MIAMI – Yadilka Aramboles eyes her three young children playing on the sidewalk and sees college in their future — even though her husband’s modest accountant’s income barely covers the family’s most basic expenses.

“The situation is bad now, but I have faith that this is going to change,” says the 32-year-old from the Dominican Republic. “For me and my children, I aspire to something more.”

Aramboles’ feelings — hopes for tomorrow, tempered by daily doses of financial stress — are a familiar blend for Hispanics in the United States, according to an Associated Press-Univision poll of more than 1,500 Latinos. But the survey of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority also shows a resounding diversity, with views and experiences varying between immigrants and the U.S.-born.

The survey was conducted as America’s 47 million Hispanics face acute economic and political pressures.

The recession that erased millions of jobs has taken an especially heavy toll on Latinos, whose average income is lower than many other groups. And the Hispanic community has been jolted by election-season debate over the country’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, a debate that has increased in intensity following Arizona’s enactment of a law that requires police, while enforcing other laws, to question a person’s immigration status if officers have a reasonable suspicion he or she is in the country illegally.

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KABUL, Afghanistan – The goal is to transform Afghanistan into a modern nation, fueled by a U.S.-led effort pouring $60 billion into bringing electricity, clean water, jobs, roads and education to this crippled country. But the results so far — or lack of them — threaten to do more harm than good.

The reconstruction efforts have stalled and stumbled at many turns since the U.S. military arrived in 2001, undermining President Barack Obama’s vow to deliver a safer, stable Afghanistan capable of stamping out the insurgency and keeping al-Qaida from re-establishing its bases here.

Poppy fields thrive, with each harvest of illegal opium fattening the bankrolls of terrorists and drug barons. Passable roads remain scarce and unprotected, isolating millions of Afghans who remain cut off from jobs and education. Electricity flows to only a fraction of the country’s 29 million people.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — The United States has made an enormous and costly commitment to building a new Afghanistan, but an Associated Press investigation finds that the results have been paltry. First in an occasional series, “Fixing Afghanistan.”

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At a rare, 90-minute press conference, the Apple chief executive asserted that reception issues were a problem shared by the entire smartphone industry, naming specifically rivals Research in Motion, Samsung Electronics and HTC Corp.

Jobs maintained there were no problems with the iPhone 4’s wraparound antenna design and accused the media of trying to “tear down” a company that had grown so successful.

After the June 24 launch of the iPhone 4, some users reported drastically reduced signal strength when they held the touch-screen phone a certain way, in what has come to be known as the “iPhone 4 death grip.”

Apple has lost more than $16 billion of its market value since June 28, with at least some of that attributed by analysts to the iPhone snafu.

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HOUMA, La. – Inside a sprawling command post in southern Louisiana, The Blob is everywhere.

It stains the many maps tacked to white walls. Computer monitors beam satellite images of it floating in the Gulf of Mexico, a magenta mass that looks more like an island than the colossal oil slick that it is. It sometimes changes shape on these screens, or breaks off into bits and pieces, but The Blob itself never vanishes.

Coast Guard Capt. Roger Laferriere oversees this command center, coordinating the unprecedented cleanup of oil off of the Louisiana coast. There are other posts like it in Mobile, Ala., and Miami, but none has more manpower, equipment — or more of The Blob, as Laferriere and his staff have christened their enemy — than this base inside what once was a BP training facility for offshore oil production.

On any given day, some 40,000 people are working all along the Gulf Coast to track where the oil is headed, lay protective boom, skim what they can and clean shorelines; nearly half of them are under what is known as the Houma Incident Command Post.

Some are analysts who sit in darkened rooms at the BP warehouse, feeding satellite data into computerized maps that show where the oil is moving, what marshes have already been boomed and what areas skimmers are toiling.

Others — many of them shrimpers and fishermen turned cleanup contractors — work out of quaint docks converted into “forward operating bases,” hitting the water after sunup to do the hands-on tasks necessary to contain and clear the oil. There’s displaced boom to be repositioned. Torn boom to be picked up, brought to shore and repaired. Absorbent boom soaked through on one side that must be turned or swapped out.

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WARSAW, Poland – Who has the right to dance at Auschwitz, to make light of the Holocaust, to shoot videos set amid cattle cars and gas chambers?

A home video that has gone viral on the Internet showing a Holocaust survivor dancing at Auschwitz and other Holocaust sites to the disco classic “I Will Survive” with his daughter and grandchildren has brought such questions to the fore.

To some, images of Adolek Kohn and his family shuffling off-beat at such hallowed places is an insult to those who perished; to others a defiant celebration of survival. The incongruous juxtapositions have struck many viewers as funny and chilling at the same time.

Whether the comedic effects were intentional or not, they bring a new dimension to questions about how far taboos can be tested in an age when comedians like Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen find rich fodder for their jokes in the Holocaust.

The fact that the video only gained massive attention when neo-Nazi groups spread it online further complicates the question.

“If the humor is meant to cheapen, then it’s bad,” said Raul Teitelbaum, 79, who survived the Nazi camp at Bergen-Belsen. “But if the humor is simply a human reaction to tragedy, it’s all right. It’s complicated to do it, but a successful humorist can pull it off.”

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