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KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Charles Barsotti, whose New Yorker cartoons plumbed the human condition featuring characters such as the psychiatrist dog and the pilgrim with the walking stick, has died. He was 80.

Barsotti was diagnosed in 2013 with brain cancer and died late Monday at home in Kansas City, his daughter, Kerry Scott, said Tuesday.

"He got the maximum out of the minimum," said Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker magazine, which has published nearly 1,400 Barsotti cartoons since the 1960s. "With just a few lines he could delineate a hobo, a spy, a king, a philosopher, a dog, a judge, all those in the same picture."

Barsotti, born Sept. 28, 1933, in San Antonio, Texas, graduated from Texas State University in 1954 and worked for Kansas City-based Hallmark Cards as a greeting card artist before moving to New York to become cartoon editor for The Saturday Evening Post until that magazine closed. Barsotti and his family returned to Kansas City in the 1960s when Barsotti developed the "Sally Bananas" comic strip.

He freelanced cartoons for The New Yorker for several years before he became a staff cartoonist for magazine about 1970, while he and his family remained in Kansas City.

"You know, he drew cartoons about philosophy and kings, and I sort of think he was the philosopher king of cartoonists," Mankoff said. "Really. He asked the big questions. Why are we here? What should we do? In a very simple way which didn't come down on any sort of answers but says part of being human is just not ignoring these questions."

Mankoff pointed to the Barsotti cartoon showing St. Peter saying to "the guy in heaven who's ready to go in: 'Really you were worried about that? You thought that was a sin too? You must have worried yourself to death.'"

Barsotti's cartoons also appeared in other publications, including The Atlantic and The New York Times. Several collections of his work have been published, including most recently the 2007 book "They Moved My Bowl," which featured his dog cartoons.

Lee Lorenz, former New Yorker cartoon editor, said the dogs in Barsotti's cartoons could have been speaking for Barsotti.

"The pup was sort of a mouthpiece for him," Lorenz said.

Barsotti's "austere, black-and-white" cartoons were instantly recognizable, and The New Yorker still has several that are as yet unpublished, Mankoff said.

"They are almost like cartoon emojis," Mankoff said. "The pilgrim on the treadmill, the little pup ... talking to the older dog with the older dog saying, 'My advice is learn all the tricks when you're young.' ... He found humor in the deepest spots of humor, which is about ourselves."

Barsotti was still working on panels even while he was ill, Mankoff said.

"I talked to Charlie I think about a month ago, and he was ready to go into the hospice, and he was saying that he was not surprisingly philosophical about it, certainly not happy about it," Mankoff said. "But what he wanted to do, was the doctors to be able to control the tremors in his hand so that he could still draw."

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. consumer prices increased in May by the largest amount in more than a year as the cost of food and gasoline showed big gains and airline fares jumped by the largest amount in 15 years.

The consumer price index rose 0.4 percent in May, the biggest one-month jump since a 0.6 percent increase in February 2013, the Labor Department reported Tuesday.

Over the past 12 months, consumer prices are up 2.1 percent. While that was the biggest 12-month price change since October 2012, it still left prices rising at a pace near the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target. But analysts said the May price jump, double what had been expected, would get the attention of Fed policymakers, who were starting a two-day meeting on Tuesday.

"The Fed will have to acknowledge in tomorrow's policy statement that price pressures are growing," said Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. "The chances that it will raise interest rates before the middle of next year are increasing."

"We're seeing more signs that the days of low inflation are behind us," said Jennifer Lee, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets. She said the drought in California pushed fruit prices up and a drought in Brazil was to blame for higher coffee prices.

Excluding volatile food and energy, core inflation was up 0.3 percent in May, the biggest one-month gain since August 2011. Over the past 12 months, core prices are up 2 percent.

The 0.4 percent May price rise reflected gains in a number of areas. Food costs were up 0.5 percent, the largest increase since a similar gain in August 2011. Food costs have been driven higher this year by an unusually harsh winter and a drought in California.

Energy costs were up 0.9 percent in May, the biggest one-month gain since December. Gasoline prices increased 0.7 percent last month.

Outside of food and energy, there were widespread price pressures as well. Airline tickets were up 5.8 percent in May, the biggest one-month gain since July 1999. The cost of clothing, prescription drugs and new cars all showed increases in May.

Even with the May price increases, inflation is still advancing at moderate rates around the 2 percent target set by the Federal Reserve, which has the job of managing interest rates to foster stable prices and maximum employment.

Low inflation has allowed the Fed to keep interest rates exceptionally low in an effort to boost economic growth without having to worry about inflation getting out of hand. A measure of inflation preferred by the Fed that is tied to consumer spending patterns has been running below the Fed's target of 2 percent for the past two years.

The central bank was meeting Tuesday and Wednesday with Fed officials widely expected to keep a key short-term rate at a record low near zero. The Fed is not expected to begin increasing that rate for another year.

While it is the Fed's job to keep inflation from rising too quickly, it also watches to make sure that prices do not rise too slowly. That can signal a weak economy and generate further weakness as consumers stop buying big-ticket items in hopes that prices will fall further.

