NEW YORK – The Pakistani-American who police say admitted to igniting a failed car bomb in busy Times Square has made no court appearance since his arrest early this week and, though he is cooperating, authorities remain unsure he was acting alone.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly declined Friday to discuss what Faisal Shahzad is telling investigators, including what his motives were. He was arrested Monday aboard a Dubai-bound plane two days after the nighttime bomb scare cleared several blocks of the bustling district.

“This individual is cooperating. In these types of situations, you let the information flow, so to speak,” Kelly said.

Police have surveillance images of Shahzad around Times Square and video that shows his car traveling to the spot where they say he left a smoking sport utility vehicle May 1 rigged with a gasoline-and-propane bomb.

Law enforcement officials say they are trying to find links between the Bridgeport, Conn., man and possible financing sources, including the Pakistani Taliban, which has both claimed responsibility for and denied roles in the botched bombing.

A money courier was being sought who may have funneled cash to the 30-year-old budget analyst, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, said Friday the Times Square suspect had apparently operated as a “lone wolf” who did not work with other terrorists. Petraeus said in a statement to the AP that the alleged perpetrator was inspired by militants in Pakistan but didn’t necessarily have direct contact with them.

Investigators believe Shahzad had some bomb-making training in Pakistan as he claimed to investigators, and his training may have been sponsored in part by the Pakistani Taliban, a senior military official told the AP. But it was not clear where the training took place nor the quality of it, the official told the AP on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

Shahzad has told investigators that he trained in the lawless tribal areas of Waziristan, where both al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban operate, and that he came up with the attack plan himself.

Investigators have not been able to establish whether Shahzad was recruited for the Times Square operation by the Pakistani Taliban or another militant group — or whether Shahzad came up with the attack plan himself, the official said.

American officials have been quoted as saying they believe the Pakistani Taliban, which has no history of attacks on U.S. soil, had a role in the Times Square plot, either in funding or motivating and training.

Half a world away Friday, police cleared the streets around Times Square and called in the bomb squad to dismantle what turned out to be a cooler full of water bottles. Earlier in the day, police were called in to check a suspicious package that turned out to be someone’s lunch.

Since the bomb scare in the heart of the city, false-alarm calls are up dramatically, nerves are jangled, and media and law enforcement are rushing to the scenes to make sure the reports aren’t something bigger.

More than 600 calls came in since the attempted car bombing a week ago — about 30 percent higher than normal, police said.

Times Square vendor Walter “Candyman” Wells said the constant scares aroused more suspicion.

“I think they’re testing us, whoever is doing this,” Wells said, sitting on a stool near his table of T-shirts. “They’re playing chess with us right now, but they ain’t gonna win. ‘Cause we’re the Bobby Fischers.”

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO – The deadly blowout of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP’s internal investigation.

While the cause of the explosion is still under investigation, the sequence of events described in the interviews provides the most detailed account of the April 20 blast that killed 11 workers and touched off the underwater gusher that has poured more than 3 million gallons of crude into the Gulf.

Portions of the interviews, two written and one taped, were described in detail to an Associated Press reporter by Robert Bea, a University of California Berkeley engineering professor who serves on a National Academy of Engineering panel on oil pipeline safety and worked for BP PLC as a risk assessment consultant during the 1990s. He received them from industry friends seeking his expert opinion.

A group of BP executives were on board the Deepwater Horizon rig celebrating the project’s safety record, according to the transcripts. Meanwhile, far below, the rig was being converted from an exploration well to a production well.

Based on the interviews, Bea believes that the workers set and then tested a cement seal at the bottom of the well. Then they reduced the pressure in the drill column and attempted to set a second seal below the sea floor. A chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat and a gas bubble which destroyed the seal.

Deep beneath the seafloor, methane is in a slushy, crystalline form. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.

As the bubble rose up the drill column from the high-pressure environs of the deep to the less pressurized shallows, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, Bea said.

“A small bubble becomes a really big bubble,” Bea said. “So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face.”

Up on the rig, the first thing workers noticed was the sea water in the drill column suddenly shooting back at them, rocketing 240 feet in the air, he said. Then, gas surfaced. Then oil.

“What we had learned when I worked as a drill rig laborer was swoosh, boom, run,” Bea said. “The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing.”

The gas flooded into an adjoining room with exposed ignition sources, he said.

“That’s where the first explosion happened,” said Bea, who worked for Shell Oil in the 1960s during the last big northern Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout. “The mud room was next to the quarters where the party was. Then there was a series of explosions that subsequently ignited the oil that was coming from below.”

