WASHINGTON (AP) -- A polity safety group is warning parents not to use a Pennsylvania company's baby bassinets after two babies were trapped and strangled in the product. The "close-sleeper/bedside sleeper" bassinets, made by the agency of Simplicity Inc. of Reading, Pa., can allow infants to slip through the product and suffocate, said the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Simplicity Inc.'s 3-in-1 and 4-in-1 convertible bassinets contain metal bars spaced farther apart than federal standards tolerate. CPSC said a 5-month-old young unmarried woman from Shawnee, Kan., was strangled on Aug. 21 when she became entrapped between the bassinet's metal ...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The State Department urged Americans on Wednesday to be aware of the risks caused by Tropical Storm Gustav to people traveling to Haiti, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. The travel alert urged U.S. citizens lacking safe shelter and likely to have existence conceited by the tropical blow violently to consider leaving while commercial flights are still advantageous. Gustav moved off of Haiti's southwestern peninsula after causing deadly flooding and landslides in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and was headed toward the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. Embassy in Port au ...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department on Wednesday recommended a dramatic reduction in the prison sentence of imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who became the key witness opposed to lawmakers and congressional aides he spent years corrupting. Prosecutors asked federal judges in Washington and Florida to shave years of prison time off his sentence, citing his be in an FBI investigation that sent numerous powerful family to prison and contributed to the Republican Party's loss of Congress. "It is appropriate given Abramoff's extraordinary cooperation to date, cooperation which can be wholly or imperfectly credited as far as concerns the ...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A KGB spy who switched allegiances at the elevation of the Cold War and was considered by the CIA as its "most valuable and economical defector" has died. Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko defected in Switzerland in 1964. Confined to a safe house in Clinton, Md., the former Soviet spy was interrogated for about four months in 1965 until transferred to a specially constructed jail because he was suspected of being a double cause, according to decades-old CIA documents released last year. He was held until October 1967, then resettled with less than an assumed identity. "While ...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than a specific place of the U.S. instruction agencies' employees are outside contractors, hired to fill in gaps in the military and civilian work virtue, according to a survey of the 16 intelligence agencies. That is roughly on par with last year's total, the first year the national intelligence director's office tried to count the outward assistant, Ronald Sanders, the intelligence director's personnel acumen chief, told reporters Wednesday. The number of government employees at U.S. intelligence agencies is classified, but Sanders confirmed it is more than 100,000. Contractors are not included in that total. ...