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NEW YORK (AP) — Millions of people from Maine to the Carolinas awoke Tuesday without electricity, and an eerily quiet New York City was all but closed off by car, train and air as superstorm Sandy steamed inland, still delivering punishing wind and rain. The U.S. death toll climbed to 38, many of the victims killed by falling trees. The full extent of the damage in New Jersey, where the storm roared ashore Monday night with hurricane-force winds of 80 mph, was unclear. Police and fire officials, some with their own departments flooded, fanned out to rescue hundreds.

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. (AP) — A train hauling coal derailed on a bridge in this city’s historic district, killing two college students who had been drinking together and hanging out on the tracks. Nearly two dozen railroad cars flipped over, including some that fell onto vehicles in a parking lot below the bridge, officials said. The students, both 19-year-old women, posted photos and comments from what appeared to be the bridge shortly before the train derailed around midnight Monday, according to Twitter feeds with the same names as the victims.

How dramatic, I can just see Biden in Blair House sobbing, blubbering, tears draining as he laments the victims and their loved ones. I can see him feeling badly about this, but really, do we need the drama queen presentation. I think it was Steven Stills who sang "Say what you mean, mean what you say...

Devastating thunderstorms Friday left nine people in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia dead and hundreds of thousands without power in the region as residents across the area face more extreme temperatures and the possibility of additional thunderstorms this weekend. According to the Associated Press, the storms were blamed for the deaths of six people in Virginia; two in New Jersey; two in Maryland; one in Ohio; one in Kentucky; and one in Washington. More thunderstorms were expected in the D.C. area heading into Saturday night, and triple-digit temperatures were forecast for Sunday with highs expected to reach 100....

Violent evening storms following a day of triple-digit temperatures wiped out power to more than 2 million people across the eastern United States and caused two fatalities in Virginia — including a 90-year-old woman asleep in bed when a tree slammed into her home, a police spokeswoman said Saturday. Widespread power outages were reported from Indiana to New Jersey, with the bulk of the service interruptions concentrated on Washington, D.C., and the surrounding areas. Earlier Friday, the nation’s capital reached 104 degrees — topping a record of 101 set in 1934.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Through music, scripture and song, Don Cornelius was remembered Thursday as the man who elevated black culture and entertainment with his "Soul Train," demolishing barriers of race and culture, and changing American history.

The Department of Homeland Security makes fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the specific purpose of scanning the networks for 'sensitive' words - and tracking people who use them. Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS's 'watch' list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group. The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as 'human to animal' and 'outbreak' to other, more obscure words such as 'drill' and 'strain'. The DHS also...

The dead include (1) a young man who passed away at the Occupy Oklahoma encampment; (2) a woman at Occupy Vancouver overdosed; (3) a protester in Bloomington, Indiana, was found dead; (4) a man was found dead in his tent at Occupy New Orleans; (5) a man shot himself in an encampment at Occupy Burlington in Vermont; (6) a protester was shot dead at Occupy Oakland; and now this death at Salt Lake City brings the grim toll to 7 deaths.

RENO, Nev. – The death toll in the crash of a World War II-era plane during a Reno air race rose to nine people Saturday as investigators combed through wreckage and scoured amateur video clips to determine why the aircraft suddenly spiraled out of control and plummeted to the ground near hundreds of spectators. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/09/17/federal-investigators-looking-into-what-caused-deadly-crash-at-air-show/#ixzz1YGNn9wu6

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- Yosemite National Park officials are trying to determine why a man fell to his death while climbing Half Dome Monday evening. Park officials tell Action News, search and rescue crews recovered the body of an unidentified man Tuesday morning at the base of the popular dome.

Federal authorities are investigating the deaths of at least six golden eagles at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's Pine Tree Wind Project in the Tehachapi Mountains, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday. So far, no wind-energy company has been prosecuted by federal wildlife authorities in connection with the death of birds protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. A prosecution in the Pine Tree case could cause some rethinking and redesigning of this booming alternative energy source. Facilities elsewhere also have been under scrutiny, according to a...

