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State fair season brings a lot of weird and fried food. The Indiana State Fair decided on spaghetti-and-meatballs ice cream as its official food — gelato noodles, strawberry-tomato sauce , chocolate meatballs and a sprinkle of white chocolate "cheese." The Iowa State Fair — home of last year's hit, deep-fried butter — now offers a double-bacon corn dog.

As the drought continues to afflict the nation's corn belt, hog and chicken farmers are competing with ethanol factories for scarce and increasingly expensive corn. Meat producers say it's not a fair competition, because government rules call for a minimum level of ethanol production, no matter what the cost. They're campaigning for a suspension of those rules.

In China, authorities are still counting the cost of heavy weekend floods in Beijing. City officials say three-dozen people died in the flooding, and more than 60,000 houses were damaged. Losses are estimated at nearly $2 billion. But the intangible damage is to the government's credibility.

The decline was a surprise. Economists say the Labor Department has been having difficulty applying "seasonal adjustments" to the figures because of changes in the timing of annual shutdowns at auto plants.

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear says he's not ready to make a decision about expanding the state's Medicaid rolls. The federal health care law, upheld by…

China has charged Gu Kailai, the wife of disgraced party official Bo Xilai, with the murder of a British businessman — the latest sensational twist in China's biggest political scandal in decades.

"It was a train wreck," Lt. Fred Mestas told the San Francisco Chronicle. For 30 minutes, many officers couldn't communicate with each other, the newspaper reports.

On the edge of Olympic Park, Westfield Stratford City Mall is the gateway to the London Games. As many as 70 percent of 10 million visitors are expected to pass through the mall. But what if you just need to get somewhere — and you have to walk through the mall?

When Russian officials downplayed shortages of HIV drugs, activists turned to the Web to raise awareness about the problem. Since 2004, the AIDS epidemic has worsened in Russia, despite a law that requires drug treatment people with HIV.

The author's What Happened to Sophie Wilder features a convert to Catholicism and another character who struggles to understand her faith. Beha talks about his Catholic upbringing, irony's place in fiction and literature's therapeutic aspects.