AP - A Christian minister vowed Tuesday to go ahead with plans to burn copies of the Quran to protest the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks despite warnings from the White House and the top U.S. general in Afghanistan that he would endanger American troops overseas.

AP - Tropical Storm Hermine gave a wet and windy punch to Texas on Tuesday but left only minor scrapes in the storm-weary Rio Grande Valley, which is proving resilient this hurricane season after taking a third tropical system on the chin.

AP - Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who has presided over the nation's third-largest city for 21 years, like his father did before him, announced Tuesday that he will not run for a seventh term, saying the time "just feels right."

AP - Federal scientists are reporting the best possible scenario for BP's leaked oil: Microbes are munching the underwater oil, but not robbing the Gulf of Mexico of much needed oxygen or creating so-called "dead zones."

AP - A 36-year-old factory worker who spent much of his adult life in prison was charged Tuesday with sexually assaulting and murdering a 14-year-old girl whose badly burned body was found behind gravel piles at the asphalt plant where he worked.

AP - The flight attendant accused of onboard antics that captured the nation's attention when he told off a passenger and slid down the plane's emergency chute with a beer will undergo a mental health evaluation with the aim of avoiding jail time in a possible plea deal.

AP - Firefighters planned to ramp up their battle Tuesday against a wildfire that forced about 3,000 people to flee their homes as the wind-whipped blaze filled the surrounding canyon with heavy smoke and spit flames.

AP - Merriam-Webster's "Word of the Summer" is not even a word. That's something no one can "refudiate."

AP - Less than a couple months after Nick Curtin opened a pharmacy in suburban Tulsa in 2008, the store was burglarized twice in one week. And just last year a masked man robbed him at gunpoint, making off with 1,800 pills.

AP - Hipsters, hustlers, celebrities, thieves, dope peddlers and just about everyone else in gritty, quirky Venice Beach know Boston Dawna. You can't miss the one-woman crime fighter.

AP - A salvaged 50-ton steel column was hoisted onto a support structure Tuesday at the World Trade Center site, where it will eventually serve as part of the entryway to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.