According to one interview transcript, a gas cloud covered the rig, causing giant engines on the drill floor to run too fast and explode. The engines blew off the rig and set “everything on fire,” the account said. Another explosion below blew more equipment overboard.

BP spokesman John Curry would not comment Friday night on whether methane gas or the series of events described in the internal documents caused the accident.

“Clearly, what happened on the Deepwater Horizon was a tragic accident,” said Curry, who is based at an oil spill command center in Robert, La. “We anticipate all the facts will come out in a full investigation.”

The BP executives were injured but survived, according to one account. Nine rig crew on the rig floor and two engineers died.

“The furniture and walls trapped some and broke some bones but they managed to get in the life boats with assistance from others,” said the transcript.

The reports made Bea, the 73-year-old industry veteran, cry.

“It sure as hell is painful,” he said. “Tears of frustration and anger.”

A 100-ton concrete-and-steel vault has been lowered onto the ruptured well, an important step in a delicate and unprecedented attempt to stop most of the gushing crude fouling the sea.

“We are essentially taking a four-story building and lowering it 5,000 feet and setting it on the head of a pin,” BP spokesman Bill Salvin told The Associated Press.

Underwater robots guided the 40-foot-tall box into place in a slow-moving drama. Now that the contraption is on the seafloor, workers will need at least 12 hours to let it settle and make sure it’s stable before the robots can hook up a pipe and hose that will funnel the oil up to a tanker.

On Saturday, the boat with the plumbing equipment for the containment box was about 1.5 miles from the vessel that lowered the box. It’s unclear exactly when the pipework will begin.

“It appears to be going exactly as we hoped,” Salvin said on Friday afternoon, shortly after the four-story device hit the seafloor. “Still lots of challenges ahead, but this is very good progress.”

It could be Sunday or Monday before officials learn whether the box the size of a house can capture up to 85 percent of the oil.

The task became increasingly urgent as toxic oil crept deeper into the bays and marshes of the Mississippi Delta.

A sheen of oil began arriving on land last week, and crews have been laying booms, spraying chemical dispersants and setting fire to the slick to try to keep it from coming ashore. But now the thicker, stickier goo — arrayed in vivid, brick-colored ribbons — is drawing ever closer to Louisiana’s coastal communities.

The Coast Guard and BP said Saturday about 2.1 million gallons of an oil-water mix had been collected, with about 10 percent being oil and the rest water. More than 160 miles of boom to contain the oil has been put out and crews have used nearly 275,000 gallons of chemicals to break up the oil on the water’s surface.

There are still untold risks and unknowns with the containment box: The approach has never been tried at such depths, where the water pressure is enough to crush a submarine, and any wrong move could damage the leaking pipe and make the problem worse. The seafloor is pitch black and the water murky, though lights on the robots illuminate the area where they are working.

If the box works, another one will be dropped onto a second, smaller leak at the bottom of the Gulf.

At the same time, crews are drilling sideways into the well in hopes of plugging it up with mud and concrete, and they are working on other ways to cap it.

Investigators looking into the cause of the explosion have been focusing on the so-called blowout preventer. Federal regulators told The Associated Press Friday that they are going to examine whether these last-resort cutoff valves on offshore oil wells are reliable.

Blowouts are infrequent, because well holes are blocked by piping and pumped-in materials like synthetic mud, cement and even sea water. The pipes are plugged with cement, so fluid and gas can’t typically push up inside the pipes.

Instead, a typical blowout surges up a channel around the piping. The narrow space between the well walls and the piping is usually filled with cement, so there is no pathway for a blowout. But if the cement or broken piping leaves enough space, a surge can rise to the surface.

There, at the wellhead of exploratory wells, sits the massive steel contraption known as a blowout preventer. It can snuff a blowout by squeezing rubber seals tightly around the pipes with up to 1 million pounds of force. If the seals fail, the blowout preventer deploys a last line of defense: a set of rams that can slice right through the pipes and cap the blowout.

Deepwater Horizon was also equipped with an automated backup system called a Deadman. It should have activated the blowout preventer even if workers could not.

Based on the interviews with rig workers, none of those safeguards worked.

WASHINGTON – Lettuce grown in Yuma, Ariz., may be the source of a widespread E. coli outbreak in romaine lettuce that has sickened at least 19 people and prompted a recall in 23 states.

Federal investigators are looking at a farm in Yuma as a possible source for the outbreak, according to the distributor who sold the lettuce.

Freshway Foods of Sidney, Ohio, said Thursday it recalled lettuce sold in 23 states and the District of Columbia because of a possible link to an E. coli outbreak that has sickened at least 19 people — three with life-threatening illness.

