David A Johnson

• AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he is an "island of one" for removing U.S. forces from northeastern Syria.

• AP

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards' quest for a second term as the Deep South's only Democratic governor will stretch over another month, as voters denied him an outright primary win Saturday and sent him to a runoff election.

• AP

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The Latest on the partial collapse of a hotel under construction in New Orleans (all times local):

• AP

BLOUNTSTOWN, Fla. (AP) — The sunsets are a sight to behold in Joe Leonard's neck of the woods these days. A year ago, lush stands of towering pines obscured the horizon, he said as he drove his pickup along a dusty Florida Panhandle road. Now, fields of thick grass mask row after row of stumps decaying into the soil that has sustained his family for five generations.

• AP

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Runoff election will decide if Louisiana's John Bel Edwards wins second term as Deep South's only Democratic governor .

• AP

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California will be the first state to ban the sale and manufacture of new fur products and the third to bar most animals from circus performances under a pair of bills signed Saturday by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

• AP

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Polls close in Louisiana primary race that Deep South's only Democratic governor hopes to win outright.

• AP

AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — The Latest on the public funeral for international opera star Jessye Norman (all times local):

• AP

Here's your look at highlights from the weekly AP photo report, a gallery featuring a mix of front-page photography, the odd image you might have missed and lasting moments our editors think you should see.

• AP

For 41 years, federal law has banned pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. But the stories tumbling out this week show it's far from eradicated.

• AP

CHICAGO (AP) — Illinois' top leaders trumpeted the benefits of automatic voter registration when signing a bipartisan plan in 2017 to change how the state finds and signs up eligible but unregistered voters: more civic participation, fewer barriers to the ballot box and modernized systems. But Illinois hasn't lived up to its promise, rolling out automatic voter registration far behind schedule and struggling with other changes the law made.

• AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Testifying in defiance of President Donald Trump's ban, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told House impeachment investigators Friday that Trump himself pressured the State Department to oust her from her post and get her out of the country.

• AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on U.S.-China trade talks (all times local):

• AP

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The lights were back on Friday for most of the nearly 2 million Northern California residents who lost electricity when the state's largest utility switched it off this week in an effort to prevent wildfires.

• AP

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Latest on the power shutoff involving California wildfires (all times local):

• AP

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An aggressive wildfire in Southern California seared its way through dry vegetation Friday and spread quickly, destroying more than a dozen homes as tens of thousands of residents were ordered to get out of its way, authorities said.

• AP

LAKE CHARLES, La. (AP) — President Donald Trump on Friday pressed his argument that the House impeachment inquiry is nothing more than a new attempt to overturn his election based on "a lot of crap."

• AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Top Pentagon officials on Friday denied the U.S. is abandoning its Syrian Kurdish allies in the face of a Turkish military offensive, although the future of a counterterrorism partnership with the Kurds was in grave doubt.

• AP

A panel of international aviation regulators found that Boeing withheld key information about the 737 Max from pilots and regulators, and the Federal Aviation Administration lacked the expertise to understand an automated flight system implicated in two deadly crashes of Max jets.

• AP

NEW YORK (AP) — Shepard Smith, whose newscast on Fox News Channel seemed increasingly an outlier on a network dominated by supporters of President Donald Trump, abruptly quit after signing off his final newscast on Friday.

• AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration and China declared a temporary truce Friday in their 15-month trade war. Yet the grievances that led them to impose tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of each other's goods remain largely unresolved.

• AP

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) — A judge is pushing for a settlement of more than 2,600 lawsuits facing OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma with a decision Friday to pause litigation against the company and members of the wealthy Sackler family that owns the company.

• AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — US says troops in Syria came under Turkish fire; says area was 'known by the Turks' to have Americans present.

• AP

NEW YORK (AP) — The Latest on court rulings that temporarily block a Trump administration policy that denies legal residence to many immigrants who receive government benefits (all times local):

There's an interesting debate going on now about the nature of our drug laws.

When I was in high school, I played a football game at Shotwell Stadium in Abilene. It was a JV match, so very sparsely attended, and other than the fact that it was very cold, and we won, I don't remember much else about the game apart from the halftime.

The Cowboys lost Sunday and didn't make the playoffs.

I saw an article the other day about tapes from the Lyndon Johnson presidency being released. 

Actually, until my sister got a job selling cell phones (down in the Sam's store), I was pretty ignorant about the whole idea.

I once read that in a single year, California changed the nature of America more than any state ever has, maybe more than all the rest put together.

If anything I say here offends you, I wasn't trying to. There are two things you don't talk about over dinner, but if that extended to newspaper columns, I wouldn't have much to write. Religion and politics offend easily, and taken together the problem is even worse. Actually, this is my point, that under no circumstances should we put either at risk by mixing them.

According to the Rev. Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, God hates gays, 9/11 was the result of America's tolerance toward homosexuality, and every dead U.S. soldier is a sign of the Lord's judgment on our depraved national character.

Because I didn't know that until someone told me to look it up. It has nothing to do with anything, but some people only read headlines, and I wanted to share.

I've recently rediscovered bouncing. Tennis balls, rubber balls, golf balls, toy balls - whatever bounces and fits in my hand, I bounce it, oh how I do.

Another OA writer had a recent column mourning the death of Customer Service. In response, readers offered explanations why we’d reached this sad state where employees are apathetic, have a poor work ethic, are all-around incompetent or some mixture of the above.