• Ukraine tries to quell pro-Moscow uprisings

DONETSK, Ukraine - Ukrainian authorities moved to quell pro-Moscow uprisings along the Russian border with mixed results Tuesday, retaking one occupied regional headquarters and watching protesters consolidate their hold on another.

In a third city, Luhansk, Ukraine's Security Service said separatists armed with explosives and other weapons were holding 60 people hostage inside the agency's local headquarters.

Those occupying the building issued a video statement saying they want a referendum on the region's status and warning that any attempt to storm the place would be met with armed force.

• Messages for 'Cuban Twitter' overtly political

WASHINGTON - Draft messages produced for a Twitter-like network that the U.S. government secretly built in Cuba were overtly political and poked fun at the Castro brothers, documents obtained by The Associated Press show. The messages conflict with claims by the Obama administration that the program had no U.S.-generated political content and was never intended to stir unrest on the island.

Disclosure of the messages, as described in internal documents, came as the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development told Congress in sometimes- confrontational testimony Tuesday that his agency's program was "absolutely not" covert and was simply meant to increase the flow of information.

An AP investigation last week found that the program, known as ZunZuneo, evaded Cuba's Internet restrictions by creating a text-messaging service that could be used to organize political demonstrations. It drew tens of thousands of subscribers who were unaware it was backed by the U.S. government.

At an oversight hearing Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont told USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah that the program was "cockamamie" and not adequately described to Congress.

• Ships frantically try to pick up underwater pings

PERTH, Australia - Search crews on Wednesday combed the Indian Ocean in a frantic bid to relocate underwater sounds that may have come from the missing Malaysian jetliner's black boxes, three days after they were last detected.

The signals first heard late Saturday and early Sunday had sparked hopes of a breakthrough in the search for Flight 370, but Angus Houston, the retired Australian air chief marshal leading the search far off western Australia, said listening equipment on the Ocean Shield ship has picked up no traces of the sounds since then.

Finding the sound again is crucial to narrowing the search area so a submarine can be deployed to chart a potential debris field on the seafloor. If the autonomous sub was used now with the sparse data collected so far, covering all the potential places from which the pings might have come would take many days.

"It's literally crawling at the bottom of the ocean so it's going to take a long, long time," Houston said.

The locator beacons on the black boxes have a battery life of only about a month - and Tuesday marked exactly one month since the plane vanished. Once the beacons blink off, locating the black boxes in such deep water would be an immensely difficult, if not impossible, task.

• Al Sharpton says report on work with FBI not new

NEW YORK - The Rev. Al Sharpton admitted on Tuesday that he helped the FBI investigate New York Mafia figures in the 1980s, even making secret recordings that appeared to help bring down a mob boss.

But at a news conference, Sharpton insisted he never considered himself a confidential informant, despite a report identifying him as the "CI-7" referenced in recently released court records.

"I was never told I was an informant with a number," Sharpton told reporters at his Harlem headquarters in response to the report posted Monday on The Smoking Gun website. "In my own mind, I was not an informant. I was cooperating with an investigation."

The report's timing became a distraction for Sharpton a day before he was to host President Barack Obama as the keynote speaker at the annual convention his civil rights group, the National Action Network. The MSNBC host complained that he was unfairly portrayed as a turncoat mob associate instead of a victim in front-page tabloid stories featuring headlines like "REV RAT" and 30-year-old photos of him when he was overweight and wore his hair in a bouffant.

• Obama to visit Washington mudslide site

EVERETT, Wash. - President Barack Obama plans to survey damage from the Washington state mudslide later this month and will meet with victims, first responders and recovery workers, the White House said Tuesday.

The White House said it plans to release further details about the president's trip to Oso, Wash., in the coming days.

Obama spoke with Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., on Tuesday about the recovery effort.

"He called to say that he's going to come out to visit the site on April 22," she said.