One of the largest great ape research centers in North America needs more than $1 million to recover from damage suffered in Iowa's record June floods.

Flooding began at the 230-acre Great Ape Trust campus in Des Moines on June 10 and damaged two administrative buildings as well as mechanical systems in the ape research center, said operations director Jim Aipperspach. Two to three feet of water swamped much of the center.

None of the apes was injured in the flooding, and research

Tanned, dirty and hungry, two men who spent three months crossing the Pacific on a raft made of plastic bottles to raise awareness of ocean debris finally stepped onto dry land.

"We made it," hollered Marcus Eriksen to a crowd of about two dozen gathered at Ala Wai Harbor on Wednesday. "Where's the food?"

Friends greeted Eriksen and fellow eco-mariner Joel Paschal with lei, fresh food and beer to celebrate the end of their 2,600-mile voyage on what they call the JUNK raft.

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Caterpillar Inc. expects record sales this year as booming demand for construction and mining equipment in China and other emerging economies offsets weakness in its home U.S. market, its chairman said Thursday.

"Our manufacturing operations in Asia have been running at capacity to satisfy demand in China," James Owens said.

In Asia, Caterpillar has so many orders for heavy mining and power generation equipment that it is sold out of most items through 2010, he said.

The sal

Toyota lowered its global sales target for 2009 by 700,000 vehicles to 9.7 million Thursday, showing that even one of the world's most durable automakers is being hurt by rising material costs, a slowing U.S. market and soaring gas prices.

"We have been going at top speed up to now," President Katsuaki Watanabe told reporters at a Tokyo hotel after announcing the numbers. "It is time to set more cautious targets."

Toyota Motor Corp had previously set a 2009 global sales goal of 10

Kid Rock is showing his affection for Detroit with a new video for a song on his new platinum-selling CD "Rock 'N Roll Jesus."

The boisterous Detroit-area rocker and bandmates on Wednesday visited the Motown Historical Museum to shoot footage of them performing the song "Roll On."

The museum is the former home of Motown Records.

This week a film crew also shot footage of Kid Rock driving around the city in a 1960s Lincoln Continental and visiting landmarks such Tiger Stadium

He does comedy, writes books, mixes it up with the hottest stars in music and Hollywood. With all this, who needs swimming?

Certainly not Michael Phelps _ not anymore, at least. But as a presenter at the 2008 Video Music Awards, all that fresh Olympic bling will certainly help.

The swimmer who took home a record-breaking eight gold medals from the Beijing Games joins Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan and Ciara as presenters at the Sept. 7 VMAs telecast from Los Angeles. British comedian

A new TV commercial shows kids eating hot dogs in a school cafeteria and one little boy's haunting lament: "I was dumbfounded when the doctor told me I have late-stage colon cancer."

It's a startling revelation in an ad that vilifies one of America's most beloved, if maligned, foods, while stoking fears about a dreaded disease.

But the boy doesn't have cancer. Neither do two other kids in the ad who claim to be afflicted.

The commercial's pro-vegetarian sponsors say it's a d

It's one of the biggest frustrations of life with food allergies: That hodgepodge of warnings that a food might accidentally contain the wrong ingredient.

The warnings are voluntary _ meaning there's no way to know if foods that don't bear them really should. And they're vague: Is "may contain traces of peanuts" more reliable than "made in the same factory as peanuts?"

Now health officials in the U.S. and Canada are debating setting standards, amid increasing concern that consumer

A regional political party has threatened to attack stores in Mumbai that place English-language signs more prominently than ones in the local Marathi language or refuse to use Marathi signs.

The threats, which police are taking seriously, are the latest effort by right-wing parties to drum up regional pride in India's financial and entertainment capital. Mumbai attracts migrants from across India who speak scores of languages, most commonly English and Hindi.

Businesses from McDo

Russian forces turned over 12 Georgian soldiers on the border of one of the separatist provinces under its control Thursday after the short war that outraged the West and brought Moscow's military deep into Georgia.

The release along the Inguri River separating Abkhazia from Georgia proper was a small conciliatory gesture amid the high tensions and belligerent posturing of the weeks following the end of the fighting.

The soldiers, who were detained Aug. 18 in the seaport of Poti,

Tom Albert drove his loaner Chevrolet Equinox like any other car.

He took it to work during the week, picked up groceries, and loaded up the back with bags of soil at the garden store. When his infant son was fussy, Albert drove the newborn around the block to calm him down.

The normal driving experience ended, however, when it came time to fuel the car. Aboard the silent vehicle, Albert had two filling stations to choose from in the Washington, D.C., area, and the fuel _ hydrogen

Dell Inc. unveiled four low-cost computer models for China, India and other emerging economies Wednesday in a new bid to tap the potential of high-growth markets outside the United States.

The two notebook and two desktop PCs are the first Dell models designed especially for emerging markets, said Steve Felice, the U.S. computer maker's president for the Asia-Pacific. They are meant for small-business users and are to be sold in 20 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Albert Pujols didn't take kindly to Milwaukee reliever Carlos Villanueva's emphatic celebration upon escaping a bases-loaded jam. So the next time he came to bat, the St. Louis Cardinals' slugger did something about it.

Pujols doubled to spark a four-run eighth inning that rallied the Cardinals to a 5-3 victory Wednesday night and pulled them within 3 1/2 games of the Brewers for the NL wild-card lead. That's where they were starting a two-game series in St. Louis, their final shot agai

The Minnesota Twins are just a game back in the AL Central, thanks in no small part to rookie outfielder Denard Span.

Span cut down the tying run at the plate with a perfect throw from right field and Minnesota broke out of its slump by beating Seattle 6-5 Wednesday night, ending a confounding series against the league's worst team.

Another bottom-feeder helped the Twins _ Baltimore shook off a slump of its own and thumped the first-place White Sox 11-3, reducing the margin atop t

The remnants of Tropical Storm Fay were expected to meander along the East Coast on Thursday, producing showers and thunderstorms from the Ohio Valley through the mid-Atlantic. A cold front was forecast to bring storms to the Midwest, while more monsoonal showers were likely in the Southwest.

Fay also could produce scattered showers in southern New England and the Southeast. The Gulf Coast was bracing for Tropical Storm Gustav, which was expected to strengthen into a hurricane by Friday

The remnants of Tropical Storm Fay in the Southeast moved slowly northward into the mid-Atlantic on Wednesday. There was the possibility of a brief tornado or two in addition to locally gusty winds.

In the midsection of the nation, widely scattered showers and thunderstorms were expected from the northern Plains into the Upper Midwest. Large hail and damaging winds were possible Wednesday afternoon and evening.

To the West, light to moderate rain was forecast for the Pacific North