AP - Hundreds of wildfires sparked by lightning flared Sunday across the heart of wine country and remote forests in Northern California, the latest batch of destructive blazes in the bone-dry state.

AP - Raging Midwest floodwaters that swallowed crops and sent corn and soybean prices soaring are about to give consumers more grief at the grocery store.

AP - School counselors, teachers and families of students the principal said made a pact to get pregnant and have babies together have no information to back the claim, the mayor of Gloucester said Sunday.

AP - In the windowless front rooms of a former day care center in a tiny Texas community, children as young as 5 were fed powerful painkillers they knew as "silly pills" and forced to perform sex shows for a crowd of adults.

AP - A publicist for George Carlin says the legendary comedian has died of heart failure at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif.

AP - For the last three years, researchers in camouflage and waders have slogged through the east Arkansas woods hoping to spot a rare bird that so far seems unwilling to be seen.

AP - The water is still well above the banks of the upper Mississippi River, but residents of both flooded towns and those protected by levees and sandbags can see an ending: The river is cresting.

AP - For four centuries, they were the ultimate pack rats. Now a Maryland family's massive collection of letters, maps and printed bills has surfaced in the attic of a former plantation, providing a firsthand account of life from the 1660s through World War II.

AP - Same-sex couples across California exchanged vows and wedding bands on the first weekend since the state began allowing gays and lesbians to legally marry.

AP - Californians exhausted by a nearly weeklong heat wave looked for relief Sunday from the triple-digit temperatures that have strained air conditioners and power companies.

AP - Bizarre microbes flourish in the most punishing environments on Earth from the bone-dry Atacama Desert in Chile to the boiling hot springs of Yellowstone National Park to the sunless sea bottom vents in the Pacific.