AP - Cooler weather Monday helped firefighters gain ground on hundreds of wildfires that have charred bone-dry terrain in both wine country and remote forests in Northern California.

AP - For a dozen years, Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick has routinely defeated all opponents in the Detroit-area congressional district she represents.

AP - Having lost her job and her three-bedroom house, Darlene Knoll has joined the legions of downwardly mobile who are four wheels away from homelessness.

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 - A jail escapee who set off a manhunt near Virginia Tech's campus by killing a hospital guard and later, a sheriff's deputy, was sentenced to death Monday despite his attorney's pleas for leniency.

AP - A convicted polygamist leader's teenage daughter, who was among the children removed from her sect's Texas compound during an abuse investigation, is fighting her attorney's attempt to shield her from a church official.

AP - Revius Ortique Jr., a former civil rights attorney who became the first black justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, died Sunday. He was 84.

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.