WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met face-to-face Wednesday for more than an hour of highly anticipated budget talks — "a good first meeting," the new Republican leader said — but expectations were low for quick progress as GOP lawmakers push for steep cuts in a deal to prevent a national debt limit crisis.

NEW YORK (AP) — The Federal Reserve raised its key rate by a quarter point Wednesday, bringing it to the highest level in 15 years as part of an ongoing effort to ease inflation by making borrowing more expensive.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A deadly storm system lashed a large swath of the southern U.S. with bands of sleet and snow for a third day on Wednesday, grounding an additional 2,300 flights, leaving hundreds of thousands without power, forcing school closures and making already treacherous driving conditions worse.

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia is removing the British monarchy from its bank notes.

The nation's central bank said Thursday its new $5 bill would feature an Indigenous design rather than an image of King Charles III.

Nobody drove Tom Brady harder than the record-setting quarterback himself, even if his 23rd and final season after a brief retirement didn't end with him lifting yet another Lombardi Trophy.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — High school senior Kahlila Bandele is used to courses that don’t address the African American experience. Then there’s her 9 a.m. class. This week, it spanned topics from Afro-Caribbean migration to jazz.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI searched President Joe Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on Wednesday without turning up any classified documents, the latest turn in an extraordinary series of searches of his and his predecessor's properties.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia is mustering its military might in the Luhansk region of Ukraine, officials said Wednesday, in what Kyiv suspects is preparation for an offensive as the first anniversary of Moscow’s invasion approaches.

NEW YORK (AP) — Before the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT was unleashed into the world, the novelist Robin Sloan was testing a similar AI writing assistant built by researchers at Google.