Officials toured the scene of a two-train collision in Connecticut that injured dozens of people and halted rail traffic from New York to Boston on Friday.Area hospitals reported seeing 70 people after the rush-hour collision. Two remained in critical condition on Saturday.The damage is absolutely staggering, Sen. Richard Blumenthal told reporters on Saturday after a tour of the scene. Ribbons ...

    

Authorities are investigating the overnight shooting death of a 32-year-old man in New Yorks Greenwich Village as a hate crime after police said the shooter may have hurled anti-gay slurs."This clearly looks to be a hate crime," NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters on Saturday.While investigators continued to piece together the events leading up to the shooting, police identified the victim...

    

Witnesses in southwestern Virginia said a car drove into a crowd at a parade Saturday and hurt several people, but the nature of their injuries wasn't immediately known. It happened around 2:30 p.m. during the Hikers Parade at the Trail Days festival, an annual celebration of the Appalachian Trail in Damascus, a small mountain town near the Tennessee state line about a half-hour drive east of...

    

Tracie Felker and Joe Marion share a deep passion for Scouting. Each has a son who attained the top rank of Eagle, and each has spent numerous years and thousands of hours volunteering as Scout leaders, promoting Scout values.And thats where they diverge. When the Boy Scouts of America votes next week on whether to admit gay youth as members, Felker and Marion hope for opposite outcomes.Marion s...

    

NASA is getting plenty of advice and sympathy as it assesses whether its Kepler planet-hunting telescope can be revived after the failure of its reaction-control system. The reactions from scientists and engineers range from repair tips to an Audenesque elegy. Here's a sampling:How to fix KeplerThe reason why the $600 million Kepler spacecraft can no longer search for planetary transits is tha...

    

Waiting hours for a cellphone to charge may become a thing of the past, thanks to an 18-year-old high-school student's invention. She won a $50,000 prize Friday at an international science fair for creating an energy storage device that can be fully juiced in 20 to 30 seconds.The fast-charging device is a so-called supercapacitor, a gizmo that can pack a lot of energy into a tiny space, charges qu...

    

Imagine having a drink with dinner at a restaurant only to be pulled over on the way home and slapped with a DUI. That could happen under a proposed plan to toughen the drunk driving laws across the country, and it has restaurateurs alarmed.The National Transportation Safety Board wants states to make it illegal to drive with a blood-alcohol content level above 0.05. Currently all U.S. states set ...

    

Are gadgets making us dumber? Two new studies suggest they might be. One found that people who are interrupted by technology score 20 percent lower on a standard cognition test. A second demonstrated that some students, even when on their best behavior, can't concentrate on homework for more than two minutes without distracting themselves by using social media or writing an email.Interruptions are...

    

It's the hottest not-yet-confirmed story in entertainment at the moment: Are Beyonce and Jay-Z about to announce that baby No. 2 is on the way?E! Online and other outlets seem positive this is the case, though thus far "sources" are the only place information has come from -- no one's spokesperson has stepped forward to put the official stamp on it. But perhaps Beyonce herself reportedly did, on a...

    

A US Airways flight made a belly landing at Newark International Airport in the early morning hours on Saturday after the plane reported a problem with its landing gear, a spokesman for the airline said.No injuries were reported after Express Flight 4560 landed just after 1 a.m. carrying 31 passengers and three crew from Philadelphia, US Airways spokesman Davien Anderson said in a statement. The D...