Stories by Associated Press

If the pregame prayer sounded more like a scouting report, it was. And if Sister Jean didn’t have any plans for next weekend, well, she does now. Loyola Chicago carried out its 101-year-old superfan’s plans to a T on Sunday, moving to the Sweet 16 with a 71-58 win over Illinois.

The vast majority of states allow buyers to walk out of a store with a firearm after a background check that sometimes can take minutes. Waiting periods are required in just 10 states and the District of Columbia, although several states are considering legislation this year to impose them.

If you didn’t pay attention to college basketball until the NCAA Tournament, the good news is you didn’t miss much. The regular season was a revolving door, the schedule and sometimes even the final score determined by which players and teams were entering the sport’s COVID-19 protocols and which were coming out.

The breakout star and model for the most coveted bobblehead of the 2018 NCAA Tournament is now eight months beyond her 101st birthday and still serving as chaplain for the Loyola of Chicago basketball team. 

With key pieces of their Final Four team leading the way, the eighth-seeded Ramblers marked a triumphant return to college basketball’s biggest stage Friday with a 71-60 victory over No. 9 seed Georgia Tech at Hinkle Fieldhouse.

Students can safely sit just 3 feet apart in the classroom as long as they wear masks but should be kept the usual 6 feet away from one another at sporting events, assemblies, lunch or chorus practice, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.

Asian Americans were already rattled by a wave of racist attacks amid the spread of the coronavirus pandemic across the United States. While the motive behind Tuesday's rampage remains under investigation, some see it as a wake-up call to stand up against a rise in violence against the community.

The House voted Thursday to unlatch a gateway to citizenship for young Dreamers, migrant farm workers and immigrants who’ve fled war or natural disasters, giving Democrats wins in the year’s first votes on an issue that once again faces an uphill climb to make progress in the Senate.

The short answer: You can enjoy small gatherings again, but should continue wearing a mask and social distancing in public.

A worker shot and killed two colleagues at a supermarket distribution center near Milwaukee before crashing his vehicle during a police pursuit and then killing himself, a union official and police said Wednesday.

Americans will be getting extra time to prepare their taxes. The Internal Revenue Service says it’s delaying the traditional tax filing deadline from April 15 until May 17.

A white gunman accused of killing eight people, most of them of women of Asian descent, at three Atlanta-area massage parlors was charged with murder Wednesday in an attack that sent terror through the Asian American community that’s increasingly been targeted during the coronavirus pandemic.

March Madness arrives as vaccinations increase in the U.S. and the death toll from COVID-19 has dropped, but health experts note that many seniors and other at-risk people still haven’t been vaccinated. 

Comments this week by Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., underscored that immigration remains a complex problem for the two parties to tackle successfully, even with Donald Trump no longer in the White House. Local members of Congress weigh in on this and more. 

New evidence that it may be safe for schools to seat students 3 feet apart — half of the previous recommended distance — could offer a way to return more of the nation’s children to classrooms with limited space.

After the first allegations surfaced in January, the Archdiocese of Chicago temporarily removed Michael Pfleger to investigate, leading to fierce backlash from parishioners trying to clear his name. They’ve flooded the archdiocese’s phone lines and staged rallies. They’ve also challenged the accusers’ accounts.

The biggest unknown leading into a March Madness bracket reveal more than a year in the making had nothing to do with bubble teams or top seeds. Instead, it was the not-so-simple matter of which programs would be healthy enough to play. 

Gunfire erupted at a party on Chicago’s South Side early Sunday, killing two people and wounding 13 others in what authorities say may have been a gang-related shooting.

In Chicago, philanthropy paid for nearly half the $50 million, four-year Chicago Connected program, which pays for kids’ home internet if they qualify for reduced-price lunches. Chicago Public Schools, the country’s third-largest district, is on the hook for $25 million.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday he wishes former President Donald Trump would use his popularity among Republicans to persuade more of his followers to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

Bogus claims about the virus, masks and vaccines have exploded since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic a year ago. Journalists, public health officials and tech companies have tried to push back against the falsehoods, but much of the job of correcting misinformation has fallen to the world’s front-line medical workers.

The National Audubon Society, along with partners, established the first Lights Out program in 1999 in Chicago. Philadelphia joins 33 other cities including New York, Boston, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

The attorney for George Floyd’s family said Friday that a $27 million settlement of a federal lawsuit by the city of Minneapolis is the largest pretrial civil rights settlement ever.

Floyd family attorney Ben Crump called it the largest pretrial settlement ever for a civil rights claim, and thanked city leaders for “showing you care about George Floyd.”

"Renegades: Born in the USA," is an eight-episode series of conversations between the former president and Bruce Springsteen.

Even though it is not approved in the U.S., well over 10 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine are stockpiled in the country for domestic use and cannot be exported under the terms of the company’s agreement with the federal government.