AP - At the University of Illinois, being an athlete gets you access to a $6 million facility with oversized leather chairs and Oriental rugs.

AP - A passenger train smashed into a sedan that drove into its path in central Florida on Friday night, killing three people in the car, authorities said.

AP - Conservationists are looking to the wife of Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens to help push for federal reforms that they say will help thousands of wild horses and save rangeland in the West.

AP - Years of collecting dead carcasses and examining lead-poisoned livers have convinced Mike Smith of this: to save Pacific Coast trumpeter swans, he has to haze them.

AP - Endeavour's seven astronauts entered their last full day in space Saturday awaiting word if mission managers had cleared the space shuttle for a return to Earth.

AP - A Pennsylvania Democratic party leader says MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews may be considering a run for U.S. Senate in 2010.

AP - What is the sound that a falling pumpkin makes when it hits the ground?

AP - An Arizona appeals court panel ruled Friday that the Havasupai Indian tribe can proceed with a lawsuit that claims university researchers misused blood samples taken from tribal members.

AP - In a season that inspires earnest letters about toys, one notable batch is being sent not by kids to Santa's workshop but by parents to the executive suites of real-world toy makers.

AP - Her father waits behind a glass wall, clothed in the jail standard gray-and-white striped shirt and pants. He has tidied up some since their last visit: What's left of his thinning hair has been trimmed, and his face is clean of stubble.

AP - The recent spate of drug-related killings in Nogales, Mexico, is driving apart what have long been close-knit communities, discouraging some residents of its Arizona sister city from crossing the border.

AP - In New Orleans, a dire warning to flee emptied the city before Hurricane Gustav in early September. In Houston less than two weeks later, a plea to 'hunker down' might have kept evacuation routes from clogging before Hurricane Ike struck.

AP - Seven-year-old Dan Taglia heard the fire alarm bell from his classroom on Dec. 1, 1958, but hoped it was a signal that students were getting ice cream. It was too late in the day for a fire drill, and anyway the nuns wouldn't send the children out coatless on such a cold day.

AP - One customer's favorite purple velvet chair at a Starbucks in a New York suburb has become a memorial.

AP - Investigators in Detroit say they have little to go on in the case of a fetus found in a municipal wastewater treatment plant.

AP - In the years after World War II, Americans packed up their young families and Army surplus camping gear and headed into the national forests to hunt, fish, and hike. Going to the woods was part of what it meant to be an American.

AP - Prosecutors have offered a plea deal to an 8-year-old boy charged with murder in the shooting deaths of his father and another man in their St. Johns home, court records show.

AP - Prosecutors have offered a plea deal to an 8-year-old boy charged with murder in the shooting deaths of his father and another man in their eastern Arizona home, court records show.