AP - Tropical Storm Fay meandered north along the Florida Atlantic coast Wednesday but did not immediately head out over the ocean, lessening the chances it will gain strength and become a hurricane.

AP - The week before the 2004 Democratic National Convention, John Kerry drafted his presidential nomination speech and then set off on a cross-country trip that brought him home to thousands of delegates waiting in Boston.

AP - U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones was in a hospital Wednesday but no details on her condition were released.

AP - Rain overnight came to the aid of firefighters at a wildfire in Washington state that prompted an evacuation order for dozens of homes.

AP - Even if a student plans on a major where the financial rewards aren't so obvious, such as art history or philosophy, most American families don't factor in their child's expected earning power when considering the potential debt load for college.

AP - Paddlings, swats, licks. A quarter of a million schoolchildren got them last year — and blacks, American Indians and kids with disabilities got a disproportionate share of the punishment, according to a study by a human rights group.

AP - Turns out Bigfoot was just a rubber suit. Two researchers on a quest to prove the existence of Bigfoot say that the carcass encased in a block of ice — handed over to them for an undisclosed sum by two men who claimed to have found it — was slowly thawed out, and discovered to be a rubber gorilla outfit.

AP - The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.

AP - A 14-year-old girl allegedly married to jailed polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs with her parents' blessing at age 12 was ordered back into foster care Tuesday by a Texas judge.

AP - Crews were waiting for floodwaters to recede so they can begin restoring washed-out trails and footbridges to a remote village near the Grand Canyon hit by flooding, authorities said.

AP - LeRoi Moore, the versatile saxophonist whose signature staccato fused jazz and funk overtones onto the eclectic sound of the Dave Matthews Band, died Tuesday of complications from injuries he suffered in an all-terrain vehicle accident, the band said. He was 46.

AP - A New Jersey congressman has arrived in the Republic of Georgia in an effort to bring home two young girls stuck overseas since the conflict with Russia began.

AP - John Lennon's killer told parole officials during his latest unsuccessful bid for release from prison that he is ashamed and sorry for gunning down the former Beatle nearly three decades ago.

AP - A convicted sex offender admitted Tuesday that he strangled a 20-year-old South Carolina college student two years ago, leaving her body in her off-campus apartment with her bikini top still wrapped around her neck.

AP - The abandoned ashes are stacked floor to ceiling in the basement of the Graham, Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors, tucked neatly on wooden shelves and tables and in an unused dumbwaiter. Someone loved the people once, enough to have their bodies cremated — then promptly forgot or decided they didn't want them.

AP - Poll workers will not be allowed to take voting machines home for safekeeping in the days before the November presidential election because the practice known as "sleepovers" is an unacceptable security risk, the state elections chief said Tuesday.

AP - Maudie White Hopkins, who grew up during the Depression in the hardscrabble Ozarks and married a Confederate army veteran 67 years her senior, has died. She was 93.