AP - Rising prices at the gas pump appear to be having at least one positive effect: Traffic deaths around the country are plummeting, just as they did during the Arab oil embargo three decades ago.

AP - A man who fatally shot a sheriff's deputy Tuesday had been ordered by a court to undergo a mental evaluation and had twice left a hospital before barricading himself in a home and triggering a shootout with police, authorities said.

AP - Authorities on Tuesday recovered what they believe to be charred remains from the rubble of a burned house from which a gunman may have ambushed emergency workers, St. Louis County's medical examiner said.

AP - Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is now charged with exchanging romantic text messages with additional women in the scandal that has him fighting allegations that he lied under oath about an intimate relationship with his former chief of staff.

AP - Federal prosecutors have decided not to seek criminal charges against the Rev. Al Sharpton over his chronic tax problems, his lawyers said Tuesday.

AP - A woman accused of slicing open a pregnant woman's belly and taking her baby was obsessed with getting an infant and even had hallucinations of hearing babies cry after a February 1990 miscarriage, according to court records.

AP - The mother of a missing 2-year-old is a person of interest in a case that is beginning to look like a homicide, prosecutors said Tuesday. Sheriff's deputies said they still hope to find the girl alive.

AP - Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs, already convicted in Utah of rape as an accomplice and awaiting trial in Arizona on other charges related to underage marriages, is now accused of assaulting a girl in Texas in January 2005.

AP - Rain started to fall along the Gulf Coast as Hurricane Dolly — upgraded in force from a tropical storm — closed in on towns straddling the Texas-Mexico border.