WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co. redesigned the best-selling vehicle in the United States, the F-150 pickup, and cut its death rate in half, a leading safety group said in a study set for release on Thursday.

AP - Higher-than-expected revenue has meant more state government spending this year on transportation, higher education and pensions, a new survey found, though it also picked up new worries over poorly performing sales taxes.

AP - A Democratic activist announced Wednesday he will run against U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith in 2008 and focus on the Republican's changed stance on the Iraq war.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Wannabe pop star Sanjaya Malakar, the 'American Idol' contestant best known for his wacky hairdos, was booted from the hit show on Wednesday, disappointing a hard core of smart alecks who delighted in mocking his mediocre singing and extreme hair styles.

AP - WACO, Texas — In the ashes of the Branch Davidian site where nearly 80 people died in a 1993 blaze after an armed standoff with federal agents, a new religious community is slowly taking shape.

AP - Julia Campbell was no stranger to adventurous exploits.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The man who massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech railed against wealth and debauchery and portrayed himself as a defender of the weak in a video sent between killings and shown by NBC on Wednesday.

AP - A jury must decide if a Tennessee preacher's wife was an abused woman who accidentally shot her husband, or whether she blasted him with a shotgun on purpose.

AP - An additional 4 million Magnetix magnetic building sets are being recalled after children swallowed the tiny magnets in them and were seriously injured, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Thursday.

AP - Cell phone text messages. Loudspeakers on towers. Cameras that detect suspicious activity. After the Virginia Tech massacre, colleges and universities are considering these and other measures to alert thousands of students across their campuses of emergencies.

AP - A jury must decide if a Tennessee preacher's wife was an abused woman who accidentally shot her husband, or whether she blasted him with a shotgun on purpose.

AP - Firefighters were making slow progress Thursday against two wildfires that have forced more than 1,000 people from their homes and destroyed 14 houses as they spread over more than 45 square miles of tinder-dry forest in southeast Georgia.

AP - NBC News' decision to air some of the video and pictures sent by Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui had immediate repercussions Thursday, with family members of victims canceling their plans to appear on the 'Today' show.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some family members of the victims killed at Virginia Tech university canceled interviews with NBC on Thursday because the television network aired video and photographs of the killer it received in the mail.

ATLANTA (Reuters) - The United States is expected to have at least 127 million flu-vaccine doses on hand for this coming influenza season -- the most ever, companies told the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer unveiled a new energy policy on Thursday which aims to make the state the most aggressive in the nation in conservation and cut power demand by 15 percent by 2015.

AP - Gov. John Lynch said Thursday he will sign legislation establishing civil unions for gay couples in New Hampshire.

AP - A threat posted on an online blog worried Kalamazoo Valley Community College officials enough Thursday that they shut down the campus for the rest of the week, the sheriff's department said.

AP - Efforts to dig out two miners buried for nearly two days beneath at least 45 feet of rocks and dirt in an open pit coal mine resumed Thursday morning after a seven-hour safety delay, a federal official said.

AP - Jurors had two different pictures of a Tennessee preacher's wife to consider as they began deliberating her fate Thursday. Was she an abused woman who accidentally shot her husband or did she intentionally shoot him in the back and leave him to die in the church parsonage?

AP - Colleges and universities are looking at cell phone text messages, warning sirens and other ways to quickly alert students across their campuses of emergencies in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre.

AP - A mother who smothered her crying 9-month-old twins with a pillow then went back to sleep was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

AP - Firefighters were making slow progress Thursday against two wildfires that have forced more than 1,000 people from their homes and destroyed 14 houses as they spread over more than 45 square miles of tinder-dry forest in southeast Georgia.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NBC News' broadcast of a video manifesto by the Virginia Tech university killer drew criticism from police on Thursday, and some of the victims' family members canceled interviews with the network.

AP - Mourners on Thursday marked the 12th anniversary of the bombing that killed 168 people here by reaching out to victims of the Virginia Tech shootings and of violence everywhere.

AP - Efforts to dig out two miners buried for nearly two days beneath at least 45 feet of rocks and dirt in an open pit coal mine resumed Thursday morning after a seven-hour safety delay, a federal official said.

AP - Gov. Jon S. Corzine was still breathing with the help of a ventilator on Thursday, a week after a high-speed crash left him in critical condition.

AP - While the parents of the Virginia Tech gunman have kept silent and out of public view, his uncle met with an official from a Korean-American association and said he assumes the parents are doing fine.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Schools in Yuba City, California were ordered into a 'lock-down' on Thursday after police warned a man had threatened to go on a killing spree in locals schools.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The widening U.S. student lender scandal is putting new scrutiny on the ties between private loan companies like Sallie Mae and the government agencies that oversee federal loan programs.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Major U.S. television networks limited broadcasts of a video manifesto by the Virginia Tech university killer after heavy coverage drew criticism on Thursday from police and victims' family members.

