AP - President Barack Obama denounced waste, inefficiency and downright fraud in the government's health care system on Wednesday as he sought to rally public support for his revamped overhaul plan. "Improper payments cost taxpayers almost $100 billion last year alone," Obama said at a rally in this St. Louis suburb.

AP - An open diplomatic row during the visit of Vice President Joe Biden has shined a spotlight on the U.S. failure to rein in Israeli settlement ambitions and deepened Palestinian suspicions that the United States is too weak to broker a deal.

AP - Corey Haim, a 1980s teen heartthrob whose career was blighted by drug abuse, has died. He was 38. Haim died early Wednesday at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Los Angeles County coroner's Lt. Cheryl MacWillie said.

AP - They flew planes during World War II but weren't considered "real" military pilots. No flags were draped over their coffins when they died on duty. And when their service ended, they had to pay their own bus fare home.

AP - Church abuse scandals in Germany have reached the older brother of Pope Benedict XVI and are creeping ever closer to the pontiff himself.

AP - Colleen LaRose spent long days caring for her boyfriend's father in a second-floor apartment in Pennsburg, a small town north of Philadelphia. But online, federal authorities say, the devoted caretaker developed a daring alter ego, refashioning herself as "Jihad Jane" while helping recruit and finance Muslim terrorists — and eventually moving overseas to try to kill an artist she perceived as an enemy to Islam.

AP - A former Detroit city councilwoman was sentenced to more than three years in prison Wednesday for bribery after a federal judge refused to set aside her guilty plea during a stormy court hearing dominated by a dispute over evidence of other payoffs.

AP - A troublingly high number of U.S. patients who are given angiograms to check for heart disease turn out not to have a significant problem, according to the latest study to suggest Americans get an excess of medical tests.