College students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Ohio State in Columbus and Daemen College in Amherst, N.Y., are among those who were affected by the outbreak, according to health departments in those states. The health officials said most of the victims were sickened in April and have already recovered.

Vice president Devon Beer said Freshway Foods worked with the Food and Drug Administration to trace the contaminated lettuce to a Yuma grower, whom he would not identify.

The recall only applies to romaine lettuce with “best if used by” date before or on May 12, when Freshway Foods stopped buying its romaine from Yuma, Beer said.

Officials in Arizona also confirmed the investigation. Laura Oxley, a spokeswoman for Arizona’s agriculture and health departments, said federal officials contacted them and told them they suspected the source of the E. coli outbreak was lettuce grown in the state. She said there were no additional shipments to stop because the winter lettuce season has mostly ended for the year.

The Yuma area is the source of much of the nation’s winter lettuce crop, but farmers switch to other crops at the end of winter.

Freshway Foods said Thursday it was recalling romaine lettuce sold under the Freshway and Imperial Sysco brands. No contamination was found at the company’s processing plant, according to the FDA. New York state’s Public Health Laboratory discovered the contamination in a bag of Freshway Foods shredded romaine lettuce on Wednesday after local authorities had been investigating an outbreak for several weeks.

The most common strain of E. coli found in U.S. patients is E. coli O157. The CDC said the strain linked to the lettuce, E. coli 0145, is more difficult to identify and may go unreported.

E. coli infection can cause mild diarrhea or more severe complications, including kidney damage. The three patients with life-threatening symptoms were diagnosed with hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can cause bleeding in the brain or kidneys.

It was not immediately clear why students on college campuses were sickened. Freshway Foods said the lettuce was sold to wholesalers, food service outlets, in-store salad bars and delis. The recall also affects “grab and go” salads sold at Kroger, Giant Eagle, Ingles Markets and Marsh grocery stores. Bagged lettuce at the grocery store is not involved in the recall so far.

Most of the recalled lettuce was sold in states east of the Mississippi River. It was sold in Alabama, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

NEW YORK – Authorities say a Staten Island ferry with a history of accidents lost power and crashed into a pier as it approached its terminal, leaving as many as 37 people with minor and moderate injuries.

The accident happened at around 9:20 a.m. Saturday as the Andrew J. Barberi approached the St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island.

The city’s transportation commissioner says the ferry’s throttle failed to engage as it came in for a landing.

That meant the crew was unable to use the engines to slow the vessel.

Coast Guard officials say the ferry suffered serious damage to its ramps and decks above the waterline. More than a dozen people were checked out at area hospitals.

The Andrew Barberi was also involved in a 2003 wreck that killed 11 people after the pilot passed out at the wheel.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

NEW YORK (AP) — A Staten Island ferry boat with a history of accidents struck a pier as it approached a terminal Saturday, seriously hurting at least one person and leaving as many as 35 with minor injuries.

The Andrew J. Barberi hit the pier at around 9:20 a.m. as it approached the St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island.

Passenger Jason Watler, 30, of St. George, said he realized the ferry was moving faster than usual as it approached the shore, became alarmed and began to run toward the back of the boat.

“It was not slowing down,” he said. “He was going too fast.”

Then, he heard a “a real big boom.”

“I stumbled a little bit,” he said. “People were screaming. People were crying.”

Fire Department officials said some passengers were being taken by ambulance to hospitals. Others were being bandaged and comforted by firefighters at the scene.

City officials were still struggling to gather information on the crash and what might have caused it more than 90 minutes after it happened. They said there were unsure how much damage was done to the boat, which was still afloat.

Service on the ferry line was suspended after the accident, then restored by late morning.

The Andrew Barberi was also involved in a 2003 wreck that killed 11 people. That accident also occurred at the St. George Terminal, when the boat failed to slow down and hit the pier at full speed.

The ferry runs across New York harbor between Manhattan and Staten Island.

A massive amount of crude oil lurks off Gulf Coast shores, threatening to devastate ecosystems to livelihoods from Louisiana to Florida. What began as an oil rig explosion has turned into a potential environmental disaster of epic proportions.

A fact sheet on the company website says BP takes responsibility for cleaning up the spill and will pay compensation for “legitimate and objectively verifiable” claims for property damage, personal injury and commercial losses. President Barack Obama and several attorneys general have asked the company to explain what exactly that means.

People like Dana Powell, manager of the Paradise Inn in Pensacola Beach, Fla., have feared what will happen to the Gulf Coast’s staple industries such as tourism and commercial fishing.

