Ken Stanford

A North Carolina prison inmate used a smuggled mobile phone to keep in touch with kidnappers holding the father of a prosecutor who helped send him away for life, federal authorities said.

A day after hailing the Civil Rights Act as a lasting legacy of Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency, President Barack Obama is using another civil rights forum to issue an election-year warning against erosion of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that helped pave Obama's path in politics.

A FedEx tractor-trailer crossed a grassy freeway median in California Thursday afternoon and slammed into a bus filled with high school students. Ten people were killed in the fiery crash, including both drivers and five students, authorities said.

Two of three fires that occurred in Hall County overnight are considered "suspicious" by investigators who say, however, ther is no reason to believe they are related.

A spokesman for Family Dollar said Thursday afternoon the company is "working to finalize" the list of the 300+ stories it plans to close.

A yearlong review of information the U.S. intelligence community had prior to the Boston Marathon bombing found that the government did not miss any key details that could have prevented the attack - instead, the report found, information Russia withheld from the U.S. could have made a difference, according to an official who described the report's findings.

CBS moved swiftly Thursday to replace the retiring David Letterman with Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, who will take over the "Late Show" next year and do battle with Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel for late-night television supremacy.