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LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — Eccentric Texas businessman-turned-artist Stanley Marsh 3, whose partially buried row of Cadillacs became a road-side tourist attraction in the 1970s, died Tuesday. He was 76.

Marsh, long known in his hometown of Amarillo as a prankster and philanthropist but who faced indictment alleging he molested teenage boys late in life, died in Amarillo, criminal attorney Paul Nugent said.

An heir to his family's oil-and-gas fortune, Marsh was a quirky but successful banker and television executive. But he was best known for his art, most notably "Cadillac Ranch," a row of 10 graffiti-splattered cars seemingly standing on their noses along Interstate 40 west of Amarillo.

The display, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary Saturday, quickly became a tourist attraction after Marsh commissioned the Ant Farm, a radical art and design collective, to build it in 1974. The cars — acquired from junkyards, private owners and used car lots — were moved a mile west in 1997.

In 2012, when Marsh was 74, several lawsuits were filed alleging he'd paid two boys, ages 15 and 16 at the time, for sexual acts. He settled the lawsuits the next year, but was indicted two months later on charges that accused him of sexually assaulting six teenagers in recent years. Marsh denied the allegations and vowed to fight them in court. No trial date had been set.

Marsh's creations include a mesa painted to look as if it were floating and a football field-sized pool table hidden in the Panhandle terrain that only could be seen from the air. Hundreds of his mock road signs popped up in Amarillo neighborhoods, bearing such slogans as "Big Deal" and "My Grandmother Can Whip Your Grandmother."

"Amarillo has lost a bit of its color," longtime friend Wyatt McSpadden said. "He certainly enlivened what might have been a kind of dull place."

But Marsh, whose health had deteriorated in recent years after a series of strokes, had been pulling pranks in Amarillo long before.

"By nature I'm an introvert, and I'm a shy person," Marsh once said. "When I do these stunts, which cause a great deal of attention, I can kind of shift gears and act like a master of ceremonies."

Marsh was born on Jan. 31, 1938, in Amarillo. His father and grandfather made their fortunes in the oil and gas business, but Marsh didn't follow in their footsteps. His given name was Stanley Marsh "III," but he changed it to "3" because he thought the former was pretentious.

His creative bent began as a child and included carving swords and painting with watercolors, prompting some to tell him that made him an artist.

"It's a lot better to be an artist than to be just somebody who makes things, so I said, 'Of course I'm an artist,'" he told The Associated Press in 2009.

He earned his bachelor's degree in economics and master's degree in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Wendy, adopted five children and had numerous grandchildren, and lived in Toad Hall, a 300-acre estate on the outskirts of Amarillo.

He returned to Amarillo after college in the late 1960s and impressed those who knew him as a prankster with his business skills by heading a local bank. In 1967, using some family money, Marsh purchased KVII-TV and turned it into the city's top-rated television station within a few years.

Marsh sold the station in 2002 but continued to go to his office and pursue artistic endeavors.

In 1975, Marsh showed up at the Washington bribery trial of then-U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connally, a Texan accused in a milk-price scandal, dressed in a fringe Western jacket and carrying a pail of cow dung.

Despite such antics, Marsh said he considered himself mature and responsible, a "leader of men who is doing what I want to do, and more people should be like me."

But some felt he went too far.

In 1994, Marsh was accused of locking a local teenager in a chicken coop and threatening him with a hammer for stealing one of the hundreds of diamond-shaped street signs he'd placed around town, some of which read: "Steal This Sign." Marsh later pleaded no contest to two misdemeanors.

Although his art and shenanigans were often public, Marsh said he never wanted to be figured out. In 1994, he said he wanted his epitaph to read in part: "Thanks, everybody. I had a good time."

As the U.S. steers warships closer to Iraq and beefs up its embassy's security in Baghdad with nearly 300 troops, a nagging question has resurfaced.

What compelling interests does Washington still have in a nation where all U.S. forces were pulled out 2 1/2 years ago?

Three days after Sunni militants calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria seized Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, President Obama paused on the White House lawn and issued a warning.

"Terrorists," he said, were being allowed to overrun part of Iraq's territory. "This poses a danger to Iraq and its people," he added, "and given the nature of these terrorists, it could pose a threat eventually to American interests as well."

Just what those American interests might be, the president did not say. But a few days later, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asserted on CNN that Iraq was quickly becoming a new staging area for an attack on the United States.

"The number of people that could die in this country from getting this wrong is going to be far greater than 4,000, because they're getting weapons they didn't have before," Graham warned. "The economic chaos to the world is going to be far greater than this — and the money we spent in saving Iraq. This is another 9/11 in the making."

For some experts on the region, that may be an overstatement. "I think, if they're referring to an exact replication of 9/11, I'm not entirely sure that's likely," says Georgetown University's Bruce Hoffman, who directs its Center for Security Studies.

Hoffman thinks the risk is more subtle. ISIS is focused right now on gaining more ground in Iraq, he says, but the group also has a large following and fighters with Western passports.

"What worries me, and I'm sure what concerns members of Congress, is that in respect to the success and the notoriety that they've achieved in the past few days, that reach may in fact grow," Hoffman says.

Still, according to Persian Gulf expert Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, Americans are wary of new entanglements after a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pollack, who once strongly backed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, now says the U.S. has no good options in Iraq. He thinks America's interest in Iraq goes beyond terrorism — it's also clearly economic.

"It will be a real challenge for an American president to go back to the American public and say, you know what, our economy rests still on the oil market, and the oil market is heavily influenced by whatever happens in places like Iraq, and if we don't deal with the problems in Iraq, we could face a severe recession at home," he says. "But I do think that that is probably the most compelling argument that can be made."

Other experts on the region question whether oil, terrorism, or anything else justifies U.S. military action in Iraq.

"Even if we took a kind of inside-the-Beltway, mainstream approach to U.S. foreign policy interests, I can't see what they are here," says Juan Cole, director of the University of Michigan's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

If anything, Cole argues, U.S. airstrikes against ISIS could turn many others in Iraq not currently in the fight to take up arms. "For the U.S. to treat this as a series of al-Qaeda conquests and then to exercise military force to suppress it," says Cole, "I think risks misunderstanding the situation and deeply alienating the Sunni population of northern Iraq."

Pollack notes that Iraq is once again in a state of civil war — just as it was seven years ago. But unlike then, the U.S. no longer has either the political or military clout it once had, he says.

"I think that we have to recognize that we're not probably going to be able to do a whole lot in Iraq," he says. "We may not be able to shut down this civil war, not any time soon."

Which means that while the U.S. may still have some stake in what happens in Iraq, it's been left with little leverage to do anything about it.

Singer-songwriter Jose James' music lives at the intersection of jazz harmony, pop songcraft and hip-hop rhythm. Reviewer Tom Moon says that James' latest album, While You Were Sleeping, shows phenomenal growth.

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."