A hurricane warning has been issued for North Carolina’s coast in anticipation of Hurricane Earl. A tropical storm watch has also been issued for areas on the North Carolina/Virginia border and extended up the coast to Massachusetts. Meanwhile, the tourists of North Carolina’s Ocracoke Island are being evacuated as Earl threatens to smash into the popular vacation spot. Earl moved through the Caribbean at 125 m.p.h. Tuesday, and was upgraded later in the day from a Category 3 to Cateogry 4 storm. Other areas up the Eastern Seaboard may have to evacuate. The hurricane is likely to run parallel to the East Coast, and may turn north and swipe Cape Cod and Maine by Saturday.

The Middle East peace talks appear to have survived an early challenge: President Obama denounced the murder of four Israeli settlers by a Hamas gunman as “senseless slaughter” and said the attacks won’t “undermine these talks.” He pledged the United States would be “unwavering in its support of Israeli security.” Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the talks so far “open, productive, serious in the quest for peace.”

The suspected hostage-taker at the Discovery Communications building in Silver Spring, Maryland, was shot and killed by authorities after a four-hour standoff. Police aimed and shot when the gunman, James J. Lee, pointed his handgun at one of the three hostages. Lee, a radical environmentalist, had a long history of conflict with the Discovery Channel, and a manifesto he posted to a website proclaimed that "Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what's left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture." Lee was arrested in 2008 for creating a disturbance outside Discovery and evaluated by state psychiatrists at the time, though they "couldn't find anything wrong with me," Lee said at the time. Lee walked into the Discovery Communications building around 1 p.m. waving a handgun, wearing what appeared to metallic canisters on his chest and back, and was carrying two boxes and two backpacks that police said could have contained explosives. The three hostages escaped unharmed.

Want an iPhone without the actual phone? That’s pretty much what the new iPod touch is: Apple unveiled the device on Wednesday. It comes with the iPhone’s beautiful, crisp Retina display, an A4 chip, a gyroscope, an HD video recorder on the back, and a front-facing camera that will allow for FaceTime video chats. It will go on sale next week at $229 (8GB), $299 (32GB), and $399 (64GB). Apple also unveiled its a new iPod Nano, which replaces the wheel with a touch screen, and a new Apple TV. It will stream rented movies directly from iTunes so that you don’t need local storage; currently, Apple is renting shows from ABC and Fox for 99 cents each. It also will come with full Netflix streaming support.

How's this for a breach of journalistic ethics? An upcoming piece in The New York Times Magazine details how two News of the World staffers—a reporter and a private investigator employed by Britain's largest paper—hacked into the phones of British royal family aides. Clive Goodman, a reporter, and Glenn Mulcaire, an investigator working for the paper, obtained PIN codes to access the voicemail inboxes of royal aides. Aides grew suspicious when messages were marked as listened to and saved when nary a person had checked them. In 2006, News of the World ran a story about Prince Harry's wild night out at a strip club, and later that year ran a followup exclusive chronicling his girlfriend's heartache over the issue in which is printed verbatim a voice message that had been left on Harry's phone. A Scotland Yard investigation has revealed that Mulcaire has potentially hacked into the phone messages of more than thousands of people. A search of his apartment turned up 91 mobile PIN codes. Scotland Yard for its part, however, has decided to stick solely to investigating the pair's involvement with the royals.

Is it possible there’s such a thing as a reverse gender gap? A new study says that young, single, and childless women under 30—who live in cities—make more money than their male counterparts. But if any one of those factors changes—for instance, married women, or women who don’t live in a city—they end up earning less money than men. James Chung of Research Advisers, who spent more than a year analyzing Census data, said education is the reason for salary increases for women. Those with college degrees tend to earn more than those without, and more degrees are awarded to women than men. Even though some cities did not hold true on the trend, those cities tended to have industries that were based more on male-dominated industries, such as software development or military-technology contracting.

Maybe the U.S.-Mexico border does not need to be patrolled as heavily. The Pew Hispanic Center reported Wednesday that the number of illegal immigrants has dropped sharply since 2007, apparently due to the dismal job market. According to the study, an estimated 300,000 fewer people annually have arrived in the U.S. illegally since 2007—meaning the overall size of the undocumented population has dropped to 11 million people. Illegal immigrants still represent 28 percent of the foreign-born population, and nearly half of them arrived since 2000. One demographer said there has been a steady downward trend over the past four years. Braulio Gonzalez, a Guatemalan who is undocumented, said “people don’t want to come here now, they know the economy is bad.” States that have been hit the hardest by the housing crisis have seen the biggest drops in the undocumented population.