“Now when there’s a hurricane, we know it’s going to level things, devastate things, be a huge mess and it’s going to take several years to clean up,” she said. “But this? It’s going to kill the wildlife, it’s going to kill lifestyles — the shrimpers, the fishermen, tourism. Who’s going to come to an oil-covered beach?”

BP CEO Tony Hayward said Monday on ABC’s Good Morning America that BP was not responsible for the accident. He said the equipment that failed and led to the spill belonged to owner Transocean Ltd., not BP, which operated the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Guy Cantwell, a Transocean spokesman, responded by reading a statement without elaborating.

“We will await all the facts before drawing conclusions and we will not speculate,” he said.

A board investigating the explosion and oil leak plans to hold its first public hearing in roughly two weeks. The cause of the April 20 explosion, which killed 11 workers, has not been determined.

Coast Guard Capt. David Fish, chief of the Washington-based Office of Investigations and Analysis, said the six-member board — three from the Coast Guard and three from the U.S. Minerals and Management Service — will likely meet in the New Orleans area and take testimony from experts and workers who survived the disaster.

“We want to get it public because that’s just what our rules are and while everything is fresh in everyone’s mind, particularly with the witnesses,” he said.

Meanwhile, Hayward said chemical dispersants seem to be having a significant impact keeping oil from flowing to the surface, though he did not elaborate.

The update on the dispersants came as BP was preparing a system never tried to siphon away the spill of crude from a blown-out well a mile underwater. However, it will take at least another six to eight days before crews can lower 74-ton concrete-and-metal boxes being built to capture the oil and siphon it to a barge waiting at the surface.

That delay could allow at least another million gallons to spill into the Gulf, on top of the roughly 2.6 million or more that has spilled since the April 20 blast. Those numbers are based on the Coast Guard’s estimates that 200,000 gallons a day are spilling out, though officials have cautioned it’s impossible to know exactly how much is leaking.

By comparison, the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons off the Alaska coast in 1989.

Crews continued to lay boom in what increasingly felt like a futile effort to keep the spill from reaching the shore, though choppy seas have made that difficult and rendered much of the oil-corraling gear useless.

In Pensacola, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist characterized the spill as “sort of an underground volcano of oil.” He said Monday that BP was responsible for the cleanup and added “we’ll be more than happy to send them the bill.”

Everything engineers have tried so far has failed to stop the leak. After the explosion, the flow of oil should have been stopped by a blowout preventer, but the mechanism failed. Efforts to remotely activate it have proven fruitless.

The oil could keep gushing for months until a second well can be dug to relieve pressure from the first.

Besides the immediate impact on Gulf industries, shipping along the Mississippi River could soon be limited because the slick was precariously close to a key shipping lane. Ships carrying food, oil, rubber and much more come through the Southwest Pass to enter the vital waterway.

Shipment delays — either because oil-splattered ships need to be cleaned off at sea before docking or because water lanes are shut down for a time — would raise the cost of transporting those goods.

“We saw that during Hurricane Katrina for a period of time — we saw some prices go up for food and other goods because they couldn’t move some fruit down the shipping channels and it got spoiled,” PFGBest analyst Phil Flynn said.

The Port of New Orleans said projections suggest the pass will be clear through Tuesday.

Obama toured the region Sunday, deflecting criticism that his administration was too slow to respond and did too little to stave off the catastrophe. The administration has also strongly defended any comparison to the slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

A piece of plywood along a Louisiana highway had these words painted on it: “OBAMA SEND HELP”

The containment boxes being built were not part of BP’s original response plan. The approach has been used previously only for spills in relatively shallow water. Coast Guard Adm.Thad Allen said engineers are still examining whether the valves and other systems that feed oil to a ship on the surface can withstand the extra pressures of the deep.

BP was trying to cap the smallest of three leaks with underwater robots in the hope it will make it easier to place a single oil-siphoning container over the wreck. One of the robots cut the damaged end off a pipe at the smallest leak Sunday and officials were hoping to cap it with a sleeve and valve, Coast Guard spokesman Brandon Blackwell said Monday. He did not know how much oil was coming from that leak.

“We see this as an opportunity to simplify the seafloor mission a little bit, so we’re working this aggressively,” BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said.

A company official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the volume of reserves, confirmed reports that tens of millions of barrels of oil were beneath the seabed being tapped by the rig when it blew up. Bob Fryar, senior vice president for BP in Angola, said any numbers being thrown out are just estimates at best.

