AP - Tropical Storm Cristobal churned off the Southeast seaboard after it formed Saturday, the first storm to threaten the U.S. this hurricane season, forecasters said.

AP - A team of elite athletes and expert mountaineers has ended a weeklong hunt for Steve Fossett, finding no sign of the missing adventurer or his plane but eliminating miles of rugged terrain from areas that still must be searched.

AP - A missing Fort Bliss soldier sent a text message about leaving her husband two days before she vanished, her sister said Saturday.

AP - Investigators hoped to confirm Sunday the identity of a woman whose body was found bound with duct tape with her uterus cut open in the apartment of another woman who falsely claimed a newborn baby was her own.

AP - Federal investigators on Saturday began trying to figure out why one of the world's largest mobile cranes toppled over, killing four contract workers and injuring seven others.

AP - Far from the combat zones, the strains and separations of no-end-in-sight wars are taking an ever-growing toll on military families despite the armed services' earnest efforts to help.

AP - For years, they were the picture of solidarity: the four children of Martin Luther King Jr. carrying on the legacy of the civil rights icon.

AP - The political vision of a summer gas tax holiday died a quick death in Congress, losing to a view that federal excise taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel will have to go up if they go anywhere.

AP - Tropical Storm Cristobal, the first tropical storm to menace the Southeast seaboard this hurricane season, sent outer bands of intermittent rain lashing the eastern Carolinas late Saturday as forecasters predicted it could dump several inches in some areas of drought-stricken North Carolina.

AP - Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled "Jail Bird."

AP - An autopsy on a woman's body found in an apartment linked to a mystery newborn baby found that the woman was partially eviscerated and her uterus was cut open, authorities said Saturday.

AP - To the Staten Island girls who may have been taught to fight dirty in Brownies, Ken Pringle is sorry. To the muscle-bound, tanned-as-coconut-shell visitors he referred to as "guidos," employing a term widely considered an ethnic slur, the mayor of Belmar offers his apologies.