SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) -- Homeless people in Orange County were put on alert by police and advocates concerned that they're the target of a serial killer who has already slain three homeless men.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As HBO considers making a movie about Marion Barry with Eddie Murphy in the title role, the real Barry is doing something that comes naturally: running for re-election in the nation's capital.

BROWNING, Mont. (AP) -- Two wildfires on Montana's Blackfeet Indian Reservation burned thousands of acres, forced scores to evacuate and destroyed several buildings overnight, but rain helped firefighters and volunteers get a handle on the blazes on Thursday.

OGDEN, Utah (AP) -- A shootout erupted when police raided a Utah house on Wednesday evening, killing an officer and seriously wounding five others and the suspect, authorities said.

ALAMINOS CANYON BLOCK 857, GULF OF MEXICO (AP) -- Two hundred miles off the coast of Texas, ribbons of pipe are reaching for oil and natural gas deeper below the ocean's surface than ever before.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The head of the National Urban League said Tuesday that Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum tried to leverage a stereotype about black people and public assistance programs to gain an advantage in the Iowa caucuses.

CHICAGO (AP) -- For six decades, civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells was woven into the fabric of Chicago's South Side as the namesake of a public housing project.

Angela Davis, in her introduction to Mumia Abu-Jamal's 2009 book "Jailhouse Lawyers," called him one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. "As a transformative thinker," she writes of Abu-Jamal, "he has always taken care to emphasize the connections between incarcerated lives and lives that unfold in the putative arenas of freedom."

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- After a lengthy legal battle between a black South Carolina church and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a judge has ruled that the church owns a building where KKK robes and T-shirts are sold.

MIAMI (AP) -- Franky the drug dog's super-sensitive nose is at the heart of a question being put to the U.S. Supreme Court: Does a police K-9's sniff outside a house give officers the right to get a search warrant for illegal drugs, or is the sniff itself an unconstitutional search?