AP - President Barack Obama mixed a pitch for manufacturing jobs with a dash for campaign cash on Wednesday, embarking on a three-day West Coast trip to haul in millions of dollars for his re-election bid.

AP - American factories are humming — and driving the economy forward.

Reuters - China's leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping wooed and warned the United States on Wednesday, offering deeper cooperation on trade and global troublespots while demanding Washington heed Beijing's demands on Tibet and other contentious "core interests."

AP - A fire started by an inmate tore through a severely overcrowded Honduran prison, burning and suffocating inmates in their locked cells and killing as many as 356 people in one of the world's deadliest prison fires in a century, authorities said Wednesday.

AP - Congressional leaders of both parties praised an emerging deal Wednesday to extend a payroll tax cut and extra jobless benefits through 2012, but cautioned that bargainers still had to nail down final details.

AP - Iran claimed Wednesday that it has achieved two major advances in its program to master production of nuclear fuel, a defiant move in response to increasingly tough Western sanctions over its controversial nuclear program.

AP - The Los Angeles County coroner's office has issued subpoenas for medical and pharmacy records from Whitney Houston's doctors and medical providers, which is standard procedure in such investigations, an official said.

AP - The last of the once-ubiquitous FEMA trailers has been removed from New Orleans more than six years after floodwalls and levees broke during Hurricane Katrina and caused the city to flood.

AP - The Hawaiian monk seal, the most endangered marine mammal in the United States, has a long list of threats — fishing nets, sharks and, particularly, humans. But for one group of seals, the biggest threat came from one of its own: a 400-pound brute named KE18 who killed two other seals and wounded at least 11, most of them helpless pups.

AP - Already writing the NBA's best story, Jeremy Lin has now scripted a thrilling finish.