ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – America's latest folk-hero flight attendant may be the one on a Southwest Airlines jet who took a 13-month-old baby from her mother after the woman slapped the crying child for kicking her.

SUKKUR, Pakistan — Angry flood survivors in Pakistan blocked a highway to protest slow delivery of aid and heavy rain lashed makeshift housing Monday as a forecast of more flooding increased the urgency of the massive international relief effort.

CHICAGO — They were close. After three weeks of respectful but increasingly tense deliberations, 11 jurors were ready to convict Rod Blagojevich of what prosecutors called a "political corruption crime spree" that would have sent yet another former Illinois governor to prison.

McKINNEY, Texas — A 29-year-old man killed himself during a shootout with authorities after he drove a trailer filled with explosives into the parking lot of a suburban Dallas police station and started firing at the building, officials said Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — Researchers are warning that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is a bigger mess than the government claims and that a lot of crude is lurking deep below the surface, some of it settling perhaps in a critical undersea canyon off the Florida Panhandle.
The Skanner News Video: Gulf Shrimp Catch is Pitiful

WASHINGTON – Add another election-year hurdle for Democrats: President Barack Obama's forceful defense of the right of Muslims to build a mosque near the World Trade Center site.

SAN FRANCISCO — Gay couples who had been gearing up to get married in California this week had to put their wedding plans on hold once again after a federal appeals court said it first wanted to consider the constitutionality of the state's same-sex marriage ban.

ORANGEBURG, S.C. – A South Carolina mother who claimed her children drowned when their car careened into a river was charged with murder Tuesday after authorities said she confessed to suffocating the two toddlers and then faking the accident.

TOKYO — Japan lost its place as the world's No. 2 economy to China in the second quarter as receding global growth sapped momentum and stunted a shaky recovery.

BOGOTA, Colombia – A Boeing 737 jetliner with 131 passengers aboard crashed on landing and broke into three pieces at a Colombian island in the Caribbean early Monday. The region's governor said it was a miracle that only one person died.