DURHAM - Soon after Dr. Clark Wang found out he might be dying, he decided to give the Earth a parting gift: a casket made of untreated wood salvaged from an old chicken coop.

LITTLETON - On land and under water, the search continued Saturday evening for Karl Besas of Raleigh, who disappeared Friday night in Lake Gaston.

CHARLOTTE - Gary Kelly has brought Birdie to Thomas Street Tavern since the dog was no bigger than a beer can.

RALEIGH - Even after Hurricane Katrina destroyed her family's New Orleans home five years ago, even after they resettled in Raleigh and her children started new lives in new schools, Amy Nguyen longed to return to Louisiana.

RALEIGH - Emma Breslin and her mother, Danielle, were thinking of spending Saturday afternoon at the Scholastic Book Fair. Instead, they went to a spelling bee - and came away with a $150 Scholastic gift card and a chance at a trip to Jamaica.

Ending what former N.C. lottery commissioner Kevin Geddings called a five-year nightmare, the same federal judge who sent him to prison more than three years ago has officially exonerated him.

DURHAM - This year, Derrick Michael Allen is seeing for the first time important information about the murder and sex assault case that was first brought against him 12 years ago.

KANNAPOLIS - For nearly two years, the recession made David Murdock's plan to create a major research campus look like a business school casestudy in bad timing.

RALEIGH - More than 1,000 video-game players, including some from Europe and Korea, have flooded the Raleigh Convention Center this weekend in the pursuit of sore thumbs and cash prizes.

It turns out I'm not alone in getting scammed at the bank.

Last week, 292 forgotten people were remembered.

WakeMed will stop providing non-emergency care for the state's inmates on Oct. 1, citing the rising cost and hassle of treating those patients.

The N.C. Conference of District Attorneys wants a thorough accounting of all the problems at the State Bureau of Investigation crime lab.

A Raleigh man faces a variety of charges, including assault and ethnic intimidation, after Wake County sheriff's deputies say he fired a handgun close to four Hispanic children.

RALEIGH - Lawyers for Brad Cooper, a Cary man accused of killing his wife, hope to persuade a judge to move their client's murder trial out of Wake County, saying extensive media coverage had prejudiced the jury pool.

RALEIGH - Employees at the state agency that is supposed to help unemployed North Carolinians find jobs were instead using their government computers to play games and burn bootleg DVDs, a state audit shows.

The Alexander County community famed for its lunker emeralds has yielded a 64-carat gem that experts say is North America's largest cut emerald.

CHAPEL HILL - Though wise in the ways of public service and state politics, Tom Ross was still a higher education neophyte three years ago when he took over as president of Davidson College.

Verifying the work of thousands of bullet and casing examinations performed by the State Bureau of Investigation will be challenging and could be impossible.

DURHAM - Two women suffered minor injuries at a Research Triangle Park business Thursday afternoon when the duct from an air-conditioning unit fell from a ceiling, the company's president said.