On Sunday, fishermen from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle got the news that more than 6,800 square miles of federal fishing areas were closed, fracturing their livelihood for at least 10 days and likely more just as the prime spring season was kicking in.

Peter Young has worked nearly 18 years as a fishing guide and said he’s afraid his way of life may be slipping away. The government has overreacted by shutting down vital fishing areas in the marshes, he said.

Until he sees oil himself, Young will keep fishing the closed areas.

“They can take me to jail,” he said. “This is our livelihood. I’m not going to take customers into oil, but until I see it, I can’t sit home and not work.”

The announcement assures that no new drilling will take place off the state’s coastline in the foreseeable future because Schwarzenegger would have to include the drilling proposal in his May revision of the state budget.
Speaking at a news conference near Sacramento, the governor said television images of the oil spill in the Gulf have changed his mind about the safety of ocean-based oil platforms.

“You turn on the television and see this enormous disaster, you say to yourself, ‘Why would we want to take on that kind of risk?’” Schwarzenegger said.

The Republican governor had proposed expanding oil drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara County to help close the state’s $20 billion budget deficit. Democrats last year blocked a similar proposal, but Schwarzenegger renewed his support earlier this year, saying it was a reliable way to increase revenue as the state grapples with an ongoing fiscal crisis.

A deal struck between some environmental groups and Plains Exploration & Production Co., known as PXP, was estimated to bring the state some $100 million. The Houston-based company was going to slant-drill up to 30 new shafts into state waters from an existing platform that is sitting in federal waters.

Schwarzenegger said he would find another way to plug the state’s budget deficit.

“If I have a choice to make up $100 million and what I see in Gulf of Mexico, I’d rather find a way to make up that $100 million.”

The California coast was not part of President Barack Obama’s announcement a month ago when he said he wanted to expand oil drilling off the Atlantic coast and in eastern portions of the Gulf. Including California would have been too difficult politically because of strong opposition within the state’s congressional delegation and with environmental groups in the state.

A 1969 blowout on a Union Oil Co. platform off the Santa Barbara coast fouled miles of ocean.

The flash floods caught Nashville off-guard, and thousands of residents and tourists were forced to flee homes and hotels as the river that winds through the city rapidly spilled over its banks. Eleven of the 12 people killed in Tennessee drowned, including six in Nashville.

Using motor boats, jet skis and canoes, authorities and volunteers rescued scores of residents trapped in flooded homes, some which looked like islands surround by dark brown river water. Helicopters plucked stranded residents off of rooftops.

The downtown — home of a historic warehouse district that dates back to the 1800s and is now occupied by bars and restaurants — was nearly deserted after authorities evacuated the area. Floodwater spilled into some streets near the riverfront, and restaurants and bars in the warehouse district were closed. A few blocks away, the historic Ryman Auditorium, longtime former home of the Grand Ole Opry, was in no immediate danger.

“It’s shocking to see it this way, but it was an incredible storm,” Mayor Karl Dean said as he surveyed the downtown flooding. The Cumberland River was expected to crest Monday afternoon at more than 11 feet above flood stage, and officials worried they may find more bodies in the rising floodwaters.

Thousands of people took refuge in emergency shelters, including about 1,500 guests at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center who spent the night at a high school to escape the flooding.

The resort’s hotel, located northeast of downtown along the river, had “significant water” inside and would remain closed indefinitely, said hotel spokeswoman Kim Keelor. A life-sized Elvis statue, missing his guitar, was laying on its back in the parking lot of the Wax Museum of the Stars near Opryland Hotel.

German tourists Gerdi and Kurt Bauerle, both 70, said resort staff suddenly started rushing people out of the area Sunday night.

“We had just finished eating and suddenly they said: ‘Go! Go! Go!’” said Gerdi Bauerle, who was visiting from Munich. “And we said ‘Wait, we haven’t even paid.’”

“The water began rising much more rapidly than anyone predicted,” Keelor said.

Water flooded parking lots around the nearby Grand Ole Opry House and the Opry Mills shopping mall, but it wasn’t immediately clear if water had made it inside the buildings.

Lucy Owens, 46, said she had followed directions to stay inside with her 21-year-old son at their home near Opryland when she heard on the TV that her neighborhood was being evacuated Sunday night. She and her son tried to escape in her truck, but she couldn’t even make it to her mailbox because the water was so high that it started flooding the truck’s cab.

She said she screamed for help and a police officer came and took her and son to a point where a boat could rescue them. By then, water was up to her ribcage.

“I got no notice. No one said nothing about evacuating. I did what they said and stayed put. I didn’t get out. I didn’t drive. Then it just all happened so fast,” she said.