Short and sweet: Conan O’Brien has named his upcoming TBS late-night program Conan. New York Magazine lists several other possibilities: The Coco Show!, Up Late with Conan, Conan 3.0. But it says plain old Conan was chosen weeks ago. Why, then, the reason for the delay? It’s possible that O’Brien had to pry the rights for that name away from the creators of Conan the Barbarian.

Dancing With the Stars may have a “dream team” cast this year, but ABC wasn’t able to nail down every celeb the network wanted. The Hollywood Reporter reports that stars who said no include Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, commentator Ann Coulter, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sylvester Stallone, Erin Brockovich, Richard Branson, Tim Allen, and Suzanne Somers. Some people, executive producer Conrad Green said, turn down the show even though they like it because they think they’re terrible dancers. An anonymous source told The Hollywood Reporter that Melanie Griffith tries to get on the show every single season. Meanwhile contestant Bristol Palin has already earned a reputation for being difficult, viewing all the press she has to do as a chore.

From its acclaimed director to its salacious girl-on-girl kiss, Black Swan has been the buzz of Hollywood. Darren Aronofsky's ballet thriller made waves overseas Tuesday night, premiering at the Venice Film Festival and seemingly, the film is living up to its hype. Natalie Portman plays Nina, a virginal ballerina obsessed with dance and striving for perfection. Her world crashes in on her when Lily (Mila Kunis) is introduced to her ballet company. Variety calls Portman's performance “courageous," adding that she "lays bare the myriad insecurities genuinely dedicated performers face when testing their limits, revealing shades of the actress never before seen on film.” The Hollywood Reporter, however, was less impressed with Portman’s showing, saying: “You sense she has bravely ventured out of her comfort zone to play a character slowly losing sight of herself. It’s a bravura performance.” Still, on a whole, the bizarre, dark ballerina film, piqued the reviewer’s interest. The “instant guilty pleasure… is so damn out-there in every way that you can't help admiring Aronofsky for daring to be so very, very absurd.”

Remember when Sarah Palin spent $150,000 of the RNC’s money on her wardrobe? That was hilarious, and it gets even better: She said she was going to donate that clothing to charity, but Vanity Fair’s Michael Joseph Gross says she ended up keeping much of it. “My family was never told that all must be returned,” she fumed in an email to aides two days after the story about her spending surfaced. “Do they want the nylons and other things that are pretty worn, returned?” she asked, apparently asking an aide in person, “Do they really want my dirty undergarments?” When she returned to Alaska after the election, she was directing aides to look for clothing items she wanted to keep: “Remember the five black leather Flyers bags w sweatshirts and jerseys and Flyers propaganda in each bag? Anyone know where they ended up?” One of the aides who was sent to Alaska to retrieve the clothing says, “All of a sudden, she couldn’t find stuff.”

Michael Douglas is opening up about his recent rounds of chemo and radiation to treat the cancerous tumor at the base of his tongue. "It really knocks you out," he told People magazine in a new cover story. After contending with persistent throat and ear pain the Oscar-winning actor was given stage 4 throat cancer prognosis in August. "The hardest part is seeing his fatigue, because Michael is never tired," said his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who, despite the road ahead, remains optimistic. "If there's anything Michael has, it's strength."

A horrifying crime: On Monday evening, a stranger asked Bethany Storro, “"Hey, pretty girl, do you want to drink this?" and then threw a cup of acid-like liquid into Storro’s face, causing severe burns. Storro, a 28-year-old Washington native, is in serious condition at a Portland, Oregon, hospital. Her mother says her face will take months to heal. Storro was getting something out of her car in Vancouver when the unknown woman attacked her; Storro’s eyesight may have been saved by the brand-new sunglasses she was wearing. Authorities are still unsure what exactly was in the liquid splashed in the victim’s face.

