Army Special Forces veteran Ezell Finklea, 61, had cooperated with law enforcement, identifying his neighbor as the killer in a 2012 slaying case. On the eve of the trial, Finklea was gunned down.

The invited lawmakers' decision marked another failure in the White House’s ongoing attempt to splinter Democrats, who instead are holding firm against Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion for his border wall.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said it would be "profoundly irresponsible" for him to issue an order that would result in thousands of federal employees staying home from work and not doing their jobs.

An art exhibit installed on the grounds of the World Trade Center that features a giant candy sculpture wrapped in the Saudi flag will be relocated following complaints from 9/11 victims groups, the agency that oversees the site said Monday.

A Democratic measure rebuking Republican Rep. Steve King for his comments about white supremacy won easy approval Tuesday in the House. In a twist, the nine-term Iowa congressman was among those supporting the measure of disapproval, which was adopted, 416-1.

A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday that the agency expects to have about 2,200 inspectors back on the job by the end of this week.

The Internal Revenue Service is recalling about 46,000 of its employees furloughed by the government shutdown — nearly 60 percent of its workforce — to handle tax returns and pay out refunds. The employees won't be paid.

A Navajo Code Talker who used his native language to outsmart the Japanese in World War II has died in New Mexico at age 94.

Sgt. Trey Troney was driving in Texas, and when he saw an accident, he used his hoodie and a ballpoint pen to help an injured driver.

Obituary

Retired Air Force Col. Joe M. Jackson, a recipient of the Medal of Honor, a veteran of three wars and early U-2 pilot, died Saturday at the age of 95.

Prosecutors say Kemia Hassel and Jeremy Cuellar, both soldiers stationed at Fort Stewart, Ga., are charged in the slaying of her Army Sgt. Tyrone Hassel III, also stationed at Fort Stewart, on New Year's Eve.

Analysis

During the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, an argument resurfaced repeatedly in Trump’s rhetoric that mirrored a complaint he made in 1987: The U.S. pays a disproportionate amount of the cost of NATO, and other nations aren’t paying their share.

The White House has been considering reaching out to rank-and-file Democrats rather than dealing with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to try and chip away at Democratic opposition to the wall.

The White House, which has boasted of taking unprecedented actions to secure the nation's digital infrastructure, isn't doing enough to protect its own emails from being copycatted by hackers and spammers, according to data shared with The Washington Post by the email security firm ValiMail.

The emergence of the reclusive Ren Zhengfei, who last spoke with foreign media in 2015, underscores the depth of the attacks on Huawei Technologies Co., the largest symbol of China’s growing technological might.

National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd, who represents thousands of border patrol agents, has helped affirm President Donald Trump's conviction that a wall at the southern border is urgently needed to stop what they've described as a humanitarian crisis.

The comments by William Barr at his Senate confirmation hearing pointedly departed from Trump's own views and underscored Barr's efforts to reassure Democrats that he will not be a loyalist to a president who has appeared to demand it from law enforcement.

Rick Gates, a former senior campaign aide to President Donald Trump, will have to wait at least another two months for his sentencing date in the Russia investigation, prosecutors said Tuesday.

The first groups of migrants left San Pedro Sula's bus station Monday night, with many women and children boarding buses bound for the Guatemalan border while others started walking and hitchhiking under a steady rain. Others departed Tuesday morning trying to catch up.

The U.S. Forest Service has built its first corral for wild horses, which could allow it to bypass federal restrictions and sell the animals for slaughter.

A Green Beret may be dying of cancer. Military doctors may be to blame. But a law prevents servicemembers from suing the government for anything. Now, Sgt. 1st Class Rich Stayskal is fighting two battles. One, for his life. The other for the lives of others in similar situations.

The lawsuits said military contractor KBR dumped tires, batteries, medical waste and other materials into open burn pits. The suits claimed the resulting smoke caused neurological problems, cancers and other health issues in more than 800 servicemembers. The complaints said at least 12 servicemembers died.

