AP - A suburban Washington dentist on the run since his 2003 conviction for raping a 15-year-old female patient sedated in his office was arrested this week at a Mexican beach resort, authorities said Thursday.

AP - Fires erupted in the hills above Los Angeles on Thursday, damaging or destroying several homes as dangerous north winds fueled the flames. Farther inland, a blinding sandstorm triggered a deadly highway pileup.

AP - Attorneys for a man convicted of murdering a 6-year-old girl when he was 12 years old said Thursday they want his 30-year sentence vacated on the grounds that one of his former attorneys was incompetent.

ATLANTA (Reuters) - The New York Rangers won their first post-season game in almost 10 years with a 4-3 victory over the Atlanta Thrashers in the Eastern Conference series opener on Thursday.

AP - Despite being denied a permit by police to buy a handgun last month, Anthony LaCalamita III had no trouble buying a shotgun a few weeks later.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Healthier food and drinks are slowly finding their way into U.S. school lunchrooms, just under a year after leading companies first voluntarily agreed to ban high-calorie, low-nutrition products from schools.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than 90,000 customers in the Los Angeles area continued to have no power service Friday morning following a severe windstorm Thursday, utility officials said.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Healthier food and drinks are slowly finding their way into U.S. school lunchrooms, just under a year after leading companies first voluntarily agreed to ban high-calorie, low-nutrition products from schools.

AP - Despite an apology from the prosecutor who pursued rape charges against their clients, the lawyers for three exonerated former Duke lacrosse players were weighing a lawsuit against him, and legal experts said their case could have merit.

AP - Fire gutted a home in this suburb southeast of St. Louis early Friday, killing a mother and her three children, authorities said.

AP - A gunman already facing attempted murder charges barricaded himself inside an indoor shooting range with a group of hostages and held them for 10 hours before killing himself early Friday, authorities said. None of the hostages was hurt.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Chagas, a parasitic disease which can kill victims decades after infection, has spread from Latin America to the United States and Europe due to inadequate blood screening, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

MIAMI (Reuters) - Florida manatees are dying in record numbers and the lumbering marine mammals face growing threats from speedboats, a toxic foe called red tide and the potential loss of their warm winter havens at power plants.

AP - An Ohio man pleaded not guilty Friday to federal charges that he joined al-Qaida and conspired to bomb European tourist resorts and U.S. military bases overseas.

AP - An Indiana official publicly apologized for the state's role 100 years ago in pioneering state-authorized sterilization of 'imbeciles,' paupers and others it deemed undesirable.

AP - A gunman facing attempted murder charges barricaded himself inside an indoor shooting range with a group of hostages and held them for 10 hours before killing himself early Friday, authorities said. None of the hostages was hurt.

AP - Despite being denied a permit to buy a handgun last month, Anthony LaCalamita III had no trouble buying a shotgun a few weeks later.

AP - The Vatican has defrocked a former priest accused of sexually assaulting and whipping boys participating in Passion plays, the Philadelphia archdiocese said.

CAMDEN, New Jersey (Reuters) - New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was heavily sedated and breathing with the help of a ventilator on Friday after an accident while en route to a meeting with fired radio host Don Imus and the Rutgers women's basketball team.

DALLAS (Reuters) - Texas is a dry place but when it comes to alcohol sales it is getting a lot wetter.

AP - Human error triggered a cascade of events that caused the battery to fail on the Mars Global Surveyor last year, according to a preliminary report released Friday.

AP - A judge sentenced a former trash company supervisor to life in prison without parole Friday for strangling six women in the 1980s.

AP - Think global warming will raise the oceans enough to submerge Cape Hatteras? Want to bet on it?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Earth Day seems to have morphed into Earth Week or possibly Earth Season, with more than 1,300 U.S. events that focus on sharp cuts in the greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Human error caused NASA's Mars Global Surveyor to fail in November after the spacecraft spent nearly a decade mapping the Martian surface from orbit, the U.S. space agency said on Friday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA Director Michael Hayden is claiming success at stopping media leaks of the kind that plagued the spy agency under his predecessor, including revelations of secret prisons for terrorism suspects.

AP - The murky rivers around New York City bring to mind many things — garbage, chemicals, perhaps mobsters' bodies. Clean energy is not one of them.

AP - A member of one of Texas' oldest ranching families has locked horns with an oil company in a bizarre dispute involving pet rhinos, steel pipe and allegations of radiation poisoning and a corporate vendetta.

