SEATTLE – A day after a boy’s body was found on an island beach in Puget Sound, authorities searched unsuccessfully for his missing mother.

“No, we haven’t heard of anything being found,” Thurston Co. sheriff’s Lt. Chris Mealy said Friday night.

Thurston County had a boat in the water Friday looking for Shantina “Kat” Smiley, 29, of Silverdale. She and her 8-year-old son, Azriel Carver, were last seen Saturday night, and her partially submerged minivan was found Sunday on a remote south Puget Sound beach.

Azriel’s body was discovered by a walker Thursday on Fox Island, southwest of Tacoma and about 18 miles north by water from where the van was found.

Pierce County sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said Friday afternoon that a search plane was sent up to look for Smiley in the general area where her son’s body was found.

An autopsy Friday by Dr. Sigmund Menchel, Pierce County’s acting chief medical examiner, positively identified the boy, determined he had drowned and his death was an accident.

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NEW YORK – Cheesecake in hand, the police commissioner personally apologized Friday for the 50 or so mistaken, door-pounding visits that police have made to the home of a bewildered elderly Brooklyn couple in the past eight years.

It seems a glitch in computer records had led them over and over to Walter and Rose Martin’s modest home in the Marine Park neighborhood, about 7 miles southeast of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The most recent intrusion came Tuesday, with officers pounding on both the front and back doors, yelling “Police, open up!”

On Thursday, detectives from the NYPD’s Identity Theft Squad went to see the Martins again — this time to apologize. “And we wanted to be sure perps weren’t using that address for identity theft,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told The Associated Press on Friday.

The detectives told 82-year-old Rose and 83-year-old Walter that Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had ordered them to solve the problem, which started eight years ago and was first reported this week in the New York Daily News.

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NEW YORK (Billboard) –
Since he started his career in the ’60s, Peter Frampton has maintained his reputation as an electrifying guitarist and solo artist, most famously on 1976’s multiplatinum live set “Frampton Comes Alive!” Five days after his 60th birthday, the British legend will release one of the most personal albums of his career, “Thank You Mr. Churchill.”

Due April 27 from A&M/New Door/UMe, the set features songs that reflect on early memories as well as troubling world issues.

Frampton spoke with Billboard about his childhood, upcoming touring plans and his first two Grammy Awards, received in 2007 for the instrumental album “Fingerprints.”

Billboard: How is the album autobiographical?

Peter Frampton: There are two songs that make it autobiographical. “Thank You Mr. Churchill” uses (Winston) Churchill as the man signifying the winning of the Second World War and bringing my father home. I just thought, “What if he hadn’t been there? Would I be here today?” That led me to “Vaudeville Nanna and the Banjolele.” I had this memory as a child of my grandmother leaving a banjolele (a cross between a banjo and a ukulele) in our attic and saying to my father, “Leave this up there, and maybe Peter will get curious and you can show it to him one day.” So it is the story of how I started playing, and the track is very important to me.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — The count in the Iraqi elections isn’t yet over, but tallies released this week reveal upsets in restive provinces that portend a weak and fractious Iraq with battles looming on several fronts: Arab-Kurd rivalries, an internecine Shiite Muslim power struggle and what role Sunni Arabs will play in the next government.

Iraq’s election commission, under heavy criticism for a tortuous ballot-counting process, now has about 92 percent of votes recorded from the March 7 parliamentary election, the landmark poll that Iraqi and U.S. officials considered a gauge for the kind of nation American forces will leave behind next year.

For all the focus on the extremely tight race between Iraq’s top two vote-getters — Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and the former interim premier Ayad Allawi — election tallies released this week reveal several smaller dramas unfolding outside the capital. Sunni Arabs have weakened Kurdish leaders in diverse northern provinces, militant Shiites have overtaken their Iranian-backed allies for the religious vote, and many prominent figures will be cast into the political wilderness, according to the near-complete results issued by the Independent High Electoral Commission :

The election for the 325-seat parliament remains too close to call, with results still to come from out-of-country voting and early rounds for security forces and others such as hospital patients who needed special accommodation. Among the noteworthy themes emerging:

— Sunni Arabs have weakened Kurdish leaders in diverse northern provinces.

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The giant wind turbine stands over Dagenham Heathway like an exclamation point. To Ford Motor Co., the U.S. corporation that erected it six years ago, the turbine is a vigorous declaration of modernity, generating the sustainable energy that drives what it calls a “global center of excellence for diesel engineering.” These days, however, the 394-ft. (120 m) structure seems to punctuate the cry of pain that was once a busy shopping street in this hardscrabble East London suburb. Ford Dagenham produced as many as 340,617 cars annually and employed 40,000 people at its peak in the 1960s. Ford’s diesel-engine plant, the only business left on the 475-acre (192 hectare) site, has a workforce of just 4,000; also gone are 60,000 other jobs that depended on the car industry and its employees. It’s a depressing tableau, one all too familiar: just like Detroit, this once vibrant center of auto manufacturing seems stuck in a spiral of persistent decline.

On the main street, stores that once sold everything from household staples to electronics and jewelry are now outnumbered by pawnbrokers. During lunchtime on a crisp Monday at Albemarle & Bond, Nicola – she doesn’t wish to give her surname – 26, white and unemployed, holds a fistful of rings. “Can I get 10 quid for this?” she asks. After haggling with the assistant, she leaves with half that sum, passing a display case of trinkets earlier customers failed to redeem, including a clutch of diamant

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