News, national, washington, international, western news, all other news, politics, news

SAN FRANCISCO -- The shout of "lunch is ready" jolted nearly the entire staff of Zynga from their desks and into the Internet startup's kitchen, where they piled ahi, marinated flank steak and stir-fried soba noodles onto their plates.

A simple hand-operated rock crusher built at the University of Pittsburgh stands to improve the wellbeing of an entire Ugandan village.

Nothing fancy here -- just a routine mechanical device that requires two sets of human hands to spin flywheels to crush rock.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A recycling war is breaking out on the Bay Area's curbsides.

Those ubiquitous, colorful recycling bins set out each week for pickup stand on a battle line between growing numbers of organized crews who snag cans and bottles and the official waste haulers who say "poachers" are increasingly hostile and dangerous.

LAS VEGAS -- The inmates run this place. Not the staff. That's the reality of it.

That's the graduation speech Dahn Shaulis says he got at Nevada's prison guard academy. Manage the unmanageable, his trainers said. Learn to provoke power, to play with the "politics of the fist," to control inmates by pitting them against one another, to perfect benign neglect.

STUART, FLa. -- So you think today's high prices make it tough to feed the family? Consider the Ais Indians.

A display that will be part of a new Florida museum will vividly portray the lengths that the Ais, the dominant tribe on Florida's Treasure Coast for 2,000 years before Europeans arrived, went to get food.

WASHINGTON -- For four decades, the United States officially branded Nelson Mandela a terrorist because of his association with the African National Congress in the fight to end apartheid in South Africa.

Every harried mother and father knows the logistical headaches of taking their children to assorted soccer practices, gymnastics class, day camps and on and on.

MINNEAPOLIS -- The rules were simple enough, Max Sanders wrote on the online auction posting.

The 19-year-old University of Minnesota student was undecided in the presidential election. So for a minimum of $10, he'd vote for whomever you liked. Or, if you so chose, for no one at all.

WICHITA FALLS, Texas -- While the number of airline flights serving Wichita Falls will drop from seven to three, the city is faring better than many smaller cities across the U.S.

At least 97 airports across the U.S. have lost all airline service since 2007 or will by the end of this year, says the Air Transport Association, a trade association for the airline industry.

WARWICK, R.I. -- Judy Gendron and her four friends had just sat down to eat on the small deck on the side of her condominium here recently when they heard a loud cracking noise. Seconds later, they were falling to the ground, with a second deck overhead crashing down and pinning them in the rubble.