The service is preparing for about 41,000 members to go without paychecks on Tuesday as part of the ongoing partial government shutdown.

Berrien County Prosecutor Mike Sepic said Kemia Hassel, 22, of Allenhurst, Ga., was arraigned Monday on a charge of first-degree premeditated murder. She’s being held on a $2.5 million bond.

More than 500,000 servicemembers are now enrolled in the Defense Department’s new Blended Retirement System, the largest change to the military’s retirement benefit since World War II, according to the Pentagon.

Monday’s announcement did not include the number of troops needed to conduct this mission or when new deployments will begin. It also did not include cost estimates.

Trump rejected a suggestion to reopen the government for several weeks while negotiations would continue with Democrats over his demands for $5.7 billion for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Scientists used aerial photographs, satellite measurements and computer models to track how fast the southern-most continent has been melting since 1979 in 176 individual basins. They found the ice loss to be accelerating dramatically — a key indicator of human-caused climate change.

Veteran Republican Rep. Steve King will be blocked from committee assignments for the next two years after lamenting that white supremacy and white nationalism have become offensive terms.

Past presidents who governed during shutdowns also canceled some trips and arranged others to try to pressure the opposition or to influence public opinion. One president used the first lady as a stand-in.

President Donald Trump arrived just outside of New Orleans behind schedule because a mechanical issue slightly delayed Air Force One’s departure from Washington. A maintenance crew needed to reset an indicator light before takeoff, the White House said.

The private boarding school for grades 6 to 12 draws boys from around the country as it touts its ability to develop academic and leadership skills in a military environment.

Speaking from the South Lawn before departing the White House for New Orleans, Trump called former FBI and Justice Department officials “known scoundrels” and “dirty cops.”

In a sudden retrial, a Chinese court in northeastern Liaoning province announced that it had given Robert Lloyd Schellenberg the death penalty, reversing a 2016 ruling that sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

President Donald Trump sought to rally thousands of farmers here behind his push for a border wall, but he offered one exception to his hard-line immigration stance, promising to allow seasonal farmworkers to more easily enter the country.

William Barr's prepared remarks are an acknowledgment that his handling of special counsel Mueller’s investigation will take center stage at his confirmation hearing Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Supreme Court, without comment, turned away a challenge Monday to Matt Whitaker's appointment as acting attorney general.

No-shows among screeners across the nation soared Sunday and again Monday, when the Transportation Security Administration reported a national absence rate of 7.6 percent, compared with 3.2 percent on the comparable Monday a year ago.

The surgery is related to a 2017 attack, according to a court document in Sen. Rand Paul’s lawsuit against Rene Boucher, who attacked Paul while the senator was doing yard work.

The Pentagon is shipping a handicapped-accessible cell big enough to accommodate a hospital bed and wheelchair that, in a first, would let an accused war criminal live at the court during proceedings as he tries to recover from multiple spinal surgeries.

Witnesses, a human-rights group and a Catholic charity that collected bodies after the Nov. 13 massacre told The Associated Press that at least 21 men were slain during a 24-hour period in the La Saline neighborhood.

Navy veteran Robert Scott McCubbins’ story is one about loneliness. But it’s also about the opposite - how a community came together to give McCubbin's final companion a home.

Evansville Police Sgt. Mark Saltzman said hundreds of people were playing bingo when the shooter opened fire Sunday evening. Saltzman said the suspected gunman was detained quickly.

Members of United Teachers Los Angeles voted last year to walk off the job for the first time in three decades if a deal wasn’t reached on issues including higher wages and smaller class sizes.

President Donald Trump and his administration put farmers front and center as beneficiaries of the proposed rollback because of the strong regard Americans historically hold for farming, opponents say. Trump traveled to New Orleans on Monday to speak to a national farm convention.

The Trump administration's effort to let companies with religious or moral objections opt out of Obamacare requirements that they offer free contraception coverage in their employee health care plans hit a road block in a California court on the eve of the new rules taking effect.