Floodwaters swallowed up hundreds of homes including 45-year-old Lisa Blackmon’s in the suburb of Bellevue on the west side of Nashville. Water was up to her knees inside her house when a neighbor rushed her out Sunday morning. “I got me, the dog, the car out and that’s all I got,” she said on Monday.

Blackmon said she feared she had nothing left in her home. She said she had no flood insurance and lost her job at a trucking company last December.

Across from downtown on the east side of the river, LP Field, where the Tennessee Titans play also was threatened. Water covered one parking lot near the river but had not reached the stadium on Monday afternoon. At the Wild Horse Saloon, a popular country music hangout on the downtown riverfront, there was water in the loading dock area and the bottom floor.

The Cumberland flooded quickly after the weekend’s storms dumped more than 13 inches of rain in Nashville over two days. That nearly doubled the previous record of 6.68 inches of rain that fell in the wake of Hurricane Fredrick in 1979.

The storms, which also spawned deadly tornadoes, killed at least 12 people in Tennessee — including one person killed by a tornado in the western part of the state — six in Mississippi and four in Kentucky.

Three of the people killed in Mississippi died when high winds believed to be tornados hit their homes; the other three were killed in what authorities said were weather-related traffic accidents. Four weather-related deaths were also reported in Kentucky, including one man whose truck ran off the road and into a flooded creek.

The weekend deaths came on the heels of a tornado in Arkansas that killed a woman and injured about two dozen people Friday. A week ago, 10 people were killed by a tornado from a separate storm in western Mississippi.

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen got a bird’s eye view of the flooding damage during a helicopter tour of the area on Monday. As he crossed the Tennessee River and neared the hard-hit area of Madison County, flood waters were so deep that the tops of trees made the land looked like islands.

The Cumberland River already reached record levels since an early 1960s flood control project was put in place. With so much water inundating its tributaries, it was difficult to gauge whether the river would stop at 50 feet deep, or 11 feet above flood stage.

Much of the damage from flooding was done in outlying areas of Nashville and across the middle and western parts of Tennessee. Rescues turned dramatic over the weekend with homeowners plucked off roofs and pregnant women airlifted off a waterlogged interstate.

The rain ended Monday but there will likely be weeks of cleanup. Though there was no official estimate, it was clear thousands of homes had been damaged or destroyed by flooding and tornados. Emily Petro, with the Red Cross in Nashville, said the agency was sheltering about 2,000 people across Tennessee — about 1,200 of them in Nashville.

Most schools in middle Tennessee were closed Monday and many universities in the Nashville area postponed final exams.

The state’s roads also were in bad shape. The three major interstates in the Nashville area were closed over the weekend and Interstate 40, which runs east to west through the state, reopened Monday.

The car was registered in Connecticut, where the owner on record was questioned Sunday night about what happened to the SUV since it was in his possession, according to law enforcement officials, who both spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is at a sensitive stage.

The man was not considered a suspect, but the officials declined to say why, or to discuss any leads stemming from the interview.

Paul Browne, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for public information, would not give further details on the registered owner but said officials were still looking for the driver.

The vehicle identification number on the 1993 dark-colored Nissan Pathfinder had been removed from the dashboard, but it was stamped on the engine and axle. Its license plates came from a car found in a Connecticut repair shop.

Investigators were also looking Monday to speak with a man in his 40s videotaped shedding his shirt near the sport utility vehicle where the bomb was found.

The surveillance video, made public late Sunday, shows the man slipping down Shubert Alley and taking off his shirt, revealing another underneath. In the same clip, looks back in the direction of the smoking vehicle and furtively puts the first shirt in a bag.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that investigators have some good leads in addition to the videotape of the man. Holder said in remarks to reporters that it is too early to say whether the incident was of foreign or domestic origin or to designate it as terrorism.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on NBC’s Today show on Monday that no suspects or theories had been ruled out. “Right now, every lead has to be pursued,” she said.

And investigators had not ruled out a range of possible motives. The Pakistani Taliban appeared to claim responsibility for the car bomb in three videos that surfaced after the weekend scare, monitoring groups said. New York officials said police have no evidence to support the claims.

Peter King, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said Monday on Fox News that there was no intelligence chatter before Saturday, making a foreign connection unlikely.

The SUV was parked near offices of Viacom Inc., which owns Comedy Central. The network recently aired an episode of the animated show “South Park” that the group Revolution Muslim had complained insulted the Prophet Muhammad by depicting him in a bear costume.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg cautioned that the man on the tape may not become a suspect but urged him to come forward.