The Fed will update its economic forecasts on Wednesday and analysts are looking for the growth figure to be trimmed to reflect the very weak start to the year. Despite the weakness, which was related to a harsh winter, economists believe the economy will rebound to growth rates of 3 percent or better for the rest of this year.

The first quarter weakness did not derail improvements in the job market with unemployment falling to 6.3 percent, the lowest point in more than five years. But Fed Chair Janet Yellen has suggested that the overall unemployment rate is overstating the health of the job market and the economy, a view that is seen as signaling no sudden action by the Fed to start raising interest rates, as long as inflation gains remain modest.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Nearly four dozen Sunni detainees were gunned down at a jail north of Baghdad, a car bomb struck a Shiite neighborhood of the capital and four young Sunnis were found slain — ominous signs that open warfare between the two main Muslim sects has returned to Iraq.

The killings late Monday and Tuesday following the capture by Sunni insurgents of a large swath of the country stretching to Syria were the first hints of the beginnings of a return to sectarian bloodletting that nearly tore the country apart in 2006 and 2007.

During the United States' eight-year presence in Iraq, American forces acted as a buffer between the two Islamic sects, though with limited success. The U.S. military withdrew at the end of 2011, but it is now being pulled back in — so far committing just under 300 troops, with a limited mission of securing U.S. assets as President Barack Obama nears a decision on an array of options for combating the Islamic militants.

In the latest sect-on-sect violence, at least 44 Sunni detainees were slaughtered by gun shots to the head and chest by pro-government Shiite militiamen after Sunni insurgents tried to storm the jail near Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, police said.

The Iraqi military gave a different account and put the death toll at 52, insisting the Sunni inmates were killed by mortar shells in the attack late Monday on the facility.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, the bullet-riddled bodies of four men in their late 20s or early 30s, presumably Sunnis, were found Tuesday at different locations in the Shiite neighborhood of Benouk, according to police and morgue officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the media.

Also Tuesday, a car bomb in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City district killed 12 people and wounded 30 in a crowded outdoor market, police and hospital officials said. No one claimed responsibility for the bombing, but attacks targeting Shiite districts are routinely the work of Sunni militants.

The sectarian violence in and around Baghdad was a grim reminder of a dark chapter in Iraq's history when nearly a decade ago the city woke up virtually every morning to find dozens of bodies dumped in the streets, trash heaps or in the Tigris river, bullet-riddled or with torture marks.

Obama has said he would not commit the U.S. to military action in Iraq unless the government in Baghdad moves to "set aside sectarian differences, to promote stability, and account for the legitimate interests of all of Iraq's communities." In the absence of that type of political effort, Obama has said any American military action would not succeed.

A U.N. commission, meanwhile, warned Tuesday that "a regional war in the Middle East draws ever closer" as Sunni insurgents advance across Iraq to control areas bridging the Iraq-Syria frontier. It said Iraq's turmoil will have "violent repercussions" in Syria, most dangerously the rise of sectarian violence as "a direct consequence of the dominance of extremist groups."

There were conflicting details about the clashes at the jail in the al-Kattoun district near Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province, which was one of the bloodiest battlefields of the U.S.-led war, and on how the detainees were killed.

The fighting, some 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, was the closest to the Iraqi capital since the al-Qaida breakaway group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant began its lightning advance, seizing several key northern cities in the Sunni heartland last week.

Officers said the local police station came under attack by Sunni militants who arrived in two sedan cars to free the detainees. The militants fired rocket-propelled grenades on the building before opening fire with assault rifles.

A SWAT team accompanied by Shiite militiamen rushed to the scene and asked the local policemen to leave, according to the officers. When the policemen later returned to the station, they found all those in the detention cells dead.

The bodies were taken to the Baqouba morgue, where an official said most had gunshot wounds to the head and chest. One detainee, however, survived and was taken to the hospital.

Police later arrived at the hospital and took the wounded man away, said a hospital official.

The police officers and morgue and hospital officials all spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for their own safety.

A different account was provided to The Associated Press by Iraq's chief military spokesman, Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi. He said 52 detainees who were held at the station in al-Kattoun died when the attackers from the Islamic State shelled it with mortars.

Nine of the attackers were killed, al-Moussawi said.

The Islamic State is known to be active in Diyala, a volatile province with a mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and where Shiite militiamen are deployed alongside government forces. Sunni militants have for years targeted security forces and Shiite civilians in the province, which abuts the Iranian border.

The Sunni militants of the Islamic State have vowed to march to Baghdad and the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf in the worst threat to Iraq's stability since U.S. troops left. The three cities are home to some of the most revered Shiite shrines. The Islamic State has also tried to capture the city of Samarra north of Baghdad, home to another major Shiite shrine.

Some 275 armed American forces are being positioned in and around Iraq to help secure U.S. assets as Obama considered an array of options for combating the Islamic militants, including airstrikes or a contingent of special forces.

