ITN Online has World News . News Tracker has articles from hundreds of online news sources and can be searched. NewsBot allows you to search for news. News Index also allows you to search for news items. NewsWorks allows you to search over 100 online newspapers at once.
Paperboy searches various news sources.
Unfortunately the results are unsorted and not all AP stories are included. TotalNews allows you to search multiple news sources simultaneously, but it is a bit primitive. Searchable Newspaper Archives has links to the archives. Good for digging up a story. For example The Seattle Times allows you to search for stories from February 1996.