Greek firefighters planned to continue to work through the night to contain dozens of wildfires, including a massive blaze outside Athens, authorities said. Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis called for calm on Saturday and said ground forces "will continue their superhuman efforts" until dawn, when air operations and water drops will resume. Authorities reported 75 fires across the country. "What I want to emphasize is the sacrifice of all those fighting under extremely difficult circumstances that complicate the task ...

Hurricane Bill skipped Bermuda and set its sights on the Massachusetts coast Saturday morning, with forecasters warning people from New England to Newfoundland to be on alert. The storm is expected to pass off the coast of New England late Saturday or Saturday night and approach Nova Scotia on Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said. The Bermuda Weather Service discontinued a hurricane watch early Saturday. A tropical storm warning remained in effect, and the weather service warned that strong winds, ...

French investigators have ended the second phase of their search for the flight recorders from Air France Flight 447, the French air accident investigation agency BEA said Thursday. Flight 447 went down June 1 in the Atlantic Ocean in stormy weather as it flew from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Charles de Gaulle airport here, killing all 228 people on board. BEA said in a statement that the second phase of the search for the wreckage and the data and ...

Yin Jui-rong was one of the lucky ones. "I watched my village get buried," says the aboriginal farmer in southern Taiwan, one of hundreds in the mountainous region caught in the island's worst floods in 50 years. On August 8, Yin and 300 others in the township of Namasia fled their homes and climbed up a nearby mountain to higher ground. They spent three stormy days and nights under makeshift tents before the weather cleared enough for them to ...

An anticipated drop in humidity could hinder the efforts of firefighters battling a 6,800-acre blaze Saturday in Northern California, according to a fire official. Fire officials also expect a north-northeast wind and higher temperatures, all of which would make conditions drier, said Julie Hutchinson, spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The fire, covering 10 square miles in Santa Cruz County, lies alongside the Santa Cruz Mountains, about 60 miles south of San Francisco. The "outlook is ...

The wrath of Typhoon Morakot has affected nearly 9 million people across four coastal China provinces and killed dozens in Taiwan, officials said Tuesday. The typhoon, which stormed through the Philippines and Taiwan before slamming into eastern China over the weekend, has forced more than 1.4 million people to relocate on the mainland, China's Ministry of Civil Affairs said. At least six people -- four of them in Zhejiang province -- were killed along the coast, and more than ...

A massive mudslide unleashed by Typhoon Morakot spilled into a coastal China town, crushing a half dozen buildings and burying an unknown number of people, state-run media reported Tuesday. The mudslide occurred at about 10:30 p.m. (2:30 p.m. GMT) Monday in Pengxi Township within Zhejiang province -- one of eastern China's regions hardest hit by Morakot, the Xinhua news agency reported, citing local authorities. The incident destroyed apartment buildings standing four stories tall at the foot of a mountain. Rescuers ...

Police are searching for someone who killed a woman in her Massachusetts apartment and cut an 8-month-old fetus from her body. Since May 7, about 12,000 people have fled to Bossaso in northern Somalia where they await "the first opportunity offered by smugglers to take the perilous journey across the Gulf," the U.N. agency said. The people are among 232,000 Somalis who have fled their homes since early May because of fighting in Mogadishu between government forces and the Al-Shabaab ...

Britain's Prince William went hiking Friday with a group of homeless teenagers on a picturesque peak in northern England to raise awareness for two charities he patrons, spokespeople for the prince and one of the charities said. William, 27, was joined by six teenagers from Centrepoint, a charity for homeless young people, as they walked up Helvellyn, a mountain in the Cumbria region of northeastern England. Leading the group were members of Mountain Rescue, a volunteer-run charity. Prince William is ...

For the past three weeks in a row, Michael Jackson's "Number Ones" has been the biggest-selling album in the country. Each time, it's been disqualified from Billboard's flagship Billboard 200 chart, along with all Jackson's other releases, due to its age. That unusual run of asterisked Billboard 200 chart-toppers is now over. Which artist put an end to Jackson's posthumous flummoxing of the Billboard rules, you ask The answer is Chris Daughtry, whose "Leave This Town" bows atop the ...