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U.S. stocks surged more than 1 percent Wednesday with financials and health care leading after Republican Donald Trump won the presidential election, defying market expectations for a Hillary Clinton win. The day's rally took the major averages within 2 percent of their all-time intraday highs, and marked a stunning recovery from a sharp plunge in stock index futures overnight. Trade volume Wednesday was roughly 12 billion shares, the highest since the surprise U.K. vote to leave the European Union in June. "Overnight was all about uncertainty. Today we know" the result," said JJ Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade. He...

Former President George H.W. Bush was in stable condition late Wednesday after breaking a bone in his neck in a fall at his Maine home, his spokesman said. "He is fine -- but he'll be in a neck brace," Spokesman Jim McGrath tweeted about the 41st president.

Sarah Kemp Brady, the widow of former White House Press Secretary James Brady, died Friday after battling pneumonia, her family said in a statement. She was 73. Sarah Brady became a prominent gun control advocate after her husband was shot during the attempt on then-President Ronald Reagan's life in 1981. James Brady died in August at age 73.

AMSTERDAM — The animal rights activist who assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was freed Friday, after serving just under 12 years in prison — years during which many of Fortuyn’s ideas, particularly his disdain of “multiculturalism” and his dislike of Muslim immigration, have become mainstream in the Netherlands. Volkert van der Graaf killed Fortuyn on May 6, 2002, days before national elections in which Fortuyn was set to win big on an anti-immigration platform that upended the then-progressive Dutch political landscape.

The pilot of a Virgin Australia plane flying to the Indonesian holiday island of Bali reported a hijacking attempt on Friday after a passenger tried to enter the cockpit, an Indonesian transport official said. Metro TV had earlier cited an Indonesian air force spokesman as saying the plane had been hijacked.

AMERICA and Europe, exhausted by futile wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and by their own financial crises, have over the past five years come to a tacit consensus that they lack the power and the political will to bring democracy to far-flung, failing authoritarian states. That seemed a sad but wise conclusion so long as those failing authoritarian states really were far-flung. Then, yesterday, the zone of failing authoritarian states arrived at our doorstep. The massacres of demonstrators in Kiev's Independence Square are as awful as anything that took place during the coup in Cairo last year or the initial...

The Russian punk-protest group Pussy Riot had pledged for months to seek to disrupt the Sochi Olympics, and has begun carrying through on that promise. But the group's latest attempt at a protest was dismantled almost before it began. One day after members of the loosely-connected group were questioned in connection with some suspected thefts at a Sochi hotel, Pussy Riot gathered at a restaurant in downtown Sochi, about 20 miles from the Olympic village. The band attempted to begin performing, but was set upon by whip-wielding Cossack militiamen.

PHOENIX (CBS Las Vegas/AP) — The mother and widow of one of 19 firefighters killed in an Arizona wildfire wants the city of Prescott to provide family survivor benefits reserved for full-time employees. Deborah Pfingston’s 29-year-old son, Andrew Ashcraft, died June 30 with 18 other members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots while working a wildfire around Yarnell. An investigation into the matter is ongoing. Pfingston plans to have a news conference on Tuesday in Prescott. The grieving mother also said city officials promised they would retroactively reclassify the seasonal, temporary employees as permanent so the families could receive additional survivor...

(CNN) -- Human error is to blame for a mortar round explosion that killed seven U.S. Marines and injured eight other service members during a training exercise in Nevada this year, the Marines said on Wednesday. An investigation of the March 18 incident at Hawthorne Army Depot revealed that "the Marines employing one of the mortars did not follow correct procedures, resulting in the detonation of a high explosive round at the mortar position," the Marines said in a statement. "The investigation also determined that the mortar section had not conducted appropriate preparatory training leading up to" the nighttime training...

Chris Dorner. Body of ex-LAPD gunman identified in charred cabin

A Massachusetts woman says the FBI used a chain saw blade to cut through her door and held her at gunpoint for at least 30 minutes before agents realized they were conducting a raid at the wrong home. Judy Sanchez, of Fitchburg, says she awoke to heavy footsteps in the stairwell on Jan. 26 and walked into her kitchen in time to see a blade chop through her door. "I took two steps, face the second door, and I heard the click of a gun, and saying, ‘FBI, get down,’ so I laid down on my living room floor,” Sanchez...

