Wildfires in Colorado and New Mexico spread Monday, fanned by winds and intensified by drought, with the blaze in northern Colorado doubling in 24 hours.

Hundreds of firefighters and thousands of homeowners struggled to cope.

“The fuels out here are very dry. That’s the big story. It’s drought,” David Shell, a spokesman for the Little Bear firefighting crews in New Mexico, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday evening.

The Little Bear fire, near Ruidoso, N.M., has swallowed 34,561 acres in a week since a lightning strike started the blaze. The fire has been burning mixed conifer trees over steep, rugged terrain and threatening nearby towns such as Capitan.

“Everything is very dry, and some areas there are a lot of fuels per acre and areas where the forests haven’t had a fire for some time,” Shell said. “That’s sort of the story of the American West these days.”

In Colorado, the High Park fire near Fort Collins swelled from 31 square...

You can’t just feed the homeless outdoors in Philadelphia anymore; you now need a permit.

In Dallas, you can give away food only with official permission first.

Laws tightening regulations on aid to the homeless are popping up across the country, according to a recent USA Today report: “Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, Oklahoma City and more than 50 other cities have previously adopted some kind of anti-camping or anti-food-sharing laws, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.”

So the question being asked by many critics is: Are American officials trying to help the poor -- or legislate them out of sight?

“Starting in about 2006, several cities began arresting, fining, and otherwise oppressing private individuals and nonprofits that feed the homeless and less fortunate,” Baylen Linnekin writes at Reason.com. He cites a Las Vegas ban that Nevada's American Civil Liberties Union chapter called “among the...

Who is the little girl in the above photo, found on a Civil War battlefield? And how was she linked (if at all) to the fallen soldiers found nearby -- one Union, one Confederate -- 150 years ago?

The Museum of the Confederacy located in Richmond, Va., is asking for the public's help in identifying this and a number of other Civil War-era photos in order to return them to their rightful family owners. And the public is leaping to assist.

On Monday, an Associated Press story on the effort to identify the subject  in this and other photos was passed along repeatedly in social media circles throughout the day via Tweets, Facebook "likes," blog postings, news reports and more. On Yahoo News alone, the story was "liked" nearly 2,000 times and had more than 1,700 comments.

Photography was still a relatively newfangled art form when the Civil War began, yet its popularity allowed many soldiers to carry family photos with them into battle.

The Museum of the Confederacy has its own collection of...

WASHINGTON -- An unmanned Navy surveillance aircraft crashed into a marsh in southern Maryland on Monday without causing any injuries or apparent property damage on the ground, officials said.

Officials said that the Global Hawk, a high-altitude drone aircraft that normally carries sophisticated cameras and sensors, was on a test mission from the Naval Air Station Patuxent River, about 65 miles southeast of Washington, when the ground pilot lost control of the plane.

After Navy personnel lost contact with the drone, a Navy F/A-18 fighter jet pilot flew over the area and spotted the smoking airframe on the edge of the Nanticoke River, which flows into the Chesapeake Bay. Navy officials are investigating the cause of the crash.

FULL COVERAGE: Drones

The Coast Guard set up a 500-yard safety zone around the crash site and will seek to contain any fuel leaks, according to a spokesman.

The Navy is testing Northrop Grumman RQ-4A Global Hawk drones in eastern Maryland for maritime intelligence,...

The first rule of adventurous traveling: Things are almost never as bad as your mother thinks.

The second rule of adventurous traveling: The "almost never" exceptions can be pretty bad.

Further, if you’re writing a book called “The Kindness of America,” as hitchhiker Ray Dolin is, you might be tempting fate. Dolin learned this when a stranger shot him Saturday evening in rural Montana where Dolin was trying to hitch a ride.

Dolin, a 39-year-old from West Virginia, had been traveling across America to work on his book, a memoir, and was on a highway near the Bakken oil patch, authorities told the Associated Press.

"He was sitting down to have a little lunch, and this guy drives up,” Valley County Sheriff Glen Meier told the AP. “He thought he was going to give him a ride and as he approached the vehicle, the guy pulls out his weapon and shoots him. It's as simple as that.”

Dolin, 39, will live; he got hit in the arm and was being treated at Frances Mahon...

The first of what is expected to be a parade of alleged victims took the stand on Monday to describe abuse by Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State University.

Known as Victim No. 4, the witness told how he met Sandusky through a charity for at-risk boys and that Sandusky began to mentor him and bring him gifts. Eventually their contacts increased into "soap battles” in the shower, including unsought touching and oral sex, the witness testified.

