A buttoned-down Prince Harry joined Michelle Obama in honoring military families Thursday and toured an exhibition in Congress about land mines, opening a weeklong U.S. visit devoted to the wounded victims of war. Shrieking onlookers gave him the pop-star treatment, but he was all royal business.

Two popes prayed together Friday at the Vatican, one Catholic and one Orthodox, in a sign of improving ties following the election of new leaders for both churches.

The U.S. House passed a Republican bill along party lines Thursday that lawmakers say would remove the threat of default, while requiring the government to prioritize its debt and pension payments.

The former long-time mayor of Quebec's third-largest city was arrested Thursday in connection with a corruption scandal.

Uruguay has convicted an active general for dictatorship-era human rights violations for the first time. Gen. Miguel Dalmao was sentenced to 28 years in prison for the death of a communist professor.

Prosecutors may seek the death penalty against Ariel Castro, the man accused of imprisoning three women at his home for a decade, as police charged that he impregnated one of his captives at least five times and made her miscarry by starving her and punching her in the belly.

Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt denied on Thursday that he ordered the extermination of Ixil Mayas as he testified for the first time at his genocide trial.

The bipartisan coalition behind a contentious overhaul of immigration laws stuck together on a critical early series of test votes Thursday, turning back challenges from conservative critics as the Senate Judiciary Committee refined legislation to secure the nation's borders and offer eventual citizenship to millions living illegally in the United States.

An Ohio prosecutor vowed on Thursday to seek murder charges that could carry the death penalty against a former Cleveland school bus driver accused of kidnapping and raping three young women who endured a decade as captives in his house.

U.S. diplomats testified on Wednesday that Washington could have done more to safeguard its mission in the Libyan city of Benghazi ahead of and during an attack last year that left four Americans dead.