LONDON — Florence Green, the world's last known veteran of World War I, has died at the age of 110, the care home where she lived said Tuesday.

Briar House Care Home in King's Lynn, England, said Green died Saturday, two weeks before her 111th birthday.

Born Florence Beatrice Patterson in London on Feb. 19, 1901, she joined the Women's Royal Air Force in September 1918 at the age of 17.

She went to work as a waitress in the officers' mess at RAF Marham in eastern England, and was serving there when the war ended in November 1918.

Green remembered her wartime service with affection.

Frank Buckles, the last surviving U.S. veteran of World War I, has died. He was 110.

Buckles, who also survived being a civilian POW in the Philippines in World War II, died peacefully of natural causes early Sunday at his home in Charles Town, biographer and family spokesman David DeJonge said in a statement. Buckles turned 110 on Feb. 1 and had been advocating for a national memorial honoring veterans of World War I in Washington, D.C.

Buckles lied about his age to join the army at age 16. The Missouri native was among nearly 5 million Americans who served in World War I in 1917 and 1918.

Mitt Romney's position on the minimum wage has some on the right sounding the alarm about his candidacy--and it could expose a dangerous fault line between Romney and some of the Republican Party's most reliable backers.

Romney said last week that he supports regular increases in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation, a position he took as a candidate for president in 2008. Six years before that, as a candidate for Massachusetts governor, Romney supported linking automatic increases in the state's minimum wage to inflation. "I haven't changed my thoughts on that," he told reporters.

Indexing the minimum wage to inflation is a goal of many labor-backed groups and liberal Democrats, who say it would help millions of working people. In recent years, Republicans, backed by their allies in the business community, have opposed such efforts, arguing that raising the minimum wage would reduce employment. Some on the right have come out against the very concept of a minimum wage.

Romney's comments have caused concern among conservatives inside and outside the party.

"It goes to show he's still very defensive about his own wealth," Steve Forbes, the publishing magnate who made his own bids for the presidency in 1996 and 2000, told Yahoo News. "All it does is give the base another reason to be unenthusiastic about him."

WASHINGTON -- In a speech expounding on the rift between rural America and Washington D.C., Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) vowed Thursday to use his funding powers to stop the Obama administration from implementing new child-labor rules pertaining to agricultural work, accusing the "urban" Labor Department of meddling in a "rural" industry it doesn't understand.

"This is one of those situations where I think the Department of Labor is overstepping its boundaries, its knowledge base, and frankly I think you're sitting around watching reruns of "Blazing Saddles" and that's your interpretation of what goes on in the West," Rehberg, who holds the Labor Department's purse strings for the House of Representatives, said as he lectured a labor official during a hearing Thursday. "And it's not anymore."

Last year, the Labor Department proposed new rules governing what kinds of potentially dangerous tasks minors can and cannot perform on farms and in grain facilities. Although child and worker advocates said the new rules were long overdue, the proposals created an uproar among farmers and agricultural trade groups, who argued that the rules could hurt family-farming traditions.

Although the original proposals largely exempted family farms, the Labor Department bowed yesterday to the farming industry, further widening the exemptions it had already put forward. But that didn't stop Rehberg and GOP members of the House agriculture subcommittee from piling on the department Thursday, using the hearing as an opportunity to put forth their rural bona fides