylvania judge: Voter ID law a no-go for November 6

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 04:04 PM PDT

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - A judge on Tuesday blocked Pennsylvania from requiring voters to show photo identification in November's U.S. election, a decision that could influence turnout in a top electoral prize in the presidential race. In a setback for Republican state officials who championed the controversial law and had hoped it would help them deliver Pennsylvania for their party's presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson delayed its implementation until after Election Day, November 6. ...

Key witness in Sandusky sex abuse case sues Penn State

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 04:18 PM PDT

(Reuters) - A key witness in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal sued Pennsylvania State University on Tuesday for more than $8 million on whistleblower, defamation and misrepresentation grounds. Mike McQueary, a former Penn State assistant football coach, claimed in the suit filed in Center County Court that he lost his job, was misled and publicly scorned because he had told about one of the attacks. Sandusky, a retired Penn State football defensive coordinator, was convicted in June on 45 counts of child molestation in a case that riveted national attention on child sexual abuse. ...

Palins yet to claim Exxon Valdez oil spill compensation money

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 06:37 PM PDT

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is not shy about voicing her opinions to national audiences, headlining big-ticket political events and exposing her family and personal life on reality TV. But so far the former Alaska governor and her husband Todd Palin have not come forward to claim their share of a settlement fund established for victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. The pair was among the nearly 1,000 plaintiffs who have not claimed their payouts on a list released last week by managers of the settlement fund. Some on the list are dead. ...

Detroit police chief suspended after reports of affair with officer

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 04:19 PM PDT

DETROIT (Reuters) - Detroit Mayor Dave Bing on Tuesday suspended the city's police chief and ordered a full investigation after media reports that he had been dating a female internal affairs officer in the department. Police Chief Ralph Godbee Junior is the latest Detroit city leader to face accusations of a sexual relationship with a subordinate after former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his immediate predecessor as chief, Warren Evans. ...

Utah's top court deals blow to polygamous sect in property case

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 05:33 PM PDT

SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - Utah's highest court, in a blow to the polygamous sect headed by convicted child rapist Warren Jeffs, refused on Tuesday to allow the church to challenge state control of a communal land trust once run by its jailed leader. The decision by Utah's Supreme Court upholds its own 2010 ruling that the three years the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints waited to challenge the state takeover was too long. It also bars the case from being heard by other state judges. ...

Strike vote due at American Airlines, but result may be secret

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 05:00 PM PDT

(Reuters) - American Airline pilots this week are expected to authorize their union to call a strike, but the union says it may decide to keep the vote secret for now. The airline's 8,000 pilots have been casting votes on authorization for a month, escalating a long-running labor dispute that has already created serious flight delays at the nation's No. 3 carrier and a public relations nightmare for its bankrupt parent, AMR Corp. ...

Deportees flown to Mexico City in new program to bypass border towns

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 04:57 PM PDT

(Reuters) - Immigration officials on Tuesday flew 131 deportees to Mexico City in the maiden flight of a new program to send illegal immigrants to the interior of Mexico, rather than border towns where they are more likely to be exposed to criminals. The two-month project is a collaborative effort between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Mexican Ministry of the Interior, and is geared toward immigrants who come from the interior regions of Mexico. ...

NY lawyer pleads guilty to stealing $10 million from clients

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 05:17 PM PDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Manhattan corporate lawyer pleaded guilty on Tuesday to stealing more than $10 million in clients' money, which prosecutors said he spent on pricey restaurants and strip clubs and to buy businesses. The plea ends a year-long legal saga that began last September when Douglas Arntsen flew to Hong Kong - a day after the Manhattan district attorney's office notified his law firm, Crowell & Moring, that he was the subject of a criminal probe. ...

Women lawmakers call for tough measures to combat sex abuse in military

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 04:36 PM PDT

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - Three female Democratic members of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday called for broad changes to end what they say is an epidemic of sexual assault in the military that goes beyond the sex-with-recruits scandal at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. The comments by U.S. Representatives Loretta Sanchez, Susan Davis and Jackie Speier came after the California Democrats visited the San Antonio base and spoke with victims of the scandal. ...

New York prisons' use of solitary confinement "unjustified": report

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 04:20 PM PDT

(Reuters) - More than 13,500 times last year, New York's state prison system isolated one of its 56,000 inmates from the general prison population and each stay in solitary confinement lasted an average of five months, according to a New York Civil Liberties Union report released on Tuesday. The report calls the state's use of isolation and segregation of inmates "arbitrary and unjustified" and urges the adoption of clear criteria for employing confinement to punish prisoners. ...