A New Mexico man who said he was forced to pull his own tooth while in solitary confinement because he was denied access to a dentist has been awarded $22 million due to inhumane treatment by New Mexico's Dona Ana County Jail. Stephen Slevin was arrested in August of 2005 for driving while intoxicated, then thrown in jail for two years. He was in solitary at Dona Ana County Jail for his entire sentence and basically forgotten about and never given a trial, he told NBC station KOB.com Tuesday night. "'[Jail guards were] walking by me every day, watching me...

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - And Katy Perry's family circus goes on. [...] Keith Hudson, an evangelist preacher, spewed anti-Semitic epithets in front of hundreds of worshippers, according to various reports. "You know how to make the Jew jealous?" he said at the Church on the Rise, a nondenominational church in Westlake, Ohio. "Have some money, honey. You go to L.A. and they own all the Rolex and diamond places. Walk down a part of L.A. where we live and it is so rich it smells. You ever smell rich? They are all Jews, hallelujah! Amen." [...] A spokesperson for Katy...

<p>NEW ORLEANS — A federal jury convicted five current or former police officers Friday of civil rights violations in the deadly shootings on a New Orleans bridge after Hurricane Katrina, but decided they were not guilty of murder.</p> <p>On the Web, your face can tell everything about you . NBC News What's behind all the deaths at Yosemite? . Reuters A Silk Road culture pushed to the brink . No double dip, but economy stuck in low gear Getty Images stock Child a handful? Laid-back parenting can make matters worse . ..All five officers were convicted Friday of charges stemming from the cover-up of the shootings. The four who had been charged with civil rights violations in the shootings were convicted on all counts.</p>

BENGHAZI, Libya - A NATO airstrike in the besieged rebel-held city of Misrata mistakenly killed 12 Libyan rebels, an official with the transitional government confirmed Thursday, while new fighting was reported on Libya's western border with Tunisia. The 'regrettable' accident, at least the third in five weeks, leaves 12 fighters dead in the besieged city. The strike on Wednesday was at least the third in which rebels were killed since NATO fighter jets began pounding forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi more than five weeks ago in a mission to protect Libyan civilians.

Competing groups of Republican senators have introduced resolutions aiming either to boost or curtail the U.S. role in Libya, a sign of how divided Congress is on the military operations there. One motion, introduced by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the powerful top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, would authorize U.S. forces to operate inside Libya in an effort to keep the situation there from deteriorating into a stalemate between strongman Moammar Gadhafi and the rebels. "Rather than playing a support role within NATO, America should be leading," McCain said at an Armed Services panel hearing April 7....

NATO foreign ministers have endorsed calls for Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi to leave power, amid divisions among alliance members on the campaign to protect civilians in the North African country. At a meeting in Berlin today, NATO foreign ministers agreed the alliance would continue its Libya mission as long as was needed. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the mission was to protect civilians, and "we will do what it takes to fulfill that mission." "We are committed to providing all necessary resources and maximum operational flexibility within our mandate," he said. "A high operational tempo against legitimate targets...

The insurrection in Libya against the 42-year dictatorship of Muammar Qaddafi has turned into a military stalemate. The battle lines have moved back and forth in Libya’s crescent west of Benghazi, the opposition’s de facto capital. Mr. Qaddafi has consolidated control of western Libya, and his forces are laying siege to the city of Misurata, the last remaining opposition stronghold in the west. A proposal for negotiations and a ceasefire by the African Union was rejected out of hand by the opposition leadership on the grounds that it did not provide for removal of Qaddafi, his sons, and his inner...

(CNN) -- Violence is escalating in the west African nation of Ivory Coast, where president-elect Alassane Ouattara is trying to oust incumbent Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to leave office after losing an election. But the international response -- limited to a U.N. peacekeeping force already deployed there -- has paled by comparison with the U.S. and NATO air strikes targeting forces to Moammar Gadhafi in Libya to prevent attacks on rebels and civilians.