Sandusky, 68, is charged with 52 criminal counts that he sexually abused 10 boys over 15 years. In opening statements Monday, the prosecution alleged that Sandusky was a “predatory pedophile.” The defense insisted that Sandusky may have given gifts but did nothing criminal.

PHOTOS: The Sandusky case: Who's who

The witness, the first of eight alleged victims expected to testify at the trial, is now 28 years old. According to reports from the courtroom, he said that he began showering with Sandusky in 1997....

Amid the northern Colorado wildfire disaster, a more intimate drama is now playing out: Some wolves in a mountain rescue center and shelter were evacuated, while others were left behind.

Fans of Wolf Sanctuary have been waiting to hear the fate of those animals left to weather the wildfire.

"They were sheltered appropriately," John Schulz, public information officer for the Larimer County sheriff's department told The Times on Monday, "but that area's totally closed off right now."

As of Sunday, volunteers had removed 11 of the animals and were hoping the 19 left at the sanctuary would hide out in underground concrete bunkers called "fire dens," according to the Associated Press.

The evacuated wolves were taken to kennels in Larimer County.

The sanctuary is on more than 180 acres in the Rocky Mountains, about 20 miles northwest of Fort Collins, Colo., according to the website.

"Many thoughts and prayers," said one post on the center's Facebook page, where people were expressing their...

Richard Nixon is long dead and his henchmen long finished with their prison terms, but Watergate’s legacy lives on.

On June 17, it will be 40 years since a team of burglars broke into Democratic Party headquarters located in the then-new Watergate building in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood in  Washington.

“Plumbers,” Nixon’s operatives were called. Their capture triggered an investigation that eventually brought down the administration and elevated the careers of two dogged Washington Post journalists named Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward; they followed the story through every corner of Washington and beyond.

Now, as the anniversary approaches, the two journalists have taken to the papers and the talk shows to reflect on a landmark moment in modern American history.

“The Watergate that we wrote about in the Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today,” Woodward and Bernstein wrotein the Post on Friday. “It was only a...

Residents of northern Colorado's Front Range area are used to wildfires, especially at this time of year, but Larimer County's High Park fire is proving to be particularly fierce -- fast-moving, unpredictable and voracious.

"With very dry conditions, a lot of winds and with the lightning, it's just a tinder box waiting to go up," Jon Schulz, public information officer for the Larimer County Sheriff's Department, said in an interview today with the Los Angeles Times.

The blaze is being called the worst fire in the county in 25 years, reportedly having grown to nearly 60 square miles. And tonight, things could get worse.

Schulz said the area was under a cloak of heavy smoke but that temperatures had cooled and there was a possibility of evening thunderstorms. In that part of the country, however, thunderstorms don't always mean rain. Lightning sparked the current fire, and any storm could bring additional lightning and the possibility of more flames.

Residents received 2,600 notices of...

Suffering a seizure while behind the wheel, as U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson reportedly did, is extremely rare but is far more likely to end in death than seizures suffered elsewhere, according to federal transportation experts.

A spokeswoman for Bryson, who was cited for felony hit-and-run after his car struck two other vehicles Saturday evening in the San Gabriel Valley, said Bryson had suffered a seizure. "He was taken to the hospital for examination and remained overnight for observation. He was released and has returned to Washington," department spokeswoman Jennifer Friedman told The Times.

Bryson was cooperative with authorities, officials said, adding that an investigation remains underway. The 68-year-old had given a commencement address Thursday at Pasadena's Polytechnic School, which several of his daughters attended.

Neurologist Dr. Sean Hwang of the Cushing Neuroscience Institute, part of North Shore-LIJ Health System in Great Neck, N.Y., said Bryson needs a full...

Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach at the center of the child-sex-abuse scandal that rocked the worlds of college sports and academia, was excoriated Monday morning by prosecutors as a "predatory pedophile" whose actions against boys took place over years.

Opening statements in the highly publicized trial unfolded in a courtroom in Bellfonte, Penn., just 10 miles from the Penn State campus where some of the incidents of abuse are alleged to have occurred. Sandusky is accused of 52 criminal counts of sexually abusing 10 boys over 15 years.

The jury of seven men and five women -- most of whom have some connection to Penn State as teachers, students or just committed football fans -- watched as Senior Deputy Atty. Gen. Joseph McGettigan III displayed photographs of the alleged victims as happy boys, according to media reports from inside the courtroom.

PHOTOS: The Sandusky case: Who's who

He explained the futures of some of the children: a father, a Penn State...