USA
Tropical storm Cristobal, the first tropical storm to menace the Southeast seaboard this hurricane season, headed northeast parallel to the North Carolina coast early Sunday, the National Hurricane Center reported. Slow strengthening is forecast, along with several inches of rain.
Federal investigators on Saturday began trying to figure out why one of the world's largest mobile cranes toppled over at a Houston refinery, killing four contract workers and injuring seven others. Officials at the LyondellBasell refinery hope that video cameras mounted around the plant can shed light on what led the 30-story-tall crane to collapse (above). Crane-related deaths have also occurred in New York, Miami, and Las Vegas in recent months.
The US tomato industry estimates it has lost more than $100 million because of a public scare that had implicated tomatoes in a national salmonella outbreak. The government lifted its salmonella warning about tomatoes late last week after tests failed to find tomatoes that contained the salmonella strain that reportedly sickened 1,220 people.
A team of elite Canadian searchers ended a week-long hunt in remote areas of Nevada for the remains of American Steve Fossett, finding no sign of the missing adventurer or his plane but eliminating much rugged terrain from areas that still haven't been thoroughly searched since his disappearance last September.
"The Dark Knight," the latest Batman movie (above), set a one-day box office record with $66.4 million in receipts during its opening day, Warner Bros. reported over the weekend. The movie's Friday haul surpassed the previous record of $59.8 million set last year by "Spider-Man 3."
After 16 months of studying homelessness in Nassau County, N.Y., officials of the Long Island community have come up with a plan they hope will end homelessness in the next 10 years, Newsday.com reported. Among other things, the plan calls for a comprehensive tracking of local poverty, better services for the mentally ill, and additional rental housing.
Speech skills, including all sound production in vertebrates, can be traced back to the ability of fish to communicate with sound, according to a research study led by Cornell University professor Andrew Bass and published in the journal Science.
