AP - Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Thursday that he's pushing for changes that would allow him to seek a third term leading the nation's largest city, saying he wants to handle unfinished business including the "unprecedented challenges" brought on by the recent financial crisis.

AP - The world's longest undeveloped barrier island now looks as if people have been living — and dumping — on it for decades.

AP - Fear of the government in some communities after the Sept. 11 attacks and years of debate over immigration policy could create problems in getting an accurate count of the U.S. population in 2010, the director of the Census Bureau said Thursday.

AP - The Navy has confirmed the wreckage of a sunken vessel found last year off the Aleutians Islands is that of the USS Grunion, which disappeared during World War II.

AP - Federal regulators issued an emergency order Thursday banning use of cell phones and other electronic devices by rail workers, a day after investigators said a commuter-train engineer was text messaging moments before a deadly crash last month.

AP - O.J. Simpson's lawyer told jurors Thursday that the former football star's effort to get items back from two sports memorabilia dealers was a mistake but not a crime, saying that "being stupid, and being frustrated is not being a criminal."

AP - Steve Fossett chose a small single-engine airplane to scout a site for his next big adventure. But the crash that authorities say almost certainly claimed his life was as epic as the life the millionaire thrill-seeker tried to live.

AP - Not just Wall Street is running scared.

AP - Empty pasture is all that's left on the site of the one-room Amish schoolhouse where a gunman left five girls dead and five others wounded two years ago and the anniversary of the massacre was expected to pass quietly Thursday.

AP - Officials want to see more green roofs on building tops in Cincinnati.

AP - A coalition of child advocates is challenging an Arkansas policy that bars unmarried couples who live together from being foster parents.

AP - The judge and lawyers for both sides in the O.J. Simpson kidnapping and armed robbery case are meeting behind closed doors to work on jury instructions, and plan to present them before closing arguments later Thursday.

AP - The grandparents of nine children who were given up by their father under Nebraska's unique safe-haven law said Thursday that they wished he would have come to them for help.

AP - A top government health official rejected the idea of an immediate ban on cough and cold medicines for young children, saying it might cause unintended harm.