FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A 5-year-old North Carolina girl was raped and killed the same day she was taken from her home, according to an arrest warrant released Friday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department intends to drop manslaughter and weapons charges against one of the Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting, prosecutors said in court documents Friday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Suitably opaque, Section 2006 takes up only a few dozen lines in a sweeping health care bill that runs to 2,074 pages and mentions neither Sen. Mary Landrieu nor her state of Louisiana.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Digging in for a long struggle, Republican senators and governors assailed the majority Democrats' newly minted health care legislation Thursday as a collection of tax increases, cuts in services for the elderly and heavy new burdens for deficit-ridden states.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon said Thursday it will scour its procedures for identifying volatile soldiers hidden in the ranks following the Fort Hood shooting rampage and lapses that might allow others to slip through bureaucratic cracks.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said any new U.S. forces President Barack Obama sends to Afghanistan could move into the country swiftly, despite logistical hassles that force almost all major deliveries of troops and supplies to go by air.

WASHINGTON (AP) — After months of maneuvering, the Senate stands at the brink of a historic battle over health care with President Barack Obama and his allies on one side and Republicans, outnumbered but unflinching, on the other.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — President Barack Obama is now confirming what many have long suspected: He will miss his January deadline to close the Guantanamo prison — partly because he cannot persuade other nations to take the detainees.

KABUL (AP) — Its protracted presidential election has finally been decided, but Afghanistan is on hold.

MARIETTA, Pa. (AP) — Malaria. Tuberculosis. Alzheimer's disease. AIDS. Pandemic flu. Genital herpes. Urinary tract infections. Grass allergies. Traveler's diarrhea. You name it, the pharmaceutical industry is working on a vaccine to prevent it.

BEIJING (AP) — President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao emerged from hours of intense talks Tuesday determined to marshal their combined clout on crucial issues, but still showing divisions over economic, security and human rights issues that have long bedeviled the two powers.

WASHINGTON (AP) — With a simple marketing twist, tobacco companies are avoiding hundreds of millions of dollars a year in taxes by exploiting a loophole in President Barack Obama's child health law.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In courtrooms barred to the public, dozens of terror suspects are pleading for their freedom from the Guantanamo Bay prison, sometimes even testifying on their own behalf by video from the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

TAGAB VALLEY, Afghanistan (AP) — Hundreds of French and Afghan troops pushed into a hostile valley in eastern Afghanistan where militants launch quick attacks, then disappear into hillside villages.

SHANGHAI (AP) — President Barack Obama is walking a tightrope on his first trip to China, seeking to enlist help in tackling urgent global problems while weighing when and how — or if — he should raise traditional human rights concerns.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The state's decision to replace a three-drug lethal injection with a powerful dose of one anesthetic is raising the possibility of what may have seemed unthinkable not so long ago: a truce in the long-running legal challenges to death penalty injection across the country.

CHICAGO (AP) — The Obama administration may buy a near-empty prison in rural northwestern Illinois to house detainees from Guantanamo Bay along with federal inmates, a White House official said Saturday.

KIEL, Wis. (AP) — Hundreds of people lining the main street of an Indiana town on Saturday fell solemnly silent as the white hearse passed. Mourners waited for hours outside a Wisconsin gymnasium to say goodbye to a soldier who once promised to take down Osama bin Laden.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a move both politically and legally risky, the Obama administration plans to put on trial the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and four alleged accomplices in a lower Manhattan courthouse.

TOKYO (AP) — President Barack Obama pressed on with his mission to repair America's global standing, telling Asians he was determined to engage them as equal partners in the economy, diplomacy and security.