AP - Charles Barkley acknowledged he owes a $400,000 gambling debt to a Las Vegas Strip casino and promised Thursday to repay it after a prosecutor said the retired NBA star faced criminal charges. "My mistake," Barkley said in an interview at a pro-am golf tournament in Hoover, Ala. "I'm not broke, and I'm going to take care of it."

AP - Video recorded during the rescue of 15 rebel hostages shows them filing grim-faced toward the helicopter that would fly them to safety, then hugging one another and crying with joy after they are aloft and realize they are free.

Reuters - Jesse Helms, a die-hard anti-communist firebrand who championed a wide range of conservative causes in his 30 years in the U.S. Senate, died early on Friday, aged 86, his foundation said.

AP - Former Sen. Jesse Helms, an unyielding champion of the conservative movement who spent three combative and sometimes caustic decades in Congress, where he relished his battles against liberals, Communists and occasionally a fellow Republican, died on the Fourth of July. He was 86.

AP - For years Spain's famed Prado museum had its suspicions about one of its most prized Goyas. Now the museum says it is certain the painting is not by the 18th-century master.

AP - A pair of out-of-control wildfires roared along California's central coast Friday, chewing through opposite ends of a parched forest and threatening a total of more than 4,500 homes.