Chicago teachers vote on ratifying deal that ended strike

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 01:59 PM PDT

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chicago public school teachers began voting on Tuesday on whether to ratify an agreement with Mayor Rahm Emanuel that suspended a strike in the third-largest U.S. school district. The Chicago Teachers Union has urged its 29,000 members to ratify the proposed contract, which calls for an average 17.6 percent pay raise for teachers over four years and some improvements in benefits. Union President Karen Lewis declined to say whether members would ratify the deal. "I don't have a crystal ball," she said. ...

Judge sets October 2013 trial date for ex-Madoff backroom staff

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 02:14 PM PDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Five former employees of Bernard Madoff, charged with helping the conman run a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme over several decades, will have their chance to fight the allegations at trial in a year's time. At a hearing in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, a judge set aside as long as 3-1/2 months for a trial to start on October 7, 2013, as the defendants entered pleas of not guilty to dozens of additional charges filed by U.S. prosecutors on Monday. The three men and two women were first indicted in 2010. ...

Strike vote due at American Airlines, but result may be secret

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 04:26 PM PDT

New Yorkers still dine out but are spending less: Zagat

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 03:43 PM PDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New Yorkers are eating out at the same clip as recent years, but they're spending less in restaurants and ordering fewer take-out meals, according to the new Zagat restaurant survey. There were twice as many restaurant openings than closings in New York over the past year and diners still eat out three times per week -- the same number as in each of the past three years, according to the survey of 44,306 people, which will be released on Wednesday. But the average restaurant tab plummeted nearly 10 percent this year to $39. ...

Federal review to keep Mississippi voter ID law on hold for election

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 03:30 PM PDT

TUPELO, Mississippi (Reuters) - Mississippi's controversial new law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls will not be in effect for the November general election while federal officials review whether the measure is discriminatory, the state said on Tuesday. It was the second setback for voter ID laws in a single day, coming on the heels of a judge in Pennsylvania ordering officials there to delay implementing a photo ID requirement until after the November 6 election. Voters in Mississippi approved a voter ID ballot initiative by a wide margin last November. ...

U.S. to buy prison once viewed as a Guantanamo successor

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 03:23 PM PDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The federal government will buy an Illinois prison that the Obama administration once considered as a successor to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday. Holder said the Thomson Correctional Center will house U.S. inmates and that there are no plans to revive a 2009 effort to move some Guantanamo detainees to the United States. Congress blocked funding for President Barack Obama's idea and tightly restricted all transfers from the camp at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba. ...

Lawsuit challenges California ban on gay conversion therapy for youth

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 03:13 PM PDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Christian legal group has filed a federal lawsuit challenging a landmark California law that bars a controversial therapy aimed at reversing homosexuality from being used on children and teens, calling it a violation of privacy and free speech rights. California's Democratic Governor Jerry Brown signed the ban into law over the weekend, making the nation's most populous state the first to ban so-called conversion therapy among youth. Gay rights advocates say the therapy can psychologically harm gay and lesbian youth. ...

Republicans seize on Biden middle class comment ahead of debate

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 02:08 PM PDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Joe Biden told a campaign rally on Tuesday that the middle class has been buried for the past four years, just longer than President Barack Obama's time in the White House. Republicans immediately seized on what they termed a "stunning admission" by Biden as evidence that Obama's policies have been bad for the economy, the day before Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney meet in their first presidential debate. ...

U.S. bank website hackers used advanced botnets, diverse tools

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 02:21 PM PDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The hackers behind the cyber attacks on major U.S. banks have repeatedly disrupted online banking by using sophisticated and diverse tools that point to a carefully coordinated campaign, according to security researchers. The hackers, believed to be activists in the Middle East, were highly knowledgeable about the defensive equipment used by the banks and likely spent months on reconnaissance, said several researchers interviewed by Reuters, who viewed the assaults as among the strongest and most complex the world has seen to date. ...

Video appears to show missing U.S. journalist alive in Syria

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 01:00 PM PDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The State Department has said it believes American journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria in August, is alive and being held by the Syrian government. A shaky, 47-second video surfaced on Monday that appeared to show Tice, blindfolded and being led by a group of masked men up a rocky pathway. At one point he is pushed to his knees and cries out, "Oh Jesus, oh Jesus." U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters on Monday the department had seen the video but could not confirm it was Tice, or whether the scene was authentic or had been staged. ...

