story

NEW ORLEANS – Just a week after residents began returning to the city’s Algiers neighborhood, a parochial school there reopened Monday for the first time since Hurricane Katrina (search) struck, and its principal told pupils their school is “a place you can call home now.” As St. Andrew the Apostle …

ALBANY, N.Y. – Online auctioneer eBay Inc. will block the sale and shipment of stun guns and other illegal weapons to New York residents after working with Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (search), it was announced Tuesday. In an investigation that started last year, Spitzer’s office found that eBay users were …

BOSTON – Pushing the “open source” idea deeper into computing, several companies led by IBM Corp. are teaming up to develop programs for letting big businesses uniformly manage their increasingly vast warehouses of data. The companies are forming a group known as Aperi (search), which will attempt to free up …

SAN FRANCISCO – Despite optimism and enthusiasm, stem cell researchers arriving here Thursday for a conference are rowing hard against strong currents of financial, political and technical turmoil. There’s even talk of trying to temper heightened public expectations that cures for diseases are imminent. “Many of the technologies we hyped …

FRESNO, Calif. – Marcus Wesson (search), convicted last week of killing nine of his children, fired his defense attorneys Friday as his sentencing hearing got underway. “Your honor, my lawyers are fired,” Wesson told Judge R.L. Putnam. He then requested a Marsden hearing (search), which would enable him to address …

CHICAGO – Tommy Hilfiger Corp. (TOM) on Wednesday said it was negotiating with U.S. prosecutors to settle an investigation into whether payments between subsidiaries artificially lowered its tax rate. The clothing designer also said quarterly revenue fell on declining orders in the United States and warned that revenue would fall …

BALTIMORE – Snipers John Allen Muhammad (search) and Lee Boyd Malvo (search) were indicted Thursday on six counts of murder in Montgomery County. Each is charged with murdering six people in the county between Oct. 2 and Oct. 22 2002, including four who were shot and killed within a three-hour …

NEW YORK – Citigroup Inc. (C) said Friday it will pay $2 billion to Enron Corp. shareholders who accused it of helping the energy trader in a massive accounting fraud, a move that further cleans up the bank’s legal record and could pressure others to settle the case. The class-action …

RAMALLAH, West Bank – Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (search) postponed upcoming parliamentary elections on Saturday, giving his struggling Fatah party time to fend off a growing challenge by Hamas. The Islamic group condemned the delay as a violation of a cease-fire agreement but stopped short of withdrawing from the truce. …

WASHINGTON – Dealing a blow to President Bush a week before the Group of Eight economic summit in Scotland, the House voted to cut his funding proposal for an assistance program considered a cornerstone of his campaign to spread democracy around the world. Money for the program, the Millennium Challenge …