WILLOW, Alaska (AP) — Alaska's Mount Redoubt volcano erupted five times overnight, sending an ash plume more than 9 miles into the air in the volcano's first emissions in nearly 20 years.

Residents in the state's largest city were spared from falling ash, though fine gray dust fell Monday morning on small communities north of Anchorage.

"It's coming down," Rita Jackson, 56, said Monday morning at a 24-hour grocery store in Willow, about 50 miles north of Anchorage. She slid her fingers across the hood of her car, through a dusting of ash.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama wants automakers to make greener cars at a time when General Motors and Chrysler are hanging by the thread of a massive government loan and auto sales have plummeted to their lowest levels in more than two decades.

Obama’s plans could bring smaller cars, more hybrids and advanced fuel-saving technologies to showrooms, but car shoppers will probably pay more upfront because the new rules are expected to cost the hamstrung industry billions of dollars.

“The consumer needs to understand that they will see significant increases in the cost of vehicles,” said Rebecca Lindland, an auto analyst for the consulting firm IHS Global Insight. Her firm estimated the upgrades could add $2,000 to $10,000 to the price of a vehicle.

NEW YORK (AP) — Derek Jeter broke Lou Gehrig's record for hits at Yankee Stadium, singling in the first inning against the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday night.

The hit off Gavin Floyd was Jeter's 1,270th in the 85-year-old ballpark, scheduled to close Sunday. It came in Jeter's 8,002nd major league at-bat, passing Gehrig for second on the Yankees' career list behind Mickey Mantle (8,102).

White Sox third baseman Juan Uribe, playing on the edge of the infield grass, tried to backhand the sharp grounder, which went under his glove.

There were camera flashes with every pitch thrown to Jeter in recent days. Jeter acknowledged the long ovation by taking off his helmet and raising it to the sellout crowd.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government has agreed to provide an $85 billion emergency loan to rescue the huge insurer AIG, the The Federal Reserve said Tuesday.

The Fed said the U.S. Treasury Department was in full support of the decision.

The Fed determined that a "disorderly failure" of AIG could undermine already fragile financial markets.

The government will receive an 79.9 percent equity stake in AIG, the Fed said

DETROIT (AP) — A judge ordered Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to jail Thursday for violating the terms of his bond in his perjury case, a decision the judge said he would have made for any "John Six-Pack" defendant before him.

The mayor, who is accused of lying under oath in a civil case and faces eight felony counts, made a trip across the Detroit river to Windsor, Ontario, on city business last month without informing the court in advance, leading the county prosecutor's office to request Kilpatrick be punished.

Only minutes earlier, the mayor offered an apology to the court, telling District Court Judge Ronald Giles that for seven months, "I've been living in an incredible state of pressure and scrutiny."

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Salim Hamdan pleaded with a military jury to spare him from a life in prison, apologizing Thursday for the "innocent people" who died in the Sept. 11 attacks and saying he worked as Osama bin Laden's driver only because he needed a job.

Prosecutors asked for a sentence of no less than 30 years, asking the six Pentagon-appointed jurors to make an example of him.

The jury convicted Hamdan, a Yemeni man with a fourth-grade education, of aiding terrorism by chauffeuring bin Laden around Afghanistan at the time of the 2001 attacks. But Hamdan said he merely had a "relationship of respect" with bin Laden, as would any other employee.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — President Bush said Wednesday that North Korea has much to do before the U.S. can remove it from the terror blacklist, but expressed hope that its pariah status as a member of the "axis of evil" could some day be a thing of the past.

Pyongyang expects Bush to remove it from the U.S. list of terror-sponsoring countries as soon as next weekend, as promised when the North blew up its nuclear reactor cooling tower in June. But Bush, speaking at a news conference with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, said North Korea must first agree to international terms for verifying its dismantlement efforts.

"I don't know whether or not they're going to give up their weapons," Bush said. "I really don't know. I don't think either of us knows."

WASHINGTON (AP) — Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

The pressure on Ivins was extreme, a high-risk strategy that has failed the FBI before. The government was determined to find the villain in the 2001 anthrax attacks; it was too many years without a solution to the case that shocked and terrified a post-9/11 nation.

THOME GWE, Myanmar (AP) — Ko Nyi Thaut lost six of his children and all his possessions when Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar three months ago. But the 53-year-old farmer still has his rice fields. The surprise, say aid workers, is how quickly he and others have gone back to work.

The broader food outlook, however, is bleak.

Like tens of thousands of farmers, Ko Nyi Thaut labors from dawn to dusk preparing his flood-ravaged Irrawaddy delta land for a crop that should have been planted a month ago.

"If the weather is good and we are lucky, I think we could get about two-thirds of what we had before," he said.

"It would not have been enough for my family if we still had 11 people. But the cyclone killed six of my children, so maybe we will have enough rice for the family now."

CINCINNATI (AP) — Democrat Barack Obama received a prideful welcome from the annual NAACP convention Monday night, but in a stirring speech to the nation's oldest civil rights organization, he nonetheless insisted blacks must show greater responsibility for improving their own lives.

The man who could become the first black president urged Washington to provide more education and economic assistance. He called on corporate America to exercise greater social responsibility. But he also received his most lusty applause as he urged blacks to demand more of themselves.