Fire crews fanned out Friday across a parched California, where wind-whipped wildfires have forced hundreds of people to flee their homes and led to an emergency declaration in Santa Cruz County.

More than 600 children have been sickened with lead poisoning in a northern Chinese province where authorities shut a smelter this week thought to have caused the contamination, state media reported.

Days after the world slammed Myanmar for sentencing Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to more house arrest, U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., arrived in the military-ruled country’s capital Friday.

Alice Connors-Kellgren was surprised by her boyfriend’s new Facebook profile picture a few weeks ago: He was kissing another girl on the cheek.

Tony Danza is going back to schoolto teach.

Town-hall meetings have higlighted fears of government intrusion into the medical system, but the fate of President Barack Obama’s health care initiative might depend just as heavily on its ability to dig the nation out of debt.

A new coalition on Thursday launched $12 million in television ads to support President Barack Obama’s health care reform plan, in the opening wave of a planned expenditure of tens of millions of dollars this fall.

Amid a boisterous debate on health care reform, people flooded members of Congress on Thursday with so many e-mails that they overloaded the House’s primary website.

Les Paul, the guitar virtuoso and inventor who revolutionized music and created rock ‘n’ roll as surely as Elvis Presley and the Beatles by developing the solid-body electric guitar and multitrack recording, died Thursday at age 94.

Andy Kessler, 48, a trailblazer during New York City’s nascent 1970s skateboarding scene and a designer of skate parks who was admired by boarders on both coasts, has died.