“He may or may not have been involved,” he said, adding it was a hot day and he might simply have been trying to cool off.

The NYPD and FBI also were examining “hundreds of hours” of security videotape from around Times Square. They traveled to Pennsylvania for video shot by a tourist of a different person, and were evaluating the tape Monday and determining whether to make it public.

Police said the crude gasoline-and-propane bomb could have produced “a significant fireball” and sprayed shrapnel and metal parts with enough force to kill pedestrians and knock out windows. The SUV was parked on one of America’s busiest streets, lined with Broadway theaters and restaurants and full of people out on a Saturday night.

The area bounced back quickly and had returned to its normal bustle on a rainy Monday morning.

Police released a photograph of the SUV as it crossed an intersection at 6:28 p.m. Saturday. A vendor pointed out the SUV to an officer about two minutes later.

The explosive device in the SUV had cheap-looking alarm clocks connected to a 16-ounce can filled with fireworks, which were apparently intended to detonate the gas cans and set the propane afire in a chain reaction, said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

Investigators had feared that a final component placed in the cargo area — a metal rifle cabinet packed a fertilizer-like substance and rigged with wires and more fireworks — could have made the device even more devastating. Test results late Sunday showed it was indeed fertilizer, but NYPD bomb experts believe it was not a type volatile enough to explode like the ammonium nitrate grade fertilizer used in previous terror attacks, said police spokesman Paul Browne.

The exact amount of fertilizer was unknown. Police estimated the cabinet weighed 200 to 250 pounds when they pulled it from the vehicle.

Times Square, choked with taxis and people on one of the first summer-like days of the year, was shut down for 10 hours. Detectives took the stage at the end of some of Broadway shows to announce to theatergoers that they were looking for witnesses in a bombing attempt.

Bloomberg took NYPD officer Wayne Rhatigan of the mounted police force out for a steak dinner Sunday night a few blocks from the bombing attempt. Rhatigan had quickly moved tourists out of the way when he was told of the smoking SUV.

Ford Motor Co. saw last month’s sales rise 25 percent from a year earlier, while General Motors Co. climbed 6.4 percent. Sales for Toyota Motor Corp., which has grappled with a string of safety recalls, rose 24 percent.

Even Chrysler, which has struggled much of the year, reported a 25 percent sales increase, while Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Subaru and others also continued to see gains.

But the industry overall likely won’t be able to maintain the pace seen in March, when big sales promotions led by Toyota fueled higher sales. The Japanese automaker needed to lure buyers after suffering a series of safety recalls beginning last fall.

As buyers’ expectations for even better deals grew, demand last month slipped from March and some automakers eased up on promotions.

Auto research website Edmunds.com says incentives fell an average of 5 percent in April as the luster wore off some of the deals and automakers tried to pull back on spending. But there were still were good bargains. Honda Motor Co. spent a record $1,787 per vehicle, while Toyota spent $2,498, down $245 from record-high levels in March. GM spent $3,273 per vehicle, although that was skewed by high incentives on the brands it is discontinuing.

GM said it spent $100 less per vehicle in April than in March.

“We’ll be judicious with our incentives,” said Steve Carlisle, GM’s new vice president of sales. “We’ll be competitive but not foolish.”

Toyota used incentives to continue to spur demand as it distanced itself from safety recalls involving unintended acceleration. But sales slowed 16 percent compared with a strong March.

The Japanese automaker said its April sales were propelled by some of the vehicles involved in previous recalls like the Corolla compact, Prius hybrid and RAV4 small crossover.

Honda’s sales, including the Honda and Acura brands, rose 12.5 percent over April of last year.

Nissan Motor Co.’s April sales rose 34 percent, led by higher demand for the Rogue crossover, the Altima sedan and the newly released Cube hatchback. Crossovers are SUVs built on sedan bodies and combine elements of both vehicles.

Chrysler reported its first double-digit sales gain in nearly five years, led by a minivan promotion that drove sales up 68 percent. It saw sales surge for its Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Avenger midsize sedans.

But its Ram pickup truck sales dropped a troubling 20 percent, even as main competitors GM and Ford reported rising pickup sales.

Chrysler’s sales bucked industry trends and rose 3 percent over a March.

GM, after taking out brands that GM is phasing out or selling, GM sales rose 20 percent from April of last year. GM’s four remaining brands are Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac.

The Detroit-based automaker saw strong sales of several new products, including the Chevrolet Camaro, Chevrolet Equinox, Buick LaCrosse and GMC Terrain. Full-size pickup truck sales rose 8.4 percent, an indicator that the construction business is in recovery.

