WASHINGTON -- When Rep. Nancy Pelosi ascended to speaker of the House 18 months ago, liberals cheered. Now some jeer, calling the California Democrat a traitor to her principles.

WASHINGTON -- Jalapeno peppers are a new focus of the investigation into the salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds of people in at least 40 states, according to media reports.

For 24 years, Citizens Against Government Waste has exposed pork-barrel spenders and rallied tax critics.

ST. LOUIS -- The last of the Mississippi River navigational locks that were closed to barges because of flooding are back in business.

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran indicated Saturday that it has no plans to meet a key Western demand that it stop enriching uranium, a day after Tehran sent the European Union a response to an international offer of incentives for halting enrichment.

LOS ANGELES -- A wildfire threatening hundreds of homes in Southern California spread slowly through scenic canyonlands Saturday, straining resources as crews struggled to contain hundreds of other blazes around the state.

MIAMI -- Cuba's communist government has rebuilt its network of spies in Florida to the levels that existed before the FBI rounded up more than a dozen members of the Cuban spy Wasp Network, according to a U.S. Army expert on Cuban intelligence.

HARARE, Zimbabwe -- President Robert Mugabe summoned his top security officials to a government training center near his rural home in central Zimbabwe on the afternoon of March 30. In a voice barely audible at first, he informed the leaders of the state security apparatus that had enforced his rule for 28 years that he had lost the presidential vote held the previous day.

NEW YORK -- The National Park Service is considering reopening Lady Liberty's crown for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to documents a congressman released on July Fourth.

BAGHDAD -- Gunmen on a motorcycle assassinated an official of Iraq's biggest Shiite party Friday in the southern city of Basra, police said.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Jesse Helms, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina who for half a century infuriated liberals with his race-baiting campaign tactics and presidents of both parties with his use of senatorial privilege, died Friday. He was 86.

LOS ANGELES -- More than a dozen people, some wearing orange protective gear, pulled rakes and shovels from a dingy shopping cart and started working on a parched patch of land along a busy off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway.