RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- His sleeves rolled up and his finger stabbing the air, President Barack Obama pitched his newly unveiled jobs plan with campaign-style fervor Friday, urging Americans to pressure their lawmakers to pass his $447 billion initiative. "We're tougher than these times," he declared. "We are bigger than the smallness of our politics."

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) -- Union activists aren't backing off demands to work at a new Washington state grain terminal after hundreds of Longshore workers stormed the facility, overwhelmed guards and dumped grain.

NEW YORK (AP) -- It's a name inextricably linked with Sept. 11, with huge, catastrophic loss - Cantor Fitzgerald. Of the companies and organizations that lost people that day, none was harder hit than the financial services firm that occupied the 101st to 105th floors of the north tower at the World Trade Center. Out of 960 employees in New York, 658 were killed - no employee in Cantor's offices at the time survived. Whole divisions were decimated.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Typical workers would get an extra $1,500 in their paychecks next year under a plan by President Barack Obama to expand a payroll tax cut that is scheduled expire at the end of the year. Higher paid workers would get more, and businesses would get tax breaks, too.

Working to document the day-to-day harassment and violence experienced by Americans of South Asian, Muslim and Sikh heritage, the Sikh Coalition of America last Friday launched a website of personal stories in video format designed to dispel myths about their communities.

DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) -- For Caleb Carter, the road to becoming a Muslim took years. Sept. 11, 2001, was a turning point - specifically his high school teacher's hostile reaction to Islam that day.

During Labor Day weekend, millions of Americans hit the highways to get to their weekend vacation destinations. But many Blacks who took to the road likely weren't wearing seat belts, and that's a trend transportation officials are looking to throw in reverse.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When Mitt Romney and Rick Perry thumped their chests over their job-creation records as governor during the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night, they left the bad parts out.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- For incoming freshmen at western Connecticut's suburban Brookfield High School, hefting a backpack weighed down with textbooks is about to give way to tapping out notes and flipping electronic pages on a glossy iPad tablet computer.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House may pull the Postal Service back from the brink of insolvency, at least for a few months.