BAY JIMMY, La. (AP) - In the oil-fouled marshes of the Mississippi River delta, the sizzling high-noon heat beats down like a fist.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - When the Microsoft-designed School of the Future opened, the facility was a paragon of contemporary architecture, with a green roof, light-filled corridors and the latest classroom technology, all housed in a dazzling white modern building.

It might as well have been a fishbowl: Educators and the media from around the world

watched to see whether Microsoft could reform public education through innovation in technology.

Although the school's creative ambitions have been frustrated by high principal turnover, curriculum tensions and a student body unfamiliar with laptop computer culture, the school graduates its first senior class Tuesday with every graduate headed for an institution of higher learning.

"The first three years were definitely a challenge," said Mary Cullinane, Microsoft's liaison to the school. "They're...

HELENA, Mont. (AP) - The aging Frank Dryman, a notorious killer from Montana's past, had hidden in plain sight for so long that he forgot he was a wanted man.

-In an exclusive jailhouse interview with The Associated Press, Dryman detailed how he invented a whole new life, with a new family, an Arizona wedding chapel business - and even volunteer work for local civic clubs.

"They just forgot about me," said Dryman, in his first interview since being caught and sent back to the prison he last left in the 1960s. "I was a prominent member of the community."

That is, until the grandson of the man he shot six times in the...

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) - When dozens of overdose victims who got painkillers from the same Kansas clinic started showing up at emergency rooms and the county morgue, federal prosecutors accused a doctor and his wife of indiscriminately writing prescriptions for powerful drugs at a so-called pill mill.

-Two years later, as the trial of Dr. Stephen Schneider and his wife, Linda, who is a nurse, draws to a close in Wichita, the case is shedding new light on medical treatment that some doctors portray as help for chronic pain sufferers but that federal authorities consider...

SAN DIEGO (AP) - A military judge has allowed a Marine sergeant convicted of murder in one of the biggest war crimes cases to emerge from the Iraq war to walk free, nearly two months after a military appeals court ruled he had an unfair trial.

Monday's surprise decision to release Sgt.

Lawrence Hutchins deals another blow to the government's prosecution of U.S. troops accused of killing unarmed Iraqis.

Attorneys for the government have said Hutchins led a squad of seven troops who killed a 52-year-old man in the Iraqi village of Hamdania in 2006, and then planted a shovel and AK-47 to make it appear he was an insurgent.

"I'm going to be the best Marine I can be today," an elated Hutchins told The Associated Press in a phone interview after being released from the brig at Camp Pendleton. "Today is really a surreal experience. I think we had a good judge. ... It's hard to...