AP - Police Sgt. Patrick Welles got a call for backup one night in 2004 and told the dispatcher he was busy but would be there shortly. It turned out he was busy having sex with a woman in his patrol car, investigators say.

AP - The state attorney general said Friday he would not issue a decision on whether former U.S. Sen. John Breaux, who lives in Maryland, can run for governor of Louisiana.

AP - More than three dozen former patients have accused a prominent child psychiatrist of molesting them, a prosecutor said Friday in persuading a judge to jail the man and triple his bail.

AP - The city's hurricane recovery director, pilloried this week for saying that anyone moving into New Orleans from elsewhere was 'going to say, 'Who are these buffoons?'' apologized Friday and said stress and illness clouded his judgment.

AP - A video shown to federal jurors Friday showed an influential ex-legislator reviewing a bill to benefit what he thought was a real company, then taking cash from an undercover FBI agent.

AP - In a world of high-tech sensors and underwater robotics, Koa the bottlenose dolphin and others like her may still be the Navy's best line of defense against terrorists in scuba gear.

AP - A group of Middlebury College students looking to draw attention to global warming have sparked a national day of action beyond their wildest expectations: 1,350 actions planned Saturday across all 50 states.

AP - Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt, it has become customary to take stock of a politician's first 100 days in office. Here's what Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons' 100 days include: Four scandals or more. One criminal investigation. One $10,000 dress. And a possible $137 million budget shortfall.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Rutgers women's basketball team on Friday accepted the apologies of Don Imus after the disgraced radio personality got fired from both radio and television for calling them 'nappy-headed hos.'

NASSAU (Reuters) - A hearing in a Bahamas court on Friday failed to end a prolonged battle over custody of late Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith's daughter, 7-month-old Dannielynn.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two conservative organizations and other groups have asked a court to overturn U.S. regulators' decision to allow nonprescription sales of Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s 'morning-after' contraceptive.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York bankruptcy judge denied a motion by Northwest Airlines Corp.'s flight attendants on Friday to change a ruling that allowed the airline to void their work contract and impose heavy pay cuts last year.

PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) - The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland formally emerged from bankruptcy on Friday with a $75 million settlement plan after 2-1/2 years of court wrangling over how to pay victims of alleged sex abuse by priests.

TRENTON, New Jersey (Reuters) - New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was heavily sedated and breathing with the help of a ventilator on Friday after a highway accident, though his condition was improving, aides and doctors said.

AP - Gov. Jon S. Corzine was apparently riding without a seat belt, in violation of state law, when he was critically injured in the crash of his official vehicle, a spokesman said Friday.

AP - A principal and a teacher at a suburban elementary school quit amid allegations they were caught on video having sex in the principal's office, authorities say.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Ohio joined on Friday the list of states launching probes to see if college and university officials have steered students to student loan companies in exchange for perks.

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The recently hired New Orleans recovery czar apologized on Friday for referring to residents of the storm-ravaged city as 'buffoons' and saying its racial divisions were 'a bit like the Shi'ites and Sunnis.'

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A man fell to his death from the Empire State Building on Friday, police said, shutting down a bustling midtown Manhattan street just before afternoon rush hour.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The U.S. government said on Friday it would retry marijuana advocate Ed Rosenthal after a judge last month ruled its tax evasion and money laundering case against him was vindictive and dismissed the charges.

AP - A disciplinary committee rejected a request Friday to dismiss ethics charges against the former prosecutor in the dismissed Duke lacrosse case, who is accused of withholding critical DNA evidence from the defense.

AP - A principal and a teacher at a suburban elementary school quit amid allegations they were caught on video having sex in the principal's office, authorities say.

AP - A jury Friday convicted one of five men accused of abducting a young couple in a tourist-heavy section of Miami Beach, raping and killing the girlfriend and leaving the boyfriend for dead.

AP - A storm moving across North Texas on Friday killed at least one person, injured at least five others and caused significant damage to buildings in and around Fort Worth, authorities said.

AP - Investigators said Friday they think a man shot five family members to death before setting fire to their rural Northern California house, where he died of burns and smoke inhalation.

AP - A preacher's wife told authorities she shot her husband after a long buildup of domestic problems, according to an audiotape that prosecutors played Friday at her murder trial.

AP - The Navy expelled the former quarterback at the U.S. Naval Academy who was cleared of rape last summer but found guilty of lesser offenses, a move his attorney called 'profoundly unfair' on Friday.