USA

The jury heard closing arguments in the corruption trial of Sen. Ted Stevens (R) of Alaska in Washington on Tuesday. Prosecutors argued that it's "nonsense" to believe that one of Congress's most senior lawmakers didn't know acceptance of various gifts and loans was in violation of disclosure rules.

Instead of campaigning, Barack Obama will spend Thursday and Friday in Hawaii visiting his ailing grandmother, a spokesman for the Democratic presidential candidate said Monday. Obama has a close relationship with Madelyn Payne Dunham, who helped raise him.

Seventy-seven percent of Americans who use mobile e-mail devices have sent and received messages on them while driving a moving car, according to a survey released Tuesday by Neverfail Inc., a Texas software company. The finding assumes added relevance following last month's fatal railroad crash in Los Angeles, which involved a text-messaging engineer.

The White House hosted a summit on international aid Tuesday in Washington, which brought together about 500 representatives of countries that receive aid and are considered especially vulnerable during the current global economic crisis.

The terrorism trial of five foreign-born Muslims accused of plotting to attack the Fort Dix, N.J., Army training base opened Monday in Camden, N.J. The prosecution said it has 90 recordings that prove how far along the defendants were to carrying out an attack. Defense attorneys deny their clients were plotting anything during 2006 and 2007 meetings.

The seven-year-long US detention of 17 Chinese Muslims at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, will continue for at least several more weeks at the request of the Bush administration, a federal appellate court ruled Monday in Washington, D.C. The decision overruled a district court judge who had ordered the government to free the men because he said they're not enemy combatants.

After the discovery that Texas death-row inmates made 2,800 calls on a smuggled cellphone, Gov. Rick Perry ordered a statewide prison lockdown Monday in order to search for additional contraband. Authorities arrested the mother of an inmate for buying minutes for the phone and said that an unidentified prison guard had delivered it.

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