Purple Heart recipient Duane Sherman, 96, has received notes from elementary school students, prison inmates, the secretary of the Navy and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

President Donald Trump's National Security Council asked for military options on striking Iran in response to that country's support of insurgents in Iraq, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, was quoted in The New York Times last week as saying, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

The weeks-old standoff over funding led to the partial government shutdown that hit day 23 on Sunday without an end in sight.

New reporting raises further questions about President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia and emphasizes the need to ensure that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is finished without interference, Senate Democrats said Sunday.

The Deseret News newspaper quoted Murray Fire Department officials as saying two people were injured but no additional details were available immediately.

A video circulating on social media purports to show the moment in which Juan Guaido is intercepted on his way to an anti-government town hall meeting in the port city of La Guaira.

During a telephone interview broadcast on Fox News Channel, President Donald Trump never answered host Jeanine Pirro’s question directly, but said, “I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked."

Authorities say two Californian men have been conducting surveillance on Israeli and Jewish facilities in the U.S., and collecting information on members of the Mujahedin Khalq, an Iranian exile group that has long sought to topple the regime in Tehran.

For many U.S. businesses, President Donald Trump's tariffs are escalating costs, creating hardships and magnifying uncertainty.

U.S. officials say there is no detailed record of President Donald Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations during the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.

The epidemic of wildfires in California has led one northern California town to propose a very low-tech hircine solution: Goats. Nevada City has launched a "Goat Fund Me" campaign to bring herds of them to city-owned land to eat brush.

Former kidnapping victims say Jayme Closs, who was rescued almost three months after her alleged abduction by a man who also killed her parents, should be given plenty of space and time to recover from the trauma.

On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News before departing from Cairo that an international conference on Iran and the Middle East will take place Feb. 13-14 in Poland.

In the selective reopening of government offices, experts say they see a willingness to cut corners, scrap prior plans and wade into legally dubious territory to mitigate the pain.

The first full week of state legislative sessions and swearings-in for governors saw a flurry of new health care proposals in Democratic-controlled states, keeping with the main theme of 2018 election campaigns.

As Amanda Salmoiraghi and her family prepared to move from California to Colorado Springs for her job with the Air Force, she learned that her son Joshua's cancer was at stage 4. He would need more treatment, with stronger drugs.

Police in southern Michigan have arrested two suspects in the New Year's Eve slaying of Army Sgt. Tyrone Hassel III who was fatally shot while on leave.

Marine veteran Christopher Tur was working as a civilian contractor at Guantanamo Bay when he died. His wife Lara also worked there. Tur's brother Mike hadn't even left the island to accompany his brother's body back to Philadelphia when words alleging his sister-in-law's infidelity swirled through the base.

The U.S. State Department said in a statement that it stood behind the head of Venezuela's opposition-run congress, Juan Guaido, who said on Friday that he was prepared to step into the presidency temporarily to replace Maduro.

The potential use of a national emergency declaration by Trump for the border wall shows the extent to which Republican lawmakers are willing to yield on treasured values — in this case, the constitutional separation of powers — to steer clear of confronting the White House and to give the president what he wants.

Parsons Corporation, announced Jan. 7 it would buy Virginia-based government contractor OGSystems for an undisclosed sum. On Thursday, the hardware manufacturer Textron Systems announced its purchase of Howe and Howe Technologies, a Maine-based manufacturer of robotic military vehicles.

Cameron Currin, a Coast Guard member by day and film director in his free time, said his film "Kushtaka" is inspired by a Tlingit legendary creature of the same name, which translates as Land-Otter Man. The film is also adapted from "The Strangest Story Ever Told," a story written by Harry Colp.

Last time they saw each other, one had full use of his legs and the other a hull.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said Friday in a news release that the remains of Navy Fireman 1st Class Grant Cook, of Cozad, had been accounted for on Aug. 27.

Mission accomplished for a former World War II lead pilot and the first-time book author who chronicled his life. Following about 100 hours of conversations over two years, Mitchell M. Topal turned 97-year-old Ray Firmani's recollections into far more than a tactics-heavy review of combat actions and units involved.