This 95-degree forecast for September 1 isn’t making things any better: New York City endured the hottest summer on record this year, according to the National Weather Service, with an average high of 77.8 degrees. The summer, defined by the weather services as June through August, was worse than the 44-year-old record of 77.3, and worse than the 2006 heat wave that caused a days-long blackout for 100,000 New Yorkers. There was more than a month’s worth of 90+ degree days. About 80,000 pounds of ice cubes were used on the first day of the U.S. Open. And 17.2 million visited beaches in the city—Coney Island alone saw three times more people than in 2009. One dry ice company has been sending out delivery trucks to desperate ice cream stores as much as 15 hours a day.

Could this actually help former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown? The one man whom Brits seem to dislike more than Brown, his predecessor Tony Blair, says in his new memoir that he knew Brown would be a disaster. "It was never going to work," Blair writes in A Journey, which is published in Britain on Wednesday. He calls Brown “maddening,” and says that Brown threatened to bring him down over the cash-for-honors scandal. Blair says he was so distraught that he turned to drink. “The difficulty is when he was my number two, in sense, the chancellor to my prime minister, people maybe overestimated his capacity to be prime minister,” Blair says in an interview set to air on Wednesday.

It doesn't get much stranger than this: A California doctor trying to break into her “on again, off again” boyfriend’s home snuck down the chimney and got stuck there, where she died. Dr. Jacquelyn Kotarac, 49, wasn’t found for three days. Kotarac had tried to get into the home of her boyfriend, William Moodie, 58, with a shovel, and then climbed a ladder to the roof, where she slid feet first into the chimney. Meanwhile, Moodie slipped away unnoticed from another door, because he was hoping “to avoid confrontation.” Moodie’s housekeeper noticed a strange smell and fluids leaking from the chimney; she and her son looked in and found Kotarac’s body trapped about 2 feet above the opening to the fireplace. Kotarac’s cause of death hasn’t been determined, and though police don’t suspect foul play, they are looking into the event as suspicious.

Generally, it’s not a good thing when a country treats a rape investigation like choosing which outfit to wear to a party: Sweden has reopened its rape investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange—the same investigation that it announced and then dropped within hours last month. “There is reason to believe that a crime has been committed," said Sweden’s director of public prosecutions. The charge against Assange comes from two women; he is also being charged with molestation, which in Sweden is a nonsexual crime, similar to harassment.

After seven years, two presidents, 4,400 U.S. military causalities and some 30,000 injuries, President Barack Obama on Tuesday night announced the end of the combat mission in Iraq. Speaking from the Oval Office for the second time, Obama declared “Operation Iraqi Freedom is over” and said the Iraqi people will now be responsible for their own security. He said that “ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest – it is in our own. The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq into the hands of its own people.” The last combat forces left Iraq on August 18, and some 50,000 military advisers will remain in country. "Now it's time to turn the page," Obama said, shifting his focus to the flagging U.S. economic recovery and putting Americans back to work.

The pair of United Airlines terror suspects who successfully passed through airport security in Birmingham and Chicago before being arrested in Amsterdam may not be terrorists after all. Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, a Yemeni and permanent U.S. resident, and Hezem Abdullah Thabi al Murisi, a Yemeni on a U.S. visitor’s visa, were arrested in Amsterdam on Monday on charges of suspected terrorism stemming from al Soofi’s suspicious luggage. The luggage reportedly contained a cell phone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle, several watches taped together, a box cutter, and knives. Today, those suspicions seem to be misguided. “I do not think they had any intentions” of committing terrorism, Yemen's consul general in Detroit said Tuesday. The men don't appear on any U.S. terror watch lists, and a U.S. official said that they don't expect to charge the two men. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement today, “This matter is under investigation but as of right now, these two passengers have not been charged with any crime in the United States and we caution you against jumping to any conclusions.”

Martin Wolf at the Financial Times paints an alternative history in which Roosevelt takes office in 1930, before the Depression had begun in earnest and so lacking the mandate to tackle it aggressively. FDR takes the blame as he helplessly watches output and employment collapse. This, Wolf argues, is an analogy of what has happened to President Obama. Citing an article he wrote back in February 2009, Wolf says, “Instead of an overwhelming fiscal stimulus, what is emerging is too small, too wasteful and too ill-focused.” Even so, he points out that some bafflingly criticize the president for doing as much as he did, despite studies showing that even the too-small stimulus helped. For instance, Alan Blinder, former vice-chairman of the Fed, and Mark Zandi of Moody’s show that had there been no financial and fiscal intervention, GDP would have declined 12 percent  instead of 4 percent, and unemployment would have peaked at a devastating 16.5 percent rather than 10 percent. The future is bleak: Employment will continue to suffer, and Republicans will push through new tax cuts, once again ignoring fiscal deficits, forcing Obama to choose between vetoing their tax cuts and supporting a “yacht-and-mansion” led recovery.

