AP Top Stories

LOS ANGELES — Investigators have found a human hand in the Hollywood wilderness park where a severed head was discovered by dog walkers.

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Police in Long Beach, Calif., say they have made arrests in the long-unsolved 2008 slayings of five transients in a homeless encampment near a freeway.

NEW YORK — The prosecutor who charged Dominique Strauss-Kahn with sexually assaulting a hotel maid said Wednesday he dropped the case because he ultimately wasn't sure what transpired between the two.

LAS VEGAS — Online retailers Zappos.com and Amazon.com are being sued in Kentucky by a Texas woman alleging that she and millions of other customers were harmed by the release of personal account information.

SANTA ANA, Calif. — An Iraq war veteran charged with stabbing to death four homeless men in a weeks-long rampage in Southern California was a thrill seeker who took pleasure in killing his victims, prosecutors said Wednesday.

SEATTLE — A winter storm blasted the Pacific Northwest Wednesday, dumping near-record snow in some areas, hammering parts of Oregon with winds as high as 110 mph and bringing much of the region to a standstill.

MADISON, Wis. — A Democrat widely viewed as a union favorite emerged Wednesday to challenge Gov. Scott Walker, a day after petition circulators spurred by anger over the Republican's moves against organized labor said they submitted more than enough signatures to force a recall election.

LOS ANGELES — A dozen Los Angeles robbery-homicide investigators and a coroner's cadaver dog searched for clues through the brush of an urban wilderness park on Wednesday, a day after dog-walkers found a man's head in a plastic bag.

PHILADELPHIA — A federal judge has found that a Pennsylvania woman stole more than $1 million before she called in a hoax carjacking and fled to Disney World with a daughter.

NEW YORK — A federal prosecutor says the breakup of another insider trading ring at major hedge funds produces "a stunning portrait of organized corruption on a broad scale."

HARRISBURG, Pa. — A top aide in Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare quit rather than give up his outside job as editor of a conservative journal, officials said Wednesday.

CHICAGO — A 74-year-old reputed mobster notorious for stealing the 45-carat Marlborough Diamond from a London jewelry store in 1980 has pleaded guilty in a separate rap just as his trial was set to start in Chicago.

STOCKTON, Utah — The U.S. Army will have destroyed about 90 percent of its aging chemical weapons after it wraps up work this week in Utah, where it has kept its largest stockpile — a witches' brew of toxins, blister and blood agents that accumulated through the Cold War, officials said Wednesday.

SANTA ANA, Calif. — Arraignment has been postponed for a 23-year-old former Marine on charges he stabbed to death four Southern California homeless men in a killing spree that terrorized people living on the streets of suburban Orange County.

HICKORY, N.C. — Students are being escorted from buildings and classes have been cancelled at a community college in North Carolina where a staff member reported seeing a man walking through a parking lot with a handgun.