U.S. National - AP

PHOENIX - A man shot three people Thursday in a computer room at a Phoenix community college, injuring two of them critically, authorities said. The gunman fled but a suspect was arrested nearby.

MIAMI - The grandmother of a missing 2-year-old Orlando girl told an emergency dispatcher that a car driven by the girl's mother smelled like there had been a dead body inside, according to recordings of 911 calls released Thursday.

JARRATT, Va. - A killer who argued Virginia's procedures for lethal injection were unconstitutional was executed Thursday after a federal appeals court upheld the primary method of capital punishment in the nation's second-busiest death chamber.

SAN DIEGO - Charges have been dismissed against a Camp Pendleton Marine sniper accused in the shooting deaths of two Syrians in Iraq, Marine Corps officials said Thursday.

BENNETT, Colo. - A convicted spammer killed his wife and young daughter in an apparent murder-suicide Thursday while being sought after escaping prison last weekend, authorities said.

DEERFIELD, N.H. - Violent storms on Thursday in a 25-mile-long swath of central New Hampshire destroyed several homes, damaged dozens of others and left at least one person dead, authorities said as police and firefighters went door-to-door searching for more possible victims.

TRENTON, N.J. - Authorities are investigating whether a veteran state lawmaker possessed child pornography on his office computer, two assemblymen who share an office with him said Thursday.

NEW ORLEANS - Dozens of cargo ships, petrochemical tankers and smaller vessels stacked up Thursday near a closed stretch of the Mississippi River, a day after a collision between a barge and tanker spilled more than 400,000 gallons of fuel oil into the nation's busy shipping waterway.

PRICE, Utah - The operator of a collapsed Utah mine violated safety protocols by cutting coal pillars that should have been left standing to prevent cave-ins, federal regulators said Thursday.

MIAMI - One of two men accused of killing four people aboard a fishing charter last year pleaded guilty Thursday in exchange for an agreement that prosecutors will not seek the death penalty.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A 21-year-old woman working at a lodge for the summer was attacked by a grizzly bear about 25 yards outside a building.

LOS ANGELES - Hate crimes in Los Angeles County soared last year to their highest mark in five years even as overall crime dropped across the region, according to a report released Thursday.

OKLAHOMA CITY - Church members watching the steeple being raised on their new building looked on in horror Thursday as a crane holding the structure toppled, crushing a car and killing a 79-year-old man who had been watching from inside the vehicle, firefighters said.

Hurricane Dolly probably doomed South Texas's cotton and sorghum crops already damaged by heavy rains earlier in the summer. But analysts said the loss, while devastating for local producers, will have only a short-term effect on the markets.

BOISE, Idaho - Convicted child-killer Joseph Edward Duncan III is mentally competent to face a death penalty hearing, a federal judge in Idaho ruled Thursday.

A federal appeals court ruling that a Christian university in Colorado can receive state scholarship money is the latest in a string of legal victories for religious schools seeking public dollars.

WASHINGTON - Sixteen years after Barbie dolls declared, "Math class is tough!" girls are proving that when it comes to math they are just as tough as boys. In the largest study of its kind, girls measured up to boys in every grade, from second through 11th. The research was released Thursday in the journal Science.

HELENA, Mont. - In big, wide-open Montana, a state trooper might have to drive more than 100 miles to answer an emergency call, and routinely puts several hundred miles on the odometer in a day.

DEARBORN, Mich. - Bleeding cash and with its very survival uncertain, Ford Motor Co., an icon of American automaking, will try to import some of its success from across the Atlantic.