AP - Hurricane Dolly slammed into the South Texas coast Wednesday with punishing rain and winds of 100 mph, blowing down signs, damaging an apartment complex and knocking out power to thousands before weakening over land.

AP - A federal judge on Wednesday upheld the corruption convictions of former Newark Mayor Sharpe James and his one-time mistress, but indicated that James probably will get less than the 15- to 20-year prison sentence prosecutors are seeking.

AP - Microsoft founder Bill Gates and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg are pooling their piles of money to pour $375 million into a global effort to cut smoking.

AP - Texas authorities on Wednesday began looking for five indicted members of a polygamist sect, in a child sex-abuse case that the group's spokesman alleged was a face-saving move by officials who lost a court battle over their seizure of hundreds of children from a sect-owned ranch.

AP - The sign outside the Aquarius motel reads: "Spend a night, Not a paycheck," but some Midwest travelers have canceled reservations and other visitors stay fewer nights. On the nation's opposite coast, vacationers in Oregon worried about $4 gas splurge less on meals and skip the frills on getaways.

AP - In five years, New Jersey residents seeking driver's licenses will have to decide whether they want to become organ donors under a new first-of-its kind law.

AP - Friends and relatives of Kevin Wicks didn't accept the official explanation of why police fatally shot him when they were called to his apartment building.

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

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 - 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 - 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 - 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.