AP - The City Council's effort to remove Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick at a trial-like hearing was blocked shortly before it would have begun Monday by a judge who ruled that the city charter does not give the council such power.

AP - A California woman who escaped from a Michigan prison more than 30 years ago and remade her life as a suburban mother of three is "extremely uncomfortable" back behind bars and wants to move the case through the courts as quickly as possible, her attorney said Monday.

AP - A wind-whipped fire quickly crackled through sagebrush and grass on a residential hillside Monday in northern Reno before destroying several homes and forcing evacuations. No serious injuries were reported.

AP - Two years since a hurricane last lashed at Florida, many residents took a wait-and-see attitude Monday as a strengthening Tropical Storm Fay swept across the Florida Keys and bore down on the Gulf Coast.

AP - The state of Rhode Island and the town of West Warwick have each agreed to pay $10 million to those left behind after a nightclub fire that killed 100 people, according to court documents filed Monday.

AP - A handful of hikers remained unaccounted for after flooding struck a tiny village near the Grand Canyon rim, a community so remote it is the only one in America where the mail is delivered by mule.

AP - The mother of a girl allegedly given in marriage at age 12 to jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs refused to answer questions Monday from attorneys for the state child welfare agency that wants to regain custody of the girl and her younger brother.

AP - Federal inspectors at U.S. border crossings repeatedly turned back filthy, disease-ridden shipments of peppers from Mexico in the months before a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,400 people was finally traced to Mexican chilies.

AP - Three teens were ordered Monday to stand trial in the beating death of an illegal immigrant from Mexico after a friend of the defendants testified that the victim was sucker-punched and kicked in the head during a late-night, epithet-filled melee.