AP - President Barack Obama is promising parents and their kids that with his administration's help they will have better teachers in improved schools so U.S. students can make up for academic ground lost against youngsters in other countries.

AP - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's wife has been transferred out of a Virginia hospital's intensive care unit and is improving after she was seriously injured in an accident on an interstate highway near Washington.

AP - Jamie Paulin-Ramirez was a straight-A nursing student when she abruptly left Colorado last fall with her 6-year-old son and turned up in Ireland, where her parents say she was arrested this week in an alleged plot to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist.

AP - Students have wrapped ribbons around 8,000 sunflowers to hand out at a memorial service for Chelsea King, the 17-year-old girl whose murder has shaken her community and spurred calls for legal changes in how child sex offenders are treated.

AP - Their kingdom long ago overthrown, Native Hawaiians seeking redress are closer than they've ever been to reclaiming a piece of Hawaii.

AP - The judge didn't believe the father was a threat and denied the mother's plea to keep him away from their 9-month-old son. It was a seemingly routine ruling in a busy family law court called on too often to referee passionate fights between broken young families over the care of babies.

AP - A U.N. meeting to assess progress in advancing the fight for women's equality that ended Friday had a dramatically different slant than a similar session held five years ago: This time, the United States was not trying to make an anti-abortion declaration a crucial theme.

AP - Utah's House majority leader resigned from the Legislature Saturday, two days after his confession about sitting nude in a hot tub with a teenage girl 25 years ago stunned this conservative state.

AP - In the long and painful debate over whether he should have done more to halt the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators in World War II, Pope Pius XII has an unusual defender.

AP - America is springing forward.