Spartan Echo

  BOSTON (AP) — The Boston area held funerals for two more of its dead Tuesday — including an 8-year-old boy — as evidence mounted that the older Tsarnaev brother had embraced a radical, anti-American strain of Islam and was the driving force behind the Boston Marathon bombing. Younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s condition was upgraded [...]

  WASHINGTON (AP) — As airport delays spread across the country, members of Congress on Tuesday urged the administration to postpone the furloughing of air traffic controllers to give the White House and Congress time to find a less painful way of handling automatic spending cuts. Two senators, Republican Jerry Moran of Kansas and Democrat [...]

  CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A 59-year-old Russian cosmonaut became the world’s oldest spacewalker Friday, joining a much younger cosmonaut’s son for a little maintenance work outside the International Space Station. Pavel Vinogradov, a cosmonaut for two decades, claimed the honor as he emerged from the hatch with Roman Romanenko. The pair installed new [...]

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Two environmental activists have been charged with trespassing, unlawful assembly and obstruction after disrupting a symposium intended to present new research on energy production and the environment. Joe Solomon and David Baghdadi locked themselves together with a plastic pipe and chanted “Coal kills, science lies” until police arrived Monday at the [...]

  WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court seemed worried Monday about the idea of companies patenting genes that can be found inside the human body, as it heard arguments in a case that could profoundly reshape U.S. medical research and the fight against diseases like breast and ovarian cancer. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office [...]

LONDON (AP) — Robert Edwards, a Nobel prizewinner from Britain whose pioneering in vitro fertilization research led to the first test tube baby and has since brought millions of people into the world, died Wednesday at age 87. The University of Cambridge, where he was a professor, said Edwards passed away peacefully in his sleep [...]

  LAS VEGAS (AP) — Television stations that relay Fox programming are “on board” with a threat to transition the over-the-air network to cable and satellite TV if Internet startup Aereo keeps reselling Fox’s signal without paying for rights, the chairman of a Fox group said Tuesday. Fox’s parent company, News Corp., owns just 27 [...]

  TOKYO (AP) — It’s easy to write off North Korea’s threats to strike the United States with a nuclear-tipped missile as bluster: It has never demonstrated the capability to deploy a missile that could reach the Pacific island of Guam, let alone the mainland U.S. But what about Japan? Though it remains a highly [...]

  CHICAGO (AP) — The biggest thing in operating rooms these days is a million-dollar, multi-armed robot named da Vinci, used in nearly 400,000 surgeries nationwide last year — triple the number just four years earlier. But now the high-tech helper is under scrutiny over reports of problems, including several deaths that may be linked [...]

  BEIJING (AP) — Scientists taking a first look at the genetics of a bird flu strain that has killed three people in China said Wednesday that the virus could be harder to track than its better-known cousin H5N1 because it might be able to spread among poultry without showing any signs. The scientists, at [...]

  GENEVA (AP) — A $2 billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station has found the first significant hint of dark matter, the mysterious substance that is believed to hold the cosmos together but has never been directly observed, scientists say. The first results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which was sent into [...]