The number of fatal firearms accidents for the last six years of record are: 2002 - 762; 2003 - 730; 2004 - 649; 2005 - 630; 2006 - 680. 2007 - 613 I had to hunt a bit for this information, which I think many are interested in. The accidental firearm death rate is down over 94% since 1905. You have to do a bit of work at the link to find the figures in the source.

KABUL — Eight foreign soldiers died in one day in Afghanistan, officials said Sunday, including four in a single incident believed to have been a vehicle accident. The four died Saturday of "non-battle related injuries" in southern Afghanistan, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement. That incident, in a region containing many of Afghanistan's bloodiest battlegrounds, came on a day when ISAF said four other foreign soldiers also died in separate insurgent attacks -- three in the south and one in the east. In line with policy, ISAF did not give further details of what happened...

BAGHDAD: Two American soldiers have been killed during a mission in southern Iraq, the US military said on Saturday. The fatalities raised to 4,450 the number of US soldiers who have died in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, according to an AFP tally based on data from an independent website. “Two US service members were killed yesterday (Friday) while conducting operations in southern Iraq,” the military said in a statement without giving any other details. Sixty members of the US military were killed in Iraq in 2010, according to icasualties.org, by far the smallest number...

TOKYO—The Japanese government raised its assessment of the monthlong crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the highest severity level by international standards—a rating only conferred so far upon the Chernobyl accident. Japan's nuclear regulators said the plant has likely released so much radiation into the environment that it must boost the accident's severity rating on the International Nuclear Event scale to a 7 from 5 currently. That is the same level reached by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union, which struck almost exactly 25 years ago, on April 26, 1986. "Based on the cumulative...

(CNSNews.com) – At least 858 U.S. soldiers have died in the Afghanistan war since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. That equals 60.13 percent of the 1,427 American soldier fatalities so far in the ongoing 10-year war in that country. For March 2011, there were 26 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan, including 4 non-combat related fatalities. That brought the total combat and non-combat deaths for 2011 (January, February, and March) to 70. Those fatalities include 57 combat-related deaths and 13 non-combat deaths. For the 858 U.S. deaths since Obama’s inauguration, 791 have been combat-related. This means that for...

Inconvenient Truth: Wind Energy Has Killed More Americans Than Nuclear By Lachlan Markay Created 03/17/2011 - 1:43pm By Lachlan Markay | March 17, 2011 | 13:43 There has been quite a bit of hysteria among some major media outlets in the past few days regarding the potential dangers of nuclear power. Some have even suggested that the benefits of nuclear energy do not outweigh its potential dangers to human life. The dangers of nuclear power, while serious, need to be put in perspective. To that end, here's an interesting fact you won't be hearing from the mainstream press: wind energy...

This is Mark Crutcher's compelling 320-page expose' of the American abortion industry. A unique and uncensored look at our nation's most wrenching social issue, it has already become a must read for anyone seeking to learn the truth about the abortion issue. It fully documents that women are being sexually assaulted, mutilated, and killed inside perfectly legal abortion clinics. It also shows how pro-choice groups have used raw political power to fight off regulation of the abortion clinic business. One chapter exposes a massive cover-up of abortion clinic disasters being carried out by an agency of the U.S. government. Other...

The recent mysterious deaths of birds and fish are causing alarm among naturalists around the world. Birds are literally falling dead out of the sky, and fish are washing up dead on shores and rivers across North America and around the world. The reaction from the mainstream media seems strangely subdued, as if they're all just blowing this off as some unexplained quirk about the natural world that should be largely ignored. NaturalNews readers think differently. We are concerned when thousands of dead birds fall out of the sky for no apparent reason. The sky itself may not be falling,...

A TV station in the East Texas town of Tyler reports that hundreds more dead birds have been discovered along the sides of a highway bridge. This news adds fresh fuel to a growing conundrum over the cause of hundreds of thousands of avian deaths in localities thousands of miles apart. The station, KLTV, acknowledges that around 200 birds were found dead this morning on state highway 155. The birds, identified as American coots or mud-hens, are the first of this species to be cited in the recent spate of deaths. As with previous cases, the cause of death is...