AP - One of two Missouri hospital emergency rooms reopened Sunday, a day after being shut down under quarantine when eight people sickened by a dangerous chemical’s release sought treatment.
AP - Facing chaotic street protests demanding his resignation, Thailand’s embattled prime minister turned to lawmakers Sunday to find a way out of the crisis, but ended up having to fend off his critics’ calls to step down or call new elections.
AP - Although attention is focused on the petroleum industry as Hurricane Gustav takes aim at the Gulf Coast, billions of dollars are at stake in other economic sectors: New Orleans’ trademark tourism industry, the shipping business, sugar harvesting and even such niche products as red-hot Tabasco sauce.
AFP - The United States girded for disaster Sunday as Hurricane Gustav plowed toward Louisiana, with over a million people fleeing the Gulf Coast and oil production all but shut off in the Gulf of Mexico.
AP - The drawdown of Marines from the former Sunni insurgent stronghold of Anbar will take time because there is still much work to be done, a top U.S. commander said Sunday on the eve of the once violent province’s transfer to Iraqi security control.
Reuters - An opposition Internet news site
owner in Russia’s troubled Ingushetia region was fatally shot
on Sunday soon after being detained by police, and his
colleagues called for a rally to protest his death.
AP - The executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union has stepped aside while under investigation for allegations she paid thousands of dollars in union funds to a former boyfriend, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.
AP - Stranded by hundreds of miles of floodwaters and trapped on rooftops and trees, desperate villagers stormed rescue boats on Sunday as they tried to escape the flooding that tore through a riverbank and spilled over northern India’s vast plains.
AP - Americans are changing the game plan for retirement, with millions laboring right past the traditional retirement age and working into their late 60s and beyond.
Reuters - Authorities evacuating residents
from New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Gustav are making amends
with four-legged friends after thousands of pets perished in
Hurricane Katrina three years ago.
AFP - Scientists Sunday said they could no longer rule out a fast-track melting of the Greenland icesheet — a prospect, once the preserve of doomsayers, that would see much of the world’s coastline drowned by rising seas.
AP - Cody Miller was a high school football player who was allergic to ragweed. Douglas Briggs was a doctor coping with pain from an old back injury.
AP - A top conservative cleric close to Iran’s supreme leader criticized the economic policies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying they threaten to keep Iran from its goal of becoming a regional superpower by 2025.
AP - The owner of an independent Web site critical of authorities was shot and killed Sunday by police in a volatile province in southern Russia, his colleague said.
AFP - Months after US authorities sounded the alarm, European officials are warning of dangerous possible side effects from the wrinkle-smoothing injection Botox, according to a German news report.