AP - Ships began crawling up the Mississippi River at New Orleans in a tightly controlled procession Friday, two days after a massive oil spill shut down a stretch of one of the nation's most critical commercial arteries.
AP - An explosion blew apart walls and hurt 17 people in an apartment building still recovering from a fire six weeks earlier, authorities said. -- read full article
AP - Legislative leaders sought to install filters to block inappropriate material from being viewed on state computers two days after a veteran assemblyman's computer was seized for containing child pornography.
AP - A baby's cries led rescuers to the 3-month-old in the wreckage of a home flattened by a tornado that killed his grandmother and blew his grandfather into the yard, officials said Friday.
AP - A man who says he cooperated with police and wore a wire during conversations with a former police sergeant considered a suspect in his wife's disappearance was charged Friday with battery after shoving Drew Peterson in a barber shop parking lot. -- read full article
AP - Military salvage teams used hydraulic pumps and pontoons Friday to raise a Russian submarine once featured in a Hollywood film that sank in the Providence River last year during a storm.
AP - Kentucky authorities say two young girls have died after they were struck by a car that fled a traffic stop near the University of Louisville. -- read full article
AP - The most seriously wounded of three people shot in a community-college computer lab had punched the gunman, an old enemy, in the face before he opened fire, police said Friday.
AP - The parents of a slain pregnant woman said Friday they have forgiven the suspect charged with killing their daughter and cutting her baby out of the womb.
AP - The mother of a missing 2-year-old Orlando girl told family that she didn't know the whereabouts of her child in a contentious telephone call from jail released Friday.
AP - Three white teens were charged Friday in what officials said was an epithet-filled fatal beating of an illegal Mexican immigrant in a small northeast Pennsylvania coal town. Brandon J. Piekarsky, 16, and Colin J. Walsh, 17, were charged as adults with homicide and ethnic intimidation in the July 12 attack on Luis Ramirez.
AP - California on Friday became the first state to ban trans fats from restaurant food, following several cities and major fast-food chains in erasing the notorious artery-clogger from menus.
AP - A detective working a criminal case against Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said coincidence led him to a house to try to deliver a subpoena. -- read full article
AP - About two months ago, Dr. Kevin Antario Brown was hobnobbing with guests at a celebrity poker tournament at the Playboy Mansion, his disaster-relief medical charity the beneficiary of the lavish event.
AP - To police, Steven Hirschfield was violent and out of control when he clambered aboard a patrol boat sent to rescue him in the San Diego Bay during a gay pride party.
