NORTENO, Panama — Dressed in sweaty surgical scrubs and grappling with a screaming 6-year-old girl as he pulled her abscessed tooth, dentist Jason Vogt didn’t look the part of a diplomat.

BLACKSBURG, Va. —  Midway through his murderous rampage, the Virginia Tech gunman went to the post office and mailed NBC a package containing photos and videos of him brandishing guns and delivering a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich “brats” and their “hedonistic needs.”

NEIVA, Colombia — The long-dormant Nevado del Huila volcano erupted late Tuesday and early Wednesday, provoking avalanches and floods that swept away houses and bridges and prompted thousands to evacuate.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority upheld a nationwide ban Wednesday on a controversial abortion procedure in a decision that sets the stage for additional restrictions on a woman’s right to choose to end her pregnancy.

NEW YORK — The hot spot du jour of Manhattan nightlife looms large over Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, where crowds of stylish YoCos — young cosmopolitans — were jostling inside one evening last week for the right to pay the $15 cover. Rather than crossing the velvet ropes for a rave, house party or disco, the hip patrons were packing into a controversial lecture at the New York Public Library on the modern meaning of feminism.

NEW YORK — Kitty Carlisle Hart, whose long career spanned Broadway, opera, television and film, including the classic Marx Brothers movie “A Night at the Opera,” died after a battle with pneumonia, her son said Wednesday. She was 96.

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — A teenager shot and killed himself Wednesday shortly after pointing a handgun at two other students in a high school parking lot, police said.

TRENTON, N.J. — It was an ominous tale — an erratic driver in a red pickup racing wildly along the nation’s busiest toll road sends the governor’s sport utility vehicle careening into a guard rail.

NEW YORK — A writer accused of posing as a city firefighter and sexually abusing a woman was declared medically fit for trial despite three skull fractures, a judge said Wednesday.

TIJUANA, Mexico — Police and soldiers battled gunmen at a hospital in the border city of Tijuana Wednesday in violence that left at least three people dead before the authorities subdued the attackers, officials said.

ATLANTA — Research on two continents signaled more bad news for menopause hormones, offering the strongest evidence yet that they can raise the risk of breast cancer and are tied to a slightly higher risk of ovarian cancer.

WASHINGTON — A break-in targeting State Department computers worldwide last summer occurred after a department employee in Asia opened a mysterious e-mail that quietly allowed hackers inside the U.S. government’s network.