The Dearborn, Mich.-based automaker’s pickup sales were particularly strong. Ford said F-Series sales jumped 42 percent thanks to the new Super Duty truck. SUV sales rose 33 percent, led by the Escape and Explorer. Car sales rose 10 percent.

Korean automaker Kia Motors Corp.’s April U.S. sales rose 17 percent on strong demand for its newly released Sorento crossover and Forte sedan. Hyundai’s sales increased 30 percent on rising demand for the new Sonata midsize sedan.

Subaru’s U.S. sales soared 48 percent the back of its Outback small wagon, which doubled its sales from April of last year.

GM’s Carlisle said his company’s performance is consistent with a slow and steady economic recovery. The automaker stuck with its forecast of total U.S. light vehicle sales of 11.2 million to 11.7 million for the year.

That’s better than last year’s 10.4 million, but far below the peak of more than 17 million in 2000. Consumer spending rose 0.6 percent in March, the largest amount in five months. Yet the increase was financed out of savings. Incomes rose only slightly. Factory activity in April grew at the fastest pace in nearly six years.

Robert "Joe" Halderman thought he had a $2 million secret and a surefire plan to cash in on it: Pay him, or he'd ravage David Letterman's congenial, clean-cut image by revealing the late-night TV icon's office affairs.

Instead, Halderman ravaged his own life. The former producer for CBS’ 48 Hours Mystery is expected to start a six-month jail term Tuesday after admitting in March to the shakedown attempt.

Letterman blunted the blackmail threat by divulging his workplace dalliances himself. His viewership hasn’t suffered, and his status was barely scuffed.

But celebrity lawyers and image-makers say it’s unclear whether the case will function as a cautionary tale that deters similar episodes.

Many luminaries would rather beat back or settle such matters privately than press charges that would air their dirty laundry, the experts say. Even if a threatened celebrity is willing to go public, few have the persona and forum to do it the way Letterman did: in a forthright, sometimes funny monologue on his own show.

“There are lots of people running around the planet thinking that blackmailing celebrities or prominent, wealthy people is a great way to make a living,” said veteran celebrity publicist Michael Levine. “The lesson of Letterman is: Every so often, you’re going to run into someone who isn’t going to play.”

But, he added, “Not all people are David Letterman.”

Stars ranging from Cameron Diaz to Yoko Ono have been confronted in recent years with people demanding money to keep photos or information private. Those are episodes that became criminal cases and public knowledge. Many others are kept from ever becoming known, attorneys say.

Los Angeles lawyer Mark Geragos said he has discreetly dealt with such situations for notable clients he won’t name, including several he handled after the Letterman episode.

“Most entertainers are loath to go public with these things if they can at all help it,” Geragos said.

Halderman, 52, isn’t expected to speak at his sentencing and declined through his lawyer to be interviewed. Halderman’s expected jail term and 1,000 hours of community service were set when he pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny.

He admitted in court that he tried to squeeze $2 million from the Late Show host “by threatening to disclose personal and private information about him, whether true or false.”

He presented the threat as a faintly fictionalized screenplay about Letterman — and backed it up with information authorities have said Halderman gleaned from reading his former girlfriend’s diary. She worked for Letterman and described an affair with him in the diary, authorities have said.

Halderman’s plea deal requires him never to discuss the material.

Letterman revealed on-air Oct. 1 that he’d had sex with women who work for him and disclosed the blackmail attempt. It was the first the public had heard of the case — prosecutors announced the charges the next day — and made it a story told largely in Letterman’s voice. Critics and public-relations experts hailed his disclosure as a master stroke.

“Letterman gave everybody, within what’s reasonable, what they needed to know to make up their own minds and decide what’s right and wrong,” said Winston-Salem, N.C.-based crisis-management consultant Rick Amme.

The case appears to have made little difference with television viewers. Letterman is averaging 4 million viewers this season, up 3 percent over last season, according to the Nielsen Co.

He was helped by not having to compete against Jay Leno for several months.

Still, Letterman has said the scandal took a personal toll.

“You take a look at the explosion, and it knocks you down, and you wake up every morning, and you’re scared and you’re depressed and sad,” the comic said Friday on “Live! With Regis and Kelly.”

“And you kind of got to let that knock you down and knock you down, and then pretty soon you’ve got to start knocking IT down,” Letterman added.

Halderman no longer has his job with CBS’ 48 Hours Mystery. The network also hosts Letterman’s show.

After getting out of jail, he’s expected to do his community service at New York and Connecticut organizations that provide job training to formerly homeless people and convicts getting out of prison.