The entire 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico will be patrolled by unmanned aerial drones beginning Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security said. These drones will join the three that already patrol portions of the border, and there will also be 1,200 additional National Guard troops deployed. These measures are part of the $600 million legislation signed by President Barack Obama to increase border security in response to the escalating drug violence in Mexico. Violence continued on Tuesday, when eight people were killed when attackers hurled Molotov cocktails into a bar in Cancun. Last week, 72 migrants were allegedly murdered by a drug cartel. There was, however, a glimmer of good news out of the drug wars: A drug kingpin known as “the Barbie” was arrested Tuesday.

You can hear Senate Republicans preparing their filibuster already: The Obama team is mulling additional economic stimulus, though there is apparently debate whether it should take the shape of tax cuts to small businesses, which would presumably attract Republican support, or ideas that will likely have more economic impact but encounter GOP resistance, like state aid and infrastructure spending. Among the ideas being floated is a cut in the payroll taxes used to fund Medicare and Social Security—an idea Republicans support. Meanwhile, a fight is looming on Capitol Hill over the Bush tax cuts: Democrats want to hold a vote to extend the Bush tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 a year, but Republicans are opposing any legislation that doesn’t extend the tax cuts for rich families as well.

It’s all over now: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) conceded Tuesday night in her primary race to Fairbanks lawyer and Tea Party favorite Joe Miller. Murkowski, the sitting senator and part of an Alaskan political power family, was trailing Miller by 1,469 votes at the time of her concession. There are still several thousand votes to be counted, but Miller’s widening lead suggested Murkowski would not be able to make up the votes. At one point, Miller’s lead had narrowed to 1,210 votes and Murkowski’s campaign manager remained hopeful the Senator would make some heavy gains. Meanwhile, Miller’s team had accused Murkowski aides of misconduct, as some ballots seemed to have been cast in the wrong precinct or for the wrong party.

We wouldn’t exactly recommend getting your political news from Page Six, but it’s still a fun rumor: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg may be being wooed to join the Obama administration’s economic team, the New York Post reports. Bloomberg and Obama played golf for four hours Tuesday, and the mayor said the main topic was the economy. “Whispers,” the Post reports, say Obama asked Bloomberg to replace troubled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The tabloid says the mayor would be a bold choice that would add credibility before the midterm elections. Bloomberg has been trekking to Iowa and New Hampshire to give speeches on national problems—a major sign of 2012 president ambitions. Though he would likely have no chance to win the presidency, he could really hurt Obama in New York and Florida. So Obama has several incentives to bring him onto his team.

With the midterm elections drawing closer, politicos and economists are debating the merits of extending the about-to-expire Bush tax cuts. Enter Newsweek’s Keith Libbey and Evan Thomas, who offer a "Clean Slate," plan that would halve income taxes for most Americans. Libbey and Thomas advocate for the elimination of tax deductions and breaks that have typically in the past helped the top 1 percent of earners avoid paying Uncle Sam. How would the government compensate for a decidedly tremendous loss in revenue? To close off the gap that would arise from an income-tax cut, the writers suggest there be a 12 percent tax on consumer goods, generating almost $600 billion.

President Obama opens peace talks between Israel and Palestine in Washington on Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The two leaders arrived in D.C. on Tuesday and met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It’s the first meeting between the two sides since December 2008, but the Associated Press says, “The two sides are far apart on all key issues, so major progress in the early going is seen as unlikely.”

A hostage situation at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, has been averted. A man entered the lobby, possibly fired his weapon, and said, “Nobody is going anywhere.” The suspect, who may have had an explosive device, is allegedly 43-year-old James Jae Lee, and he has a history of protesting outside the Discovery Channel HQ. A list of Lee's demands of the Discovery Channel is available at  savetheplanetprotest.com. They include, "All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants"; "Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows"; and "Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is."

Update: Police have shot and killed the suspect, and say that three hostages are now safe. Other "devices" are in the building that have not yet been secured.