Border Patrol agent shot dead in Arizona, another wounded

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 02:01 PM PDT

PHOENIX (Reuters) - A Border Patrol agent was shot dead and another wounded when they came under fire early on Tuesday while responding to a tripped ground sensor in a drug smuggling corridor in Arizona, near the border with Mexico, authorities said. Authorities said three agents were on foot about 5 miles north of the border when gunfire erupted well before daybreak but provided few additional details on the circumstances of the violence. "As they were walking up the trail, they reported taking gunfire," Cochise County Sheriff's spokeswoman Carol Capas said. ...

Kansas judge blocks auction of "In Cold Blood" records

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 02:28 PM PDT

KANSAS CITY, Kansas (Reuters) - A Kansas judge has temporarily blocked the auction of some documents from the investigation of the 1959 murder case that inspired the best-selling book and movie "In Cold Blood." Relatives of Harold Nye, one of the investigators in the brutal murders of a family in Holcomb, Kansas, planed to auction them. But Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt last week asked a district court to block the auction and a Shawnee County judge issued a temporary restraining order, the attorney general's office said on Monday. ...

Experts puzzled by increase in U.S. traffic deaths

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 01:39 PM PDT

(Reuters) - U.S. traffic deaths rose 9 percent in the first half of 2012 compared with the same period last year, breaking a 5-year downward trend, according to preliminary data that experts cannot yet explain. Road accidents killed 16,290 people from January through June, the most since 2009, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a preliminary report that does not examine causes. A final report of vetted and analyzed data could take a year or more. ...

U.S. government accounting board chairman to retire

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 01:44 PM PDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The chairman of the U.S. board that sets accounting standards for state and local governments will retire next June, a year ahead of the end of his term and as controversial new standards for pensions start kicking in. Robert Attmore, a former auditor for New York state, has headed the nonprofit Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) since July 2004. His retirement was announced on Tuesday by the Financial Accounting Foundation, which oversees GASB. Attmore, 66, said recent pressures on the Norwalk, Connecticut-based board were not a factor in his decision to ...

Florida weighs case of illegal immigrant who passed bar exam

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 01:28 PM PDT

TAMPA, Florida (Reuters) - Florida's Supreme Court on Tuesday grilled attorneys on the implications of issuing a law license to an undocumented immigrant and law school graduate who passed the Florida Bar exam after disclosing he was in the United States illegally. As 26-year-old Jose Manuel Godinez-Samperio of Mexico watched the proceedings from the gallery, one judge accused the Florida Board of Bar Examiners of putting the state in an awkward situation. "It seems very strange," Justice R. ...

Teen drinking and driving rate cut in half in 20 years

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 12:44 PM PDT

ATLANTA (Reuters) - The percentage of high school students who drink and drive has dropped by more than half in two decades, in part due to tougher laws against driving under the influence of alcohol, federal health officials said on Tuesday. In 2011, 10.3 percent of high school students 16 and older reported drinking and driving in the previous 30 days, compared to 22.3 percent in 1991, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study. ...

Search for Jimmy Hoffa yields no remains behind Michigan house: police

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 01:22 PM PDT

DETROIT (Reuters) - In the latest twist in the 37-year-old search for missing Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa, police said on Tuesday a soil sample taken from behind a suburban Detroit house did not contain human remains. "As a result of these tests the Roseville Police Department will be concluding their investigation into the possible interment of a human body upon the property," Roseville Police Chief James Berlin said in a statement. Berlin said a battery of tests were conducted and "the samples submitted for examination showed no signs of human decomposition. ...

Insight: Delays dog U.S. government loans to green energy projects

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 03:49 PM PDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A year after the U.S. government raced to meet a deadline to finish loan agreements with dozens of clean energy companies, less than half the total money promised has been handed over. Technical questions and companies' own failures in hitting contractual milestones are behind some of the holdups. But government officials fearful of taking a risk on firms that could collapse may have also caused some of the delays. ...

Gun training for tax cops is off target: IRS watchdog

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 12:33 PM PDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Armed Internal Revenue Service agents need more thorough firearms training and they need to be more consistent in reporting accidental firings of their guns, said the tax-collecting agency's watchdog on Tuesday. "Special agents not properly trained in the use of firearms could endanger the public, as well as their fellow special agents, and expose the IRS to potential litigation over injuries or damages," said J. Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. ...