Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a congresswoman from South Florida and a key White House defender, was chosen by President Barack Obama on Tuesday to become chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

Obama picked the four-term lawmaker from South Florida to succeed Tim Kaine, who earlier Tuesday announced he would seek a Senate seat in Virginia. The move elevates Wasserman Schultz to a crucial role as Obama looks toward a re-election campaign that will use the DNC to define his likely Republican rivals.

"As Chairman Kaine departs, new leadership must come on," Vice President Joe Biden wrote Tuesday afternoon to members of the Democratic National Committee, which will have to ratify her selection.

"In selecting Debbie to lead our party, President Obama noted her tenacity, her strength, her fighting spirit and her ability to overcome adversity."

If the full DNC ratifies the choice as expected, Wasserman Schultz would be the first woman elected chair by the full body. Two others have served as appointed chairwomen.

Authorities close case on Ill. and Ind. shootings

Investigators officially closed the books Tuesday on shootings last year in rural Illinois and Indiana after DNA evidence helped show a man killed in a suburban Chicago robbery attempt months later was the shooter.

For months, authorities called Gary Amaya, 48, of Rankin, Ill., a suspect in the Oct. 5, 2010, shootings that left one dead and two injured. Amaya was killed in December with his own gun during what police said was an attempted robbery of a tanning salon in suburban Chicago.

Ballistic tests showed the handgun in the robbery attempt matched one used in the rural Illinois and Indiana. But authorities wanted to await DNA testing, including some on handwriting samples.

"In our guts, we felt that Amaya was the responsible party," said Will County Sheriff's Deputy Chief Ken Kaupas said.

Release date set for man in Calif. bus kidnapping

California's parole board on Tuesday granted parole for a man convicted of hijacking a school bus and holding 26 children and their driver captive underground in 1976, the latest turn in a years-long debate over whether the three men involved in the crime have served enough time.

Richard Allen Schoenfeld was set for release in 2021. However, any governor in the next 10 years can ask the board to reconsider its decision, board spokesman Luis Patino said.

Schoenfeld, now age 56, along with his brother Jim, and Fred Woods, captured the nation's attention when they used guns and nylon masks to commandeer a Chowchilla school bus and buried the children and driver in a truck underground. The three were sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

The captives all escaped without serious injuries after digging their way out of the buried moving van when their kidnappers, all in their mid-20s, fell asleep. In the years since, judges, prosecutors and investigators who sent the three kidnappers to prison have helped push for their release.

Dye, sawdust used to fight Japan nuclear leak

Workers are using a milky white dye as they frantically try to trace the path of highly radioactive water gushing from a tsunami-damaged Japanese nuclear plant and leaking into the ocean.

Over the weekend, workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant found a crack in a maintenance pit, the latest confirmation that radioactivity continues to spill into the environment.

The leak underscores the chicken-and-egg nature of the containment efforts at the stricken plant: the radioactive risk will be high as long as the cooling system is out, but the cooling system won't work until the radioactive water leaks are stopped long enough for workers to start it.

'We must keep putting water into the reactors to cool to prevent further fuel damage, even though we know that there is a side-effect, which is the leakage.' — Hidehiko Nishiyama, Nuclear Safety and Industrial Agency

The plant's operators also deliberately dumped 10,000 tonnes of tainted water into the ocean Monday to make space for more highly radioactive water. The dumped water is 500 times the legal limit for radioactivity.

Efforts to plug the leak took an unconventional turn Monday as officials tried to plug a suspected leak with concrete and then a mixture of polymer, sawdust and shredded newspaper, closer to where they believed the source was.

Obama, House leader fail to agree on budget

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama and the top Republican in Congress failed to produce a deal Tuesday to avoid a partial government shutdown as both American political parties continue their brinksmanship over how much the government will be allowed to spend for the next six months.

Short of an agreement to cover the rest of the budget year ending Sept. 30, the House leader, Speaker John Boehner, said after the talks his Republicans want a bill that would keep the government running for another week and slash another $12 billion in spending. The White House has shown no interest in that approach.

In the stormy conflict over government spending and the spiraling U.S. debt, Republicans opened a second front Tuesday by introducing a spending plan for next year that they say would slash the nation's deficit by $5 trillion in the coming 10 years.

The Republican plan brought forth by House Budget Committee Rep. Paul Ryan far exceeds the $1 trillion-plus in cuts outlined in Obama's February budget in line with recommendations from Obama's own bipartisan deficit commission in December. The Ryan plan blends unprecedented spending cuts with a fundamental restructuring of taxpayer-financed health care for the elderly and the poor.

Boehner: GOP 'will not be put in a box'

The White House sit-down between Obama and Boehner took place against a backdrop of Democratic accusations that Republicans are insisting on harmful spending cuts and attaching their own social policy agenda to the must-pass spending bill. Republicans counter that the White House is pressing budget gimmicks at a time that big cuts are needed to avoid dire financial consequences.