AP - Hermine weakened Tuesday but continued dumping heavy rains on a northern crawl through Texas, barely holding on to tropical storm strength but leaving behind a path of widespread power outages and landslides in Mexico.

AP - Firefighters in Colorado are planning to aggressively ramp up the fight against a 3,500-acre wildfire that has forced thousands of people from their homes in a rugged canyon northwest of Boulder.

AP - A Florida church is rebuffing warnings by the U.S. military's top official in Afghanistan to cancel a scheduled Sept. 11 burning of the Muslim holy book.

AP - A former JetBlue flight attendant accused of cursing out a passenger and sliding down an emergency exit chute will be mentally evaluated for a possible plea deal.

AP - President Barack Obama will call on Congress to pass new tax breaks that would allow businesses to write off 100 percent of their new capital investments through 2011, the latest in a series of proposals the White House is rolling out in hopes of showing action on the economy ahead of the November elections.

AFP - Republicans in the US Congress may be able to handle the country's struggling economy better than President Barack Obama's fellow Democrats, according to a new national poll released Tuesday.

AP - Half-buried in rubble, Bazelais Suy struggled to breathe — a dead woman lay on his chest. He knew he had to get her off, fast. Because he could still move his arms, he somehow managed to remove his belt, loop it around the woman's own belt and drag her off. But his legs were still pinned.

AP - An imam who has become the public face of a proposed Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero has returned to the United States following a taxpayer-funded tour of the Middle East, his wife said Monday.

AP - The crowded rooftop bleachers overlooking Wrigley Field stand as proof that no matter how bad the Chicago Cubs played, the ballpark was simply not big enough to hold everyone who wanted to see them play.

AP - Hipsters, hustlers, celebrities, thieves, dope peddlers and just about everyone else in gritty, quirky Venice Beach know Boston Dawna. You can't miss the one-woman crime fighter.

AFP - US President Barack Obama has pledged 50 billion dollars to create jobs in a massive transportation infrastructure campaign, targeting huge unemployment and ripping resurgent Republicans.

AP - Oil prices fell to near $74 a barrel Tuesday in Asia as investors mull the strength of the U.S. economy and demand for crude.

AP - A combative President Barack Obama rolled out a long-term jobs program Monday that would exceed $50 billion to rebuild roads, railways and runways, and coupled it with a blunt campaign-season assault on Republicans for causing Americans' hard economic times.

AP - A small plane crashed and burst into flames on a street in a southern Nevada residential neighborhood Monday, killing one person and badly injuring three others, authorities said.

AP - Jefferson Thomas was fast and athletic and often played pickup basketball with white students while growing up in Little Rock in the 1950s.

AP - The Justice Department won't say if the blowout preventer that failed to stop oil from gushing from BP's undersea well into the Gulf of Mexico is on its way to shore.

AP - As New York Indian Nation leaders battle in courtrooms to preserve their tax-free cigarette market, tensions are rising on reservations, where the state's renewed efforts to tax sales to non-Native customers is viewed as yet another attack on Native American rights.

AP - Hallmark Cards Inc., a $4 billion empire built on a demand for printed sentimentality, enters its second century facing a weak economy and what could be an even greater challenge: a generation that has grown up posting its sentiments online.

AP - More than 80 years ago, Germany sold tens of thousands of bonds to American investors in an effort to recover financially from World War I. Later, Adolf Hitler used some of the money raised by those bonds to build the powerful Nazi war machine that would ravage Europe during World War II.

AFP - Global stock markets rose and the dollar fell on Monday as investors further digested better-than-expected US jobs data which reduced prospects of a return to recession.