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they are children, peppered with shrapnel and screaming in pain.
• Those who die are left on the sidewalk outside, to be claimed hours later by relatives.
• An Associated Press team spent 24 hours at Dar al-Shifa hospital in Aleppo and witnessed the frantic work by overtaxed doctors and nurses to save those wounded in the battle for control of Syria's largest city.
• The AP first visited the hospital last month and returned this week to get a fuller impression of how its staff is coping amid Syria's civil war. The routine is as simple as it is brutal: A barrage of shelling echoes over the city, and about 15 minutes later, the wounded flow in.
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States has now spent $1 trillion more than it's taken in for four straight years.
• The Treasury Department confirmed Friday what was widely expected: The deficit for the just-ended 2012 budget year -- the gap between the government's tax revenue and its spending -- totaled $1.1 trillion.
• It wasn't quite as ugly as last year.
• Thanks to a slightly healthier economy, revenue rose 6.4 percent from 2011. And government spending fell 1.7 percent to $3.5 trillion. That reflected, in part, less defense spending as U.S. military involvement in Iraq was winding down and less spending on Medicaid.
• As a result, the deficit shrank 16 percent, or $207 billion.
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan is a fiscal conservative, champion of small government and critic of federal handouts. But as a congressman in Wisconsin, Ryan lobbied for tens of millions of dollars on behalf of his constituents for the kinds of largess he's now campaigning against, according to an Associated Press review of 8,900 pages of correspondence between Ryan's office and more than 70 executive branch agencies.
• For 12 years in the House, Ryan wrote to federal agencies supporting expansion

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