AP - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is set to appear before a panel investigating the financial crisis to give his take on the meltdown and his views on potential systemwide risks posed by large financial institutions.

AP - Under the shadow of fresh violence, President Barack Obama solemnly convened the first direct Israeli-Palestinian talks in two years Wednesday, challenging Mideast leaders to seize a fleeting opportunity to deliver peace to a region haunted by decades of hostility.

AP - A man who railed against the Discovery Channel's environmental programming for years burst into the company's headquarters with at least one explosive device strapped to his body Wednesday and took three people hostage at gunpoint before police shot him to death, officials said.

AP - Hurricane Earl steamed toward the Eastern Seaboard early Thursday as communities from North Carolina to New England kept a close eye on the forecast, worried that even a slight shift in the storm's predicted offshore track could put millions of people in the most densely populated part of the country in harm's way.

AP - Even as President Barack Obama was announcing the end of combat in Iraq, American soldiers were sealing off a northern village early Wednesday as their Iraqi partners raided houses and arrested dozens of suspected insurgents.

AP - Is the tea party the new Republican Party? The grass-roots network of fed-up conservative-libertarian voters displayed its power in its biggest triumph of the election year: the toppling of Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska's GOP primary. Political novice Joe Miller is the fifth tea party insurgent to win a GOP Senate nominating contest, an upset that few, if any, saw coming.

AP - American-born Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh and another Muslim inmate have asked a judge to order a federal prison to allow them and other Muslims in their highly restricted cell block to pray as a group, in accordance with their beliefs.

AP - Allergan Inc., the maker of wrinkle-smoothing Botox, has agreed to pay $600 million to settle a yearslong federal investigation into its marketing of the top-selling, botulin-based drug.

AP - A murder suspect who led officers on a high-speed chase with his dead girlfriend in the passenger seat is a central figure in the investigation of at least four killings, authorities said Wednesday.

AP - Andy Roddick found it infuriating that a lineswoman who called him for a foot fault was wrong about which of his shoes touched the line.