Willie Thornton is on a rescue mission. One morning in March he set out to save Desmond Dunklin, a 19-year-old who should have graduated last year from Greenville High School in Greenville, Alabama. Thornton, 48, the school's dropout prevention coordinator, and Lt. Malcolm Owens, the school's police officer, drive the five minutes to Dunklin's house. "I need for you to show up," Thornton tells a sleepy Dunklin, who clearly has just been awakened by the men's repeated knocking on his ...

A top executive for the company which built the "black box" aboard Air France Flight 447 says he hopes his firm's 100 percent recovery record from air accidents will be maintained despite fears the device may be lost at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Although some debris has been retrieved, air crash investigators remain in the dark about what caused the airliner to plunge into the sea off the coast of Brazil with 228 people onboard earlier this month. ...

Tail-diving passenger numbers, the long-delayed debut of a new jet and the ghost of Air France flight 447 haunts this week's Paris Air Show. One of the commercial aerospace industry's most prestigious events, the biennial show is celebrating its 100th anniversary with the industry facing grim economic numbers and the aftermath of the transatlantic crash of a Paris-bound Airbus A330 that killed 228 passengers and crew on May 31. The air show comes at a time when the commercial airline ...

If the 300,000 West Bank settlers identified by the American President as an obstacle to Middle East peace were expecting Bibi Netanyahu to support their cherished dream of an Israel stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean sea, they were disappointed on Sunday night. The right wing leader instead took a sharp and unexpected lurch to the center and said he'd support a two-state solution, meaning something called Palestine is a step closer to being inked onto their 3,000-year-old ...

As a French nuclear submarine arrived off the coast of Brazil to join the effort to locate the black box from Air France Flight 447 on Thursday, aviation experts stressed the necessity of recovering those cockpit recorders in order to learn what exactly brought down the Airbus A330 and the 228 people on board. In past inquiries into airline disasters, investigators have been able to figure out the cause by piecing together clues from the wreckage itself, sometimes without ...

As Apple kicks off a much-anticipated developers' conference Monday in San Francisco, California, much of the buzz is about the possibility of a new iPhone release. The tech company says it will discuss a new version of software for the revolutionary smartphone, which will let users copy and paste messages, search their iPhones, and write e-mails and text messages from a wide-screen view. Tech bloggers are hoping for something more: a 3.0 version of the iPhone hardware. An iPhone 3.0 ...

Baldwin, Paul •release from prison of after serving one-year term for stealing a can of beer is quickly followed by another arrest of — the 153rd — for assault Baron Cohen, Sacha •Eminem's face is landed on by bare butt of during MTV Movie Awards, leading to days of babble about whether or not the stunt had in fact been planned, which — DUH! — it had Berlin, Alan David •firing of from position as aide to Pennsylvania state senator famous for ...

Nevada is legalizing domestic partnerships, with the state Assembly voting Sunday evening to override a veto by the governor, officials said. (CNN) -- The enduring moments of our lives, the ones that stay with us the longest, don't necessarily make the headlines. The other afternoon I was talking with a woman by the name of Virginia Florey. She's 80 years old; she has lived in Midland, Michigan, all her life. She was telling me that when she was 11 years ...

The enduring moments of our lives, the ones that stay with us the longest, don't necessarily make the headlines. (CNN) -- The enduring moments of our lives, the ones that stay with us the longest, don't necessarily make the headlines. The other afternoon I was talking with a woman by the name of Virginia Florey. She's 80 years old; she has lived in Midland, Michigan, all her life. She was telling me that when she was 11 years old, she ...

Summer is here, and that means so are summer jobs. While lots of young people find work as lifeguards or camp counselors, just as many are forced off the beaten path to find their first paychecks. Don't worry if you get stuck with an odd job that might not totally dovetail with your life goals, though. Lots of wildly successful celebrities have had some strange jobs before hitting it big. Here are just a few quirky vocations held ...