AP - The city's former mayor is serving a four-month jail sentence. Its deficit could top $200 million. Hundreds of layoffs are planned. And Detroit's municipal bonds are now at junk status.

AP - As Capt. Brittany Catanzaro eased her commuter ferry, the Thomas Kean, into the Hudson River, she saw an eye-popping sight: a US Airways jet, bobbing on the tide.

AP - Four recent major airline accidents have something in common: Everyone survived.

AP - The United Nations says the death toll from Zimbabwe's cholera outbreak has risen to 2,201 and the epidemic is still not under control.

AP - A British judge has sentenced former Culture Club frontman Boy George to 15 months in jail after he was convicted of falsely imprisoning a male escort.

AP - British lawyer and writer John Mortimer, creator of the curmudgeonly criminal lawyer Rumpole of the Bailey, died Friday. He was 85.

AP - A ferry captain credited with rescuing people from a plane in the Hudson River says he feared they would die in the frigid water.

AP - An Indiana financial manager suspected of staging his death in a plane crash is expected to remain hospitalized until early next week.

AP - A judge is allowing prosecutors to continue with a criminal contempt case against a former Florida professor once accused by the U.S. government of being a top Palestinian terrorist.

AP - A commercial passenger jet that had reported a possible nosegear problem touched down safely Friday at Baltimore's airport.

AP - Wind and choppy seas were frustrating efforts Friday to free an endangered right whale tangled in fishing gear as it swam from the Georgia coast into waters off Florida.

AP - A former funeral director in Rochester, N.Y., has been sentenced to six to 18 years in prison for allowing body parts to be removed without permission from 17 corpses.

AP - A jury stunned a courtroom Friday by acquitting former Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona of a sweeping corruption conspiracy and all but one related count of witness tampering.

AP - Impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich's former chief fundraiser has admitted he illegally used corporate funds to pay gambling debts and personal expenses.

AP - Three white men were arrested Friday in connection with the torching of a predominantly black church hours after Barack Obama won the presidential election.

AP - Hundreds of people packed a church Friday for the funeral of nine family members killed by a gunman dressed as Santa during a Christmas Eve party.

AP - California's controller says he will begin a 30-day delay on tax refunds and other payments starting Feb. 1 because the state is running out of money.

AP - Minutes after a US Airways jet plunged into the icy Hudson River, Vincent Lucante and his ferry crew leaned over to pluck two soaked and shivering babies from an emergency life raft floating near the plane's right wing.

AP - A new report shows Nevada's major hotel-casinos had a huge drop in net income in fiscal 2008 as a global economic downturn worsened, hanging onto $721.2 million or a third of what they netted in the previous year.

AP - Activists have settled a lawsuit with the Environmental Protection Agency over regulation of mercury emissions from cement plants.

AP - A businessman who sold steroids and human growth hormone to bodybuilders from around the country was sentenced to two years in federal prison Friday by a judge who called him the ringleader of a far-reaching operation.

AP - The former chief executive officer of the nation's largest kosher meatpacking plant has been named in a new 99-count federal indictment filed in Iowa.

AP - Martin Luther King's flame has always burned brightest in Atlanta, but in a real sense, the torch is being passed to Washington, D.C., with his birthday and holiday taking on dual meaning for many Americans because it falls on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration.

AP - Birds like those believed to have crippled a US Airways jetliner in New York have been a danger to aviation since the days of Orville and Wilbur Wright, so airports use everything from hawks and snarling dogs to screaming fireworks and shotguns to kill or scare off the intruders.

AP - One minute they were airline passengers. Six minutes later, they were stunned survivors taking on water in the middle of the frigid Hudson River.

AP - Detroit's city's top lawyer has resigned and drawn outrage after describing one of the city's courts as a 'ghetto court.'

AP - Gov. Rod Blagojevich's chief defense attorney said Friday he will not represent the governor at his Senate impeachment trial but still will defend him on criminal charges.

AP - A former suburban school superintendent who was sentenced earlier this month for looting the district visited casinos more than 900 times in five years and lost more than $175,000, newly released court records show.

AP - Thick mud, menacing currents and bone-chilling temperatures stymied investigators Friday as they scoured the Hudson River for the two missing engines from a US Airways jetliner that crash landed in the water after colliding with birds. The investigation ran into a series of obstacles one day after the pilot ditched the plane carrying 155 people.

AP - A jury acquitted former Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona of charges that he took bribes in exchange for the power of his office, a verdict that stunned the courtroom and was hailed by the elated defendant as 'an absolute miracle.'

AP - Three of Gov. Rod Blagojevich's attorneys withdrew Friday from representing the governor at his Senate impeachment trial, but his chief defense attorney said he still will defend him on federal criminal charges.

AP - Although some critics deride his art as drab and kitschy, Andrew Wyeth's melancholy paintings were praised by others as profound reflections of 20th Century alienation and existentialism.

AP - Jury deliberations began Friday in the trial of a former sheriff accused of using his power over inmates and drug court defendants to coerce them into having sex with him.

AP - A man who died of lymphoma and lung disease more than seven years after he was exposed to toxic dust from the World Trade Center collapse was added to the Sept. 11 death toll, the New York City medical examiner said Friday.

AP - A Wisconsin man was arrested Friday in Mississippi after authorities said he threatened on the Internet to kill President-elect Barack Obama.

AP - An appeals court has cleared 10 nurses of criminal charges after they were accused of endangering patients by resigning en masse from a Long Island nursing home to protest working conditions.

AP - Chesley Sullenberger spent practically his whole life preparing for the five-minute crucible that was US Airways Flight 1549.

AP - W. Mark Felt, the former FBI second-in-command who helped unlock the secrets of Watergate as the shadowy 'Deep Throat,' was regarded Friday as a man who stood for truth in deceptive times.

AP - A suburban Detroit man accused of spying for Saddam Hussein's former regime and sharing information with the executed Iraqi dictator's intelligence service has pleaded guilty.

AP - A missing elderly couple likely fell off a Carnival Cruise ship between Long Beach and Mexico, company officials said Friday.

AP - California's controller said Friday he will be forced to impose a 30-day delay on tax refunds and some other payments starting Feb. 1 if lawmakers fail to agree on a plan to erase a nearly $42 billion budget deficit.