US News

AP - The last ferry left for the mainland and coastal residents hunkered down at home as Hurricane Earl closed in with 110 mph winds Thursday on North Carolina's dangerously exposed Outer Banks, the first and potentially most destructive stop on the storm's projected journey up the Eastern Seaboard.

AP - An oil platform exploded and burned off the Louisiana coast Thursday, the second such disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in less than five months. This time, the Coast Guard said there was no leak, and no one was killed.

AP - A two-story Comfort Inn has become a makeshift hurricane hostel on North Carolina's Outer Banks for those who want to stay close to their homes but know they need better shelter from the outslaught of Earl.

AP - Bethany Storro had just bought a pair of sunglasses and was celebrating a new job when a woman walked up to her with a cup and said: "Hey pretty girl, do you want to drink this?"

AP - It will go down as one of the most painful openings to a political debate in recent memory.

AP - Police had been negotiating with James Jae Lee for several hours and intended to keep him talking for as long as it took to safely resolve the standoff at the Discovery Channel's headquarters. Inside the lobby, Lee's three hostages had no intention of waiting.

AP - The Justice Department sued the nation's self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff" on Thursday, calling Joe Arpaio's defiance of an investigation into his office's alleged discrimination against Hispanics "unprecedented."

AP - To relaunch Middle East peace talks on Thursday, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and their American mediators quietly agreed to push aside the question of Hamas — the Islamic militant group that controls one of the two Palestinian territories and rejects negotiations.

AP - The developers planning to build a $100 million Islamic center near the World Trade Center site still have financial hurdles to clear: They haven't finished buying all the property they want for the project and are nearly a quarter-million dollars behind on real estate taxes and late fees.

AP - Calling the Chicago police chief's ultimatum to stop resorting to violence a waste of time, current and former members of some of the city's most notorious street gangs held an unlikely news conference on Thursday to send their own message to police: You're not playing fair.

AP - The former television producer who tried to blackmail David Letterman was freed Thursday after four months in jail for a plot that put a spotlight on the comic icon's office affairs, city Correction Department records show.

AP - A Detroit-area woman who was removed from a jury for commenting about the ongoing case on Facebook has a longer writing task ahead: a five-page essay about the constitutional right to a fair trial.

AP - Engineers removed a temporary cap Thursday that stopped oil from gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from BP's blown-out well in mid-July. No more oil was expected to leak into the sea, but crews were standing by with collection vessels just in case.

AP - It's been three years since Scott Eckersley was fired after asserting that his then-boss, former Gov. Matt Blunt, and others in Blunt's administration should not be deleting certain e-mails because they belonged to the public record.

AP - The defeat of Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski by an upstart fiscal conservative in Alaska's GOP primary could mark a significant shift for a state that has so long relied on federal pork to survive. The outcome was also an unexpected blow to the seniority Alaska has enjoyed in the Senate.