OMAHA, Neb. – A Holdrege family is celebrating a very special birthday. Lee and Rachel Woollen’s “miracle babies” turn 1 this month. The quadruplets — three boys and a girl — were born Feb. 11, 2008. The births at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha is believed to be the …

WASHINGTON – The treatment of circus elephants went on trial in federal court Wednesday with animal rights groups accusing Ringling Bros. of violating the Endangered Species Act when it uses bullhooks and chains to control its performing pachyderms. During opening statements, the two sides showed dueling videos that painted vastly …

WASHINGTON ( – Ignacio Carlos Flores-Figueroa, an undocumented worker from Mexico, made a curious and undeniably bad decision. After working under an assumed name for six years, he decided to use his real name and exchanged one set of phony identification numbers for another. The change made his employer suspicious …

JERUSALEM – Israeli President Shimon Peres chose hard-line Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu to form a new Israeli government on Friday, ending days of speculation and giving Netanyahu six weeks to put together a ruling coalition. The question now is whether Netanyahu will form a narrow government with his hard-line allies …

Sam Silverman is co-captain of his high school football team — a safety accustomed to bruising collisions. But that’s nothing compared with the abuse he gets for being a vegetarian. “I get a lot of flak for it in the locker room,” said the 16-year-old junior at Westborough High School …

ATLANTA – A federal probe into a deadly salmonella outbreak has exposed a dirty secret: Food producers in most states are not required to alert health regulators if internal tests show possible contamination at their plants. The legal loophole surfaced this week when federal investigators disclosed internal Peanut Corp. of …

ASPEN, Colo. – Authorities say they’re looking for a former Aspen resident after a bomb scare effectively shut down this resort town on New Year’s Eve, one of its busiest nights of the year. Suspicious packages and threatening notes were found at two banks, forcing the evacuation of a 16-block …

Federal health officials said Tuesday that asthma drugs, including Merck’s Singulair, do not appear tied to suicide — though regulators continue to examine possible links to behavioral problems. After nine months of review, the Food and Drug Administration said company data do not show any association between the popular respiratory …

NEW YORK – A computer virus that may leave Microsoft Windows users vulnerable to digital hijacking is spreading through companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia, already infecting close to 9 million machines, according to a private online security firm. Fortunately, however, it may be a dud. Though computer bugs …

CABIMAS, Venezuela – Squeezed by slumping crude prices, Venezuela is reaching out to the multinational oil companies it once demonized as imperialist profiteers. Venezuela is soliciting bids from the world’s major oil companies to extract heavy crude from vast deposits in its Orinoco River region. Despite President Hugo Chavez’s criticism …