The State Department acknowledged that one individual is suspected of slipping into two of its buildings — one in Washington, D.C., and one in Arlington, Virginia. A suspect was arrested after he allegedly tried to sell the equipment at a restaurant in Virginia, and almost all the stolen devices were retrieved.

The House and Senate voted to give federal workers back pay whenever the federal government reopens and then left town for the weekend, leaving the shutdown on track to become one for the record books once the clock struck midnight and the closure entered its 22nd day. And

If you're a sportsman looking to hunt game, a gas company planning to drill offshore or a taxpayer awaiting your refund, you're in luck: This shutdown won't affect your plans.

Analysis

A few blocks from the National Mall, amid a cluster of nondescript buildings, more than a dozen prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller have followed an unusual routine as they toil away on the Russia investigation. When they leave the office at night, they often wonder if it could be their last day on the job.

The Michigan Air National Guard is seeking input on a plan to update military training airspace around an aerial gunnery range in northern Michigan — a change that officials say could alter noise levels in surrounding communities.

Fallout from the federal government shutdown is hurting Native Americans as dwindling funds hamper access to health care and other services. The pain is especially deep in tribal communities with high rates of poverty and unemployment, where one person often supports an extended family.

Veteran Brian Kolfage who made waves by raising $20 million in one month on the crowd-sourcing site, said Friday in a new post that donors can send their refunded money to his new venture — a nonprofit that aims to build the wall without government help.

A former interpreter for U.S. troops in Afghanistan was detained Friday in Houston's international airport with his family and threatened with deportation. Someone had opened sealed medical records, prompting Customs and Border Protection personnel to detain the family over concerns the records could have been "faked."

Instead of a physical wall that President Donald Trump wants to continue building along the border with Mexico, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposed spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" for technology to scan cars for drugs, weapons and contraband at the border. That didn't go over well with a digital-rights advocacy group, which sees the proposal as a threat to Fourth Amendment rights.

As a Navy counselor, Joseph Fetterman was tasked with mentoring young enlisted sailors at Tinker Air Force Base — but Fetterman was enhancing his military pay with cash flow from a prostitution ring that he and his wife operated using women flown in from Thailand.

Though the other military service branches — the Army, the Air Force, the Navy and the Marine Corps — are part of the Department of Defense, which has been unaffected by the shutdown, the Coast Guard falls under the Department of Homeland Security which is affected.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii, listed criminal justice reform, climate change and health care as issues that she was interested in solving if elected.

The Army is testing new combat boots that are lighter and have more flexible leather. If any of the prototypes are chosen, it would be the first significant change to the service's basic boots in years.

The Navy is slated to commission its newest littoral combat ship, the future USS Wichita, during a ceremony Saturday in Naval Station Mayport, Fla.

The data raises questions about whether the immigration system might be enabling forced marriage and about how U.S. laws might be compounding the problem despite efforts to limit child and forced marriage.

Federal employees received pay stubs with nothing but zeros on them Friday as the effects of the government shutdown hit home, deepening anxieties about mortgage payments and unpaid bills.

The Coast Guard has reprimanded a Coast Guard officer in South Carolina for flashing a white supremacy hand sign on live television.

Officials have given President Donald Trump a plan to divert funds designated for Army Corps of Engineers projects in California and Puerto Rico to help pay for a wall along the southern border, a leading member of Congress said Thursday.

The Trump administration is eyeing unused money in the Army Corps of Engineers budget, specifically a disaster spending bill passed by Congress last year that includes $13.9 billion that has been allocated but not actually spent for civil works projects, two people with knowledge of the developments said Thursday.

Many Puerto Ricans were fuming Friday after reports emerged that the White House may raid disaster-relief funds approved by Congress last year to fund a security wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

A 21-year-old man from rural Wisconsin was identified Friday and jailed as the suspect who killed the parents of 13-year-old Jayme Closs and abducted the teen from the family's home near Barron nearly three months ago.