NEW YORK (AP) — An FBI excavation has turned up possible human remains at a home once occupied by a famed gangster who inspired Robert De Niro's character in the movie "Goodfellas," authorities said Wednesday.

BOSTON (AP) — A former hit man who admitted killing 20 people insisted Wednesday that he told authorities the truth when he implicated James "Whitey" Bulger in 11 slayings, but he acknowledged lying in the past, including to a close friend just before he shot him in the head.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — As the West battles one catastrophic wildfire after another, the federal government is spending less and less on its main program for preventing blazes in the first place.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — OfficeMax Inc. and Office Depot Inc. want Illinois and Florida to compete to be the home of their combined headquarters if their proposed merger is approved by offering the best package of tax breaks that they can.

SANFORD, Fla. (AP) — Attorneys quizzed a whittled-down group of prospective jurors Wednesday in the Trayvon Martin case about whether they had fired guns, made judgments based on how people dressed or had been neighborhood watch volunteers like the teen's shooter.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The city issues demolition permits, but it isn't responsible for the work done by contractors on private property, Philadelphia officials said Wednesday at the first public hearing on this month's fatal building collapse.

By Joseph Lichterman OAKLAND TOWNSHIP, Michigan (Reuters) - The latest search for the remains of former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa ended on Wednesday in a field near Detroit, where federal agents had dug with heavy equipment and shovels for three days in the hope of answering the decades old question, "Whatever happened to Jimmy Hoffa?" Since Monday, 40 agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Michigan state police and Oakland County sheriff's office, and forensic anthropologists from Michigan State University had combed an acre of the overgrown field not far from where Hoffa was ...

By Yereth Rosen ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska publicly backed gay marriage on Wednesday, becoming the third Republican senator to do so as she spoke out ahead of potentially landmark rulings from the Supreme Court on the issue. Murkowski, 56, wrote in an essay posted on her Senate website that her decision was swayed, in part, by meeting a lesbian couple from Anchorage, one of whom was in the National Guard, who had adopted four children. "This first-class Alaskan family still lives a second-class existence," Murkowski said in her essay. ...

By David Ingram and Patrick Temple-West WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than a dozen FBI agents are assigned to a criminal probe into Internal Revenue Service scrutiny of conservative political groups, FBI Director Robert Mueller said on Wednesday. "It's a high-priority investigation and it needs to be handled with care, but it also needs to be pushed aggressively," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing. Mueller spoke as Tea Party conservatives rallied outside the U.S. ...

NEW YORK (AP) — A car rocketing down an avenue in Manhattan's dense East Village swerved out of control, plowed down a sidewalk and smashed through a storefront flower stand Wednesday morning, injuring eight people, witnesses and officials said.

NEW YORK (AP) — The FBI has found possible human remains in a dig at the New York City house once occupied by a famous gangster.