hHistoric church to close

hHistoric church to close
NEW ORLEANS -- A young child is presented to the congregation of St. Augustine's Roman Catholic Church after being baptized during Mass on Sunday. The church, founded in 1841 by slaves and free people of color, is among the parishes the archdiocese plans to consolidate as it seeks to deal with $84 million in uninsured losses from Hurricane Katrina.
Graham in New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS -- In his first public sermon in nine months, evangelist Billy Graham delivered his message of repentance and salvation to an overflow arena crowd in this city slowly recovering from devastation. The 87-year-old required a walker to get to the podium but was greeted with a standing ovation and screams from the capacity crowd of 16,500 inside New Orleans Arena. An additional 1,500 people watched on a large screen on a concourse at the neighboring Superdome.
Gas prices go back up
CAMARILLO, Calif. -- Retail gas prices across the country climbed an average of 11 cents in the past two weeks, according to a new survey. The weighted average price for all three grades increased to $2.38 a gallon by the weekend, according to Trilby Lundberg, who publishes the semimonthly Lundberg Survey of 7,000 gas stations around the country. Self-serve regular averaged $2.35 a gallon nationwide. Midgrade cost $2.45 a gallon while the price for premium was $2.55. Gas prices are 38 cents higher than they were a year ago, Lundberg said Sunday.
Daschle mulls '08 bid
ABERDEEN, S.D. -- Former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, accusing the GOP of spreading a message of fear, says he is considering a 2008 presidential bid. "I haven't ruled anything out or anything in at this point," Daschle said during the weekend in an interview after a hometown dinner in his honor. "I'm encouraged by the strong support many people have voiced for my candidacy around the country and in South Dakota. I'll make a decision at some point later on this year," he said. Daschle said President Bush and Republicans have overemphasized the importance of the war on terror, and he said the United States is no safer now than it was before the Iraq invasion.
Milosevic died of heartattack, autopsy shows
PARIS -- Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic died of a heart attack, according to autopsy results released Sunday by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. A more detailed examination to determine the cause of the heart failure has not been completed, the court said. Milosevic, 64, the first former leader of a state to be tried for genocide and other crimes against humanity, was found dead Saturday on his bed inside his cell at the U.N. tribunal's prison outside The Hague. Milosevic had been on trial the past four years for his role in four Balkan wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Deaths in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan -- A roadside bomb killed four U.S. troops passing by in an armored vehicle in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, the deadliest attack on coalition forces in a month. In Kabul, a suicide bombing Sunday killed two people and narrowly missed the chief of Afghanistan's upper house of parliament, and he accused Pakistani intelligence of trying to assassinate him. The two bombings were the latest in a series of militant attacks that appear to be gathering intensity four years after the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime by a U.S.-led invasion.
Combined dispatches