Scott Neuman

An apparent gas explosion at a jail in Pensacola, Fla., has killed at least two inmates and injured more than 100 people, including some corrections officers, according to local reports. But it's not clear yet whether the incident at the Escambia County Jail has anything to do with the

People of the small Canadian town of Trout River, Newfoundland, have a big problem that just might blow up in their faces: what to do with a giant blue whale carcass that washed up on the beach and that some say threatens to spontaneously combust.

The 80-foot-long whale appeared on ...

The botched execution of death row inmate Clayton Lockett on Tuesday in Oklahoma is sparking a reassessment of lethal injection.

The Washington Post says Lockett's aborted execution and subsequent death by heart attack, along with ongoing controversies over the drugs used and how they are administered, "have begun ...

Thailand's election authorities have scheduled new parliamentary polls for July 20 after an opposition boycott of a vote earlier this year led the country's Constitutional Court to declare the results invalid.

It wasn't immediately clear if the pro-monarchy opposition — which has called for Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra's ...

Growth in the U.S. economy slowed dramatically — to just 0.1 percent — in the January-March quarter amid a particularly harsh winter, according to a report Wednesday from the Commerce Department.

The latest GDP figure was down from 2.6 percent growth in the fourth quarter of last year and represents ...

Australian officials are dismissing reports by a marine exploration company that wreckage from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet might have been located in the Bay of Bengal, thousands of miles north of the search area where the plane is presumed to have gone down.

GeoResonance, a private firm based in ...

The weather system that spawned tornadoes that killed at least 35 people this week throughout the South and Midwest is dumping heavy rain, triggering fears of major flooding.

After a slew of tornadoes that began overnight Sunday, forecasts for a third day of deadly twisters on Tuesday thankfully did not ...

North Korea has conducted live artillery drills near a disputed western maritime border with the South just days after President Obama and his South Korean counterpart urged Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.

The exercises occurred near Yeonpyeong Island, which was hit by North Korean shelling in 2010, ...

This post was updated at 3:51 p.m. ET.

At least six people were wounded in a shooting early Tuesday at a FedEx facility in Kennesaw, Ga., according to local police. The shooter is reportedly dead in an apparent suicide.

Cobb County Police Department spokesman Mike Bowman told The Atlanta ...

This post was updated at 9:30 a.m. ET.

The European Union has followed the U.S. in imposing a new round of sanctions on Russia for the Kremlin's intervention in Crimea and alleged support of separatist elements inside eastern Ukraine.

The sanctions, which specifically target Russian President Vladimir Putin's "inner ...

This post was updated at 6:15 p.m. ET.

A second day of tornadoes has caused devastation in the South, killing more than a dozen people in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. Some 50 twisters were reported in the region in a 24-hour period from Monday into Tuesday, according to meteorologists.

Australia's prime minister says the chance of finding any floating debris from MH370 is "highly unlikely" and that the search for the missing Malaysian Airliner will need to shift away from visual searches and focus instead on scouring the seafloor.

Tony Abbott said that at this point, weeks after the ...

An Egyptian court on Monday sentenced 683 people to die, including the top leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

It's the latest mass trial aimed at the Muslim Brotherhood party of ousted President Mohammed Morsi. The defendants were charged with an attack on a police station in the city of ...

Update at 9 a.m. ET:

The White House announced sanctions Monday against seven top Russian officials with links to President Vladimir Putin, including freezing their assets and banning them from obtaining U.S. visas. It also threatened to impose more economic sanctions on key sectors of Russia's economy if there is ...

_{This post was updated at 1:53 p.m. ET}

Emergency officials were searching Monday for survivors after tornadoes tore through parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma overnight, killing at least 14 people and leveling entire neighborhoods.

"We don't have a count on injuries or missing. We're trying to get a handle on ...

New York City is 20 times more likely to flood during a storm than it was in the mid-1800s, partly owing to sea-level rise linked to global climate change, according to a new study.

The maximum water height at New York Harbor during storms such as Hurricane Sandy has ...

A Canadian company has signed a contract to open the first deep-sea mineral mine off the coast of Papua New Guinea, realizing a decades-long ambition to tap the seafloor's vast resources.

Nautilus Minerals is hoping to extract copper, gold and silver at a depth of about 5,000 feet as ...

There's never been much doubt that Pope John Paul II was destined for sainthood. In more than a quarter-century as the head of the Holy See, he left such an indelible mark that at his funeral in 2005, mourners chanted "Santo subito (sainthood now)."

That road might have seemed ...

A February accident at a nuclear waste dump that resulted in the contamination of 21 workers resulted in part from "poor management, ineffective maintenance and a lack of proper training and oversight," a Department of Energy report concludes.

NPR's Geoff Brumfiel says the report, released Thursday, says the release of ...