The White House has continued to emphasize that any military engagement remains contingent on the government in Baghdad making political reforms and ending sectarian tensions, which have been on the rise even before the Islamic State's incursion last week, with thousands killed since late last year.

Republicans have been critical of President Barack Obama's handling of Iraq, but Congress remains deeply divided over what steps the U.S. can take militarily. Even lawmakers who voted in 2002 to give President George W. Bush the authority to use military force to oust Saddam Hussein expressed doubts about the effectiveness of drone air strikes and worried about Americans returning to the fight in a country split by sectarian violence.

The sectarian divide was on stark display in the accounts given by Iraqi Shiites fleeing the strategic city of Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, which was captured by Sunni militants of the Islamic state Monday.

The advancing militants burned down Shiite homes and killed at least six Shiite men who were unable to leave, said Adek, a 26-year-old Shiite who fled to the Germawa camp in the largely-autonomous Kurdish area of Dohuk.

"If the (Sunni militants) stay in Tel Afar, the Shiites can't go back home, but the Sunnis can," said 37-year-old Maitham. Both men gave only their first names for fear of reprisals by the militants.

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Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad, Diaa Hadid In Germawa, Iraq, and Julie Pace and Donna Cassata in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — For artist Pablo Picasso, 1901 was a pivotal time to experiment and find his own unique style. At just 19 years old, he was living in Paris, painting furiously and dirt poor, so it wasn't unusual for him to take one canvas and reuse it to paint a fresh idea.

Now scientists and art experts are revealing they've found a hidden painting beneath the surface of one of Picasso's first masterpieces, "The Blue Room." Using advances in infrared imagery, they have uncovered a hidden portrait of a bow-tied man with his face resting on his hand.

Now the question that conservators at The Phillips Collection in Washington hope to answer is simply: Who is he?

It's a mystery that's fueling new research about the painting created early in Picasso's career while he was working in Paris at the start of his distinctive blue period of melancholy subjects.

Curators and conservators revealed the discovery of the portrait for the first time to The Associated Press last week.

Experts long suspected there might be something under the surface of "The Blue Room," which has been part of The Phillips Collection since 1927. Brushstrokes on the piece clearly don't match the composition that depicts a woman bathing in Picasso's studio.

A conservator noted the odd brushstrokes in a 1954 letter, but it wasn't until the 1990s that an X-ray of the painting first revealed a fuzzy image of something under the picture. It wasn't clear, though, that it was a portrait.

In 2008, improved infrared imagery revealed for the first time a man's bearded face resting on his hand with three rings on his fingers. He's dressed in a jacket and bow tie, painted in a vertical composition.

"It's really one of those moments that really makes what you do special," said Patricia Favero, the conservator at The Phillips Collection who pieced together the best infrared image yet of the man's face.

"The second reaction was, 'Well, who is it?' We're still working on answering that question."

Scholars have ruled out the possibility that it was a self-portrait. One possible figure is the Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who hosted Picasso's first show in 1901. But there's no documentation and no clues left on the canvas, so the research continues.

Over the past five years, experts from The Phillips Collection, National Gallery of Art, Cornell University and Delaware's Winterthur Museum have developed a clearer image of the mystery picture under the surface. A technical analysis confirmed the hidden portrait is a work the Spanish artist likely painted just before "The Blue Room," curators said.

Since the portrait was discovered, conservators have been using other technology to scan the painting for further insights. Favero has been collaborating with other experts to scan the painting with multi-spectral imaging technology and X-ray fluorescence intensity mapping to try to identify and map the colors of the hidden painting. They would like to recreate a digital image approximating the colors Picasso used.

Curators are planning the first exhibit focused on "The Blue Room" as a seminal work in Picasso's career for 2017. It will examine the revelation of the man's portrait beneath the painting, as well as other Picasso works and his engagement with other artists.

For now, "The Blue Room" is part of a tour to South Korea through early 2015 as the research continues.

Hidden pictures have been found under other important Picasso paintings. A technical analysis of "La Vie" at the Cleveland Museum of Art revealed Picasso significantly reworked the painting's composition. And conservators found a portrait of a mustached man beneath Picasso's painting "Woman Ironing" at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

"When he had an idea, you know, he just had to get it down and realize it," Phillips curator Susan Behrends Frank told the AP, describing how Picasso had hurriedly painted "The Blue Room" over another complete picture. "He could not afford to acquire new canvases every time he had an idea that he wanted to pursue. He worked sometimes on cardboard because canvas was so much more expensive."

Dorothy Kosinski, the director of The Phillips Collection, said new knowledge about Picasso and his process can be discovered through the high-tech collaboration among museums.

"Our audiences are hungry for this. It's kind of detective work. It's giving them a doorway of access that I think enriches, maybe adds mystery, while allowing them to be part of a piecing together of a puzzle," she said. "The more we can understand, the greater our appreciation is of its significance in Picasso's life."

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Phillips Collection: http://www.phillipscollection.org

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Follow Brett Zongker on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DCArtBeat .