AP - Jefferson Thomas was fast and athletic and often played pickup basketball with white students while growing up in Little Rock in the 1950s.

AFP - Australia was finally set to learn its new government Tuesday, after more than two weeks of haggling since deadlocked August 21 elections returned the first hung parliament in 70 years.

AFP - A senior culture ministry official and the head of a Cairo museum from which a Van Gogh painting was stolen will stand trial on charges of negligence, a judicial source said on Monday.

AP - An imam who has become the public face of a proposed Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero has returned to the United States following a taxpayer-funded tour of the Middle East to promote religious tolerance.

AP - A sharp series of about 20 aftershocks rattled New Zealand's earthquake-hit city of Christchurch overnight, and earthquake experts warned Tuesday that another powerful tremblor might hammer the region in coming days.

Reuters - President Barack Obama, scrambling to jump-start job creation in a sluggish U.S. economy, proposed a six-year plan on Monday to rebuild aging roads, railways and runways with an initial $50 billion investment.

AP - Former Surinamese dictator Desi Bouterse shrugged off questions about his past during his first overseas trip as elected president, saying Monday that he will not interfere in his ongoing murder trial and dismissing a 1999 drug conviction as "almost a joke."

AP - Searchers on Monday pulled five more bodies from a mud-covered highway where back-to-back landslides buried bus passengers and people trying to save them. The deaths raised the official toll from rain-fueled mudslides in Guatemala to 45.

AP - A wind-driven wildfire broke out in the rugged Colorado foothills and quickly spread across 4 square miles Monday, destroying some homes and triggering evacuations of hundreds of others.

AP - Mexican authorities urged people to move to shelters while officials in Texas distributed sandbags and warned of flash floods as Tropical Storm Hermine strengthened and headed toward the northwestern Gulf coast on Monday.

AP - Egypt's leading democracy advocate made a forceful call Monday for the nation to boycott November's parliamentary election, saying they were certain to be rigged and urging his young supporters to be patient and plan for a lengthy struggle.

AFP - Steven Gerrard admits being captain of England right now feels like a man under siege as he prepares to lead his team into a UEFA Euro 2012 qualifier against Switzerland here on Tuesday desperately trying to keep the focus on football.

AP - The lawyer for an Iranian woman sentenced to be stoned on an adultery conviction said Monday that he and her children are worried the delayed execution could be carried out soon with the end of a moratorium on death sentences for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

AP - Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank's retort was an Internet sensation.

AFP - Plans to radically re-draw cross-border economic government across Europe hit a stumbling block on Monday 10 days from a deadline for concrete action set by European Union leaders.

AP - A Taliban suicide bomber detonated a car in an alley behind a police station in a strategically important town in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, killing at least 17 police and civilians in an explosion that shattered the station and neighboring homes.

AP - A combative President Barack Obama rolled out a long-term jobs program Monday that would exceed $50 billion to rebuild roads, railways and runways, and coupled it with a blunt campaign-season assault on Republicans for causing Americans' hard economic times.

AP - The Justice Department won't say if the blowout preventer that failed to stop oil from gushing from BP's undersea well into the Gulf of Mexico is on its way to shore.

AP - The Justice Department won't say if the blowout preventer that failed to stop oil from gushing from BP's undersea well into the Gulf of Mexico is on its way to shore.

AP - Mexican authorities urged people to move to shelters while officials in Texas distributed sandbags and warned of flash floods as Tropical Storm Hermine headed toward the northwestern Gulf coast on Monday.

AP - As New York Indian Nation leaders battle in courtrooms to preserve their tax-free cigarette market, tensions are rising on reservations, where the state's renewed efforts to tax sales to non-Native customers is viewed as yet another attack on Native American rights.

AP - Hallmark Cards Inc., a $4 billion empire built on a demand for printed sentimentality, enters its second century facing a weak economy and what could be an even greater challenge: a generation that has grown up posting its sentiments online.

AP - More than 80 years ago, Germany sold tens of thousands of bonds to American investors in an effort to recover financially from World War I. Later, Adolf Hitler used some of the money raised by those bonds to build the powerful Nazi war machine that would ravage Europe during World War II.

AFP - The World Trade Organization will issue its long-awaited opinion on Europe's challenge to American subsidies to US aerospace giant Boeing next week, a source close to the matter said Monday.