While the United States economy is performing relatively well, the nation has fared worse than six of the nine countries surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in job gains.    

The foiling of a 2009 plot to bomb the New York City subway seemed to be the kind of success President Obama was referring to when he defended “modest encroachments on privacy” to protect the country.    

The Army says it has suspended a two-star general from his duties in Japan for allegedly failing to report or properly investigate an allegation of sexual assault.

The suspended officer, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Harrison, is commanding general of U.S. Army forces in Japan.

The Army said Friday night that he was suspended by the Army chief of staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, and Army Secretary John McHugh. It provided no details about the alleged sexual assault case.

The Army says that until the investigation of Harrison's role is completed, Maj. Gen. James C. Boozer will take his place in Japan.

Typical members of Congress "don't receive this kind of briefing," Sen. Dick Durbin says.

Maj. Gen. Michael Harrison, head of U.S. Army Japan, is the latest top military commander let go.

The world's largest Internet cooperated with government officials to provide user data in a surveillance program, the NYT reports.

A senior U.S. intelligence official says that the secret program that tracked hundreds of millions of domestic phone records helped disrupt a 2009 terror plot to bomb New York City subways.

The official says the plot was thwarted because of the secret collection of phone records by the National Security Agency. The official would not provide other details.

The official was not authorized to discuss the plot publicly and requested anonymity.

Afghan-American Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to the 2009 plot, saying he had been recruited by al-Qaida in Pakistan.

Newspaper reports revealed this week that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans each day for a database used to determine whether terror suspects have been in contact with people in the U.S.

Most of the killings were committed by Mr. Ramirez before dawn during residential burglaries, and all were markedly coldblooded, involving savage beatings, mutilations and sexual assaults.    

President Obama on Friday defended government efforts to gather telephone and Internet data, and sought to reassure Americans that his administration was not listening in on their calls.    

Two math-notebook pages recently authenticated as belonging to Abraham Lincoln suggest the 16th president, who was known to downplay his formal education, may have spent more time in school than usually thought.

And the Illinois State University math professors behind the discovery say the work shows Lincoln was no slouch, either.

Math professors Nerida Ellerton and Ken Clements said Friday at the university in Normal that they'd recently confirmed that the two pages were part of a previously known math notebook from Lincoln's childhood. It was found in the archives of Houghton Library at Harvard University, where it remains.

The book, known as a cyphering book in Lincoln's day, is a sort math workbook in which Lincoln wrote math problems and their answers. It's the oldest known Lincoln manuscript.

Based on the difficulty of the problems involved and dates on some of the pages -- 1824 and, on the recently authenticated pages, 1826, when Lincoln was 17 -- Lincoln likely worked in the book intermittently over several calendar years while his family lived in Indiana, the married professors said. They think he could have started as early as the age of 10 and believe his work happened while he was in school.

"Most people say he went to school for anything between three months and nine months" over the course of his life, Clements said. "We think he went to school (up to) two years."

And very little of the work is wrong, he added.

"He made very few errors, and he always knew what he was trying to do," Clements added. "We've studied thousands of these cyphering books. You don't always get the feeling that `this guy knew what he was doing."'

The professors' find suggests Lincoln may have gone to school over as many as three to five winters, according to historian Daniel Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield. The library owns one previously identified page of the book.

"They are arguing with some merit that a cyphering book would have been created in a school setting," Stowell said. "It does at least open the possibility that he may have had more formal schooling than originally thought. Not a whole lot more, but still more."

The pages -- attached as a single leaf -- include word problems that are the equivalent of roughly eighth-grade modern work, Clements said.

"If 100 dollars in one year gain 3 1/2 dollars interest, what sum will gain $38.50 cents in one year and a quarter?" one reads.

Any student doing such work in the 1820s would have been more advanced than most on the frontier in Indiana, Clements said.

"If you got to that stage, you'd sort of done well," he said.

Lincoln is known to have later studied trigonometry and geometry on his own.

The newly authenticated pages have been in the Harvard library's archives since 1954. They were known as Lincoln documents, but their origin wasn't known, the professors said. The two looked at the documents as they researched a book they've written on math books from the period.

A letter from former Lincoln law partner William Herndon from 1875 that accompanied the papers, describing them, made the authentication relatively straightforward, Clements said.

Lincoln's stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, gave the cyphering book to Herndon after Lincoln's death, and Herndon then gave them to other people, Stowell said.

They meet in California for their first in-person talks since the Chinese president took office.

At least three people were wounded and a suspect reportedly was in custody Friday after a shooting at Santa Monica College in Southern California, according to officials and media reports.

A Cleveland man accused of holding three women captive for a decade has been indicted on 329 charges that include kidnapping and rape, prosecutors said.    

Samantha Power, who is facing some resistance from pro-Israel groups, was praised by the Israeli ambassador to Washington.    

A 42-year-old man accused of being high while operating demolition equipment when a building collapsed and killed six people will be charged with involuntary manslaughter.    

The former reporter behind “The Wire” suggested in a long blog post that “the national eruption over the rather inevitable and understandable collection of all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans” was misguided.    

But both could be telling the truth, observers say.

A Clayton County officer is recovering at local medical center after an officer-involved shooting that killed a man on Friday evening. 

As of 6p.m. Georgia power reported about 7,500 people without power, mostly to the north and east of Atlanta.