Associated Press News

ABERDEEN, Wash. (AP) -- One-hundred-fifty baskets of pink petunias hang from the light posts all over this city, watered regularly by residents trying to make their community feel alive again. A local artist spends his afternoons high in a bucket truck, painting a block-long mural of a little girl blowing bubbles, each circle the scene of an imagined, hopeful future....

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) -- The huge raised-relief images show a Confederate trinity sitting astride their horses, high above the ground. Hats held across their chests, President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson ride across the face of Stone Mountain into faded glory....

Americans with telescopes, cameras and protective glasses staked out viewing spots along a narrow corridor from Oregon to South Carolina to watch the moon blot out the midday sun Monday in what promised to be the most observed and photographed eclipse in history....

HOUSTON (AP) -- Soon after he opened his office serving immigrants fighting to stay in the United States, Raed Gonzalez became a lawyer who goes after other lawyers....

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Jerry Lewis, the manic, rubber-faced showman who jumped and hollered to fame in a lucrative partnership with Dean Martin, settled down to become a self-conscious screen auteur and found an even greater following as the tireless, teary host of the annual muscular dystrophy telethons, has died. He was 91....

GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) -- The Rev. Nelson Johnson needs no reminders of the massacre of five of his labor-activist friends almost 40 years ago - he still has the faded scar on his left arm, left by a Nazi who stabbed him as white supremacists descended on a march for workers through black neighborhoods in Greensboro....

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Jerry Lewis, whose career as producer-director-writer and movie star peaked in the 1960s, may be best remembered by younger generations for the muscular dystrophy telethons he conducted every Labor Day weekend....

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist and who broke racial barriers in the 1960s and used his humor to spread messages of social justice and nutritional health, has died. He was 84....

Defense lawyers have long questioned the reliability of some forensic science methods, but over the past decade, the debate has intensified. Two highly critical reports found that with the exception of DNA, many methods have not been tested rigorously enough to be considered scientifically valid....