Ken Stanford

For the second straight year, millions of Social Security recipients, disabled veterans and federal retirees can expect historically small increases in their benefits come January.

Chestatee Regional Hospital in Dahlonega and two other hospitals in northeast Georgia made the Georgia Hospital Association's Elite Circle in a recent evaluation.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the U.S. reached an agreement in principle Saturday on the major elements of a deal that would allow American troops to stay in Afghanistan after 2014.

Early voting begins Monday in many places across Georgia for the November 5 elections but in some places it will be delayed until Tuesday.

People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Xerox announced late in the evening that access has been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported.

Seeking a new generation of leaders, social conservatives are looking for a lot more than opposition to gay marriage and abortion.

From Silicon Valley to the South Pacific, counterattacks to revelations of widespread National Security Agency surveillance are taking shape, from a surge of new encrypted email programs to technology that sprinkles the Internet with red flag terms to confuse would-be snoops.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday said a partial agreement was reached with Afghanistan on a security accord, but the potentially deal-breaking issue of jurisdiction for American forces remains unresolved.