BOSTON (Reuters) - New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch will sign legislation that would make the state the fourth in the country to allow same-sex civil unions, his spokesman said on Thursday.

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A huge, black smoke plume spread over east Houston on Thursday as two tanker trucks burned at a chemical wholesaler's terminal north of the Houston Ship Channel, according local television reports.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer unveiled an ambitious new energy policy on Thursday that aims to cut power demand 15 percent by 2015 in what he says would be the most aggressive state conservation plan in the country.

AP - It was an ordeal that lasted 19 hours. In that span, a man bound a Columbia University graduate student in her apartment, raped her, doused her with hot water and bleach, slit her eyelids and finally set a fire before fleeing, police said.

AP - Anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles, an aging ex-CIA operative suspected in a decades-old airliner bombing, was released from U.S. custody Thursday pending his trial on charges of immigration fraud, his lawyer said.

AP - At the end of Act One, the tenor wearing a white suit and trademark red suspenders clutches his fat cigar in a smoldering rage.

AP - The mother of a kindergartner was charged with assault Thursday and banned from school after officials said she walked into the child's classroom, pointed a toy cap gun at students and pulled the trigger several times.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey, who resigned his post amid a sex scandal, is teaching law and ethics at the state's Kean University, the school said on Thursday.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A Canadian lawyer who worked for Conrad Black described in taped testimony at the fallen media magnate's fraud trial on Thursday how last-minute payments to executives were 'unremarkable,' and indicated the defendants had spared shareholders a huge tax bill.

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (Reuters) - New Hampshire's governor said on Thursday he will sign a bill that would make the state the fourth in the nation to allow same-sex civil unions, giving momentum to the socially divisive issue in the state that helps kick off the 2008 White House race.

BENTONVILLE, Arkansas (Reuters) - Matt Kistler, a Wal-Mart executive who previously worked at Oscar Mayer and Kraft Foods, knows very well the long-held mantra of consumer goods companies: 'Bigger is better'.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. meat inspectors will begin to intensify monitoring of higher-risk processing plants as early as July, Agriculture Department officials said on Thursday, despite complaints they cannot adequately identify who needs extra checking.

AP - Peter Read wants you to make a choice.

AP - A 12,000-student school district was locked down Thursday as authorities searched for a man they say threatened to make the Virginia Tech-style massacre look 'mild by comparison.'

AP - A 16-year-old Russian boy found a hospital halfway around the world willing to remove his brain tumor for free.

SAN YSIDRO BORDER CROSSING, Calif (Reuters) - The world's busiest land border crossing between the United States and Mexico is 'saturated' and 'grossly out of date' but it is unclear if Congress will provide the money to overhaul it, a senior U.S. official said.

AP - A judge's ruling on Cho Seung-Hui's mental health should have barred him from purchasing the handguns he used in the Virginia Tech massacre, according to federal regulations.

AP - A drug ring based at Miami International Airport used cargo workers to smuggle cocaine and heroin for the past five years, authorities said Thursday in announcing charges against 29 people.

AP - Firefighters made slow progress Thursday against two wildfires that have forced more than 1,000 people from their homes and destroyed 18 homes as they spread over nearly 50 square miles of tinder-dry forest.

AP - Crews trying to free two miners buried for more than two days beneath a huge mound of rocks and dirt reached the backhoe one of the men was in, a federal official said late Thursday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Thursday threatened Drexel University with a lawsuit and settled probes with three other colleges as he stepped up his investigation into higher education lending practices.

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - An outspoken critic of the U.S. government's push to restore wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains was sentenced on Thursday in U.S. District Court to six days in jail and banned from public lands for two years for trying to poison the protected species.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department warned Americans on Thursday of increasingly violent drug gangs in Mexico and urged travelers to stick to main highways and well-known tourist destinations.

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - U.S. police arrested nine illegal immigrants working for a contractor at a California military base on Thursday, in an operation underscoring a threat to national security from fake identity documents, authorities said.

AP - In high school, Cho Seung-Hui almost never opened his mouth. When he finally did, his classmates laughed, pointed at him and said: 'Go back to China.'

AP - A Web designer was charged Thursday with posting on his own site a bogus threat to kill 50 San Diego State University students, then alerting a TV station to try to draw publicity, the FBI said.

AP - A Georgia man who admitted that he poisoned his children's soup in an attemt to get money from the Campbell Soup Co. was sentenced Thursday to five years in federal prison. U.S. District Judge Julie Carnes also ordered William Allen Cunningham, 41, of Stockbridge to have no further contact with the children or his ex-wife.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Broadcast of a video diatribe by the Virginia Tech gunman has reopened the debate over media use of vile or disturbing material that goes back decades to the likes of Son of Sam and the Zodiac killer.

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - U.S. police arrested nine illegal immigrants working for a contractor at a California military base on Thursday, in an operation underscoring a threat to national security from fake identity documents, authorities said.