Death Toll

The death toll from this week's tornadoes continued to climb Saturday morning, making the storms fueled by record winds the second worst in history. As the rescue and relief efforts continued through much of seven states, officials braced for what was being called a humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people remained without power; usable water was in demand. In hard-hit Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama decided to end the school year early. The Alabama Emergency Management Agency on Saturday morning reported that the state's death toll has risen to 254, pushing the region's total to more than 340. Mississippi and Tennessee each reported 34 deaths.

WASHINGTON - As President Obama prepared to deliver a major speech on national security Thursday, his administration acknowledged for the first time that it had killed four U.S. citizens - one more than previously known - in drone missile strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. The disclosure Wednesday raised fresh questions about the secret drone campaign, a signature part of Obama's counter-terrorism effort, in which several thousand suspected terrorists, militants and others have been killed.

The number of lives lost and families shattered from Hurricane Sandy continued to climb Saturday, with the death toll now at more than 110. The number of lives claimed in New York from the super storm was reduced by one to 48, after medical examiners determined two deaths initially linked to the storm were not, and another body was found during the recovery effort. INTERACTIVE: Before and after Hurricane Sandy Hardest-hit parts of the state are still buried in rubble and tunnels in metropolitan New York still flooded, leaving officials to wearily expect that the number could keep climbing.

MOORE, Okla. - The grueling recovery from a killer tornado began Tuesday as search-and-rescue operations continued, but authorities acknowledged that the likelihood of finding anyone alive grew dimmer by the moment. In a rare bit of good news, the state medical examiner slashed the confirmed death tally in half. On Monday night, officials had pegged it at 51, including 20 children, and said the toll would grow. But some victims had been counted more than once, officials said Tuesday, as they reported the number of deaths at 24, including nine children.

You know that texting while driving is dangerous. But just how dangerous is it? According to researchers from the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Ft. Worth, texting behind the wheel accounted for 16,141 deaths between 2002 and 2007. The researchers arrived at that figure by analyzing nationwide traffic data from the Fatality Accident Reporting System and texting records from the Federal Communications Commission and CTIA, the wireless telecom industry group.

The city of Joplin was changed from a typical small Missouri city into a zone of frenzied effort after Sunday's tornado as rescuers raced bad weather and coped with a shortage of supplies. At least 116 people were killed in the tornado, and the toll is expected to rise. Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr announced the latest death toll at a Monday afternoon news conference, according to the Associated Press. Rohr said seven people had been rescued. By midmorning Monday, about 20 hours after the tornado tore a six-mile wound in the heart of the city, residents searched through the rubble in what reminded many of a war zone.

Tornadoes roared through the Midwest on Wednesday, further spreading death and damage and threatening rescue and cleanup efforts in some already hard-hit areas. At least 14 deaths have been reported in recent days in Oklahoma and Arkansas, and the death toll in Joplin, Mo., stood at about 122 from the single deadliest tornado since the National Weather Service began keeping records in 1950. Severe storms began brewing Wednesday afternoon over eastern Kansas and were expected to roll across Missouri, southern Illinois, southern Indiana and Kentucky, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the National Storm Prediction Center.

A massive storm system was marching toward the Northeast on Wednesday, upending post-Christmas travel plans after dumping snow and sleet on the middle of the country on Christmas Day and producing tornadoes through the South. The storm, which stretches from Michigan to Florida, has been blamed for six deaths so far. As the storm moves from the Tennessee Valley to the Mid-Atlantic, heavy snowfall, tornadoes and significant icing are possible, the National Weather Service said.  PHOTOS: Northeast braces for winter storm The storm could dump as much as 18 inches of snow from western New York to central Maine.

As more people in Europe fall ill from an especially dangerous strain of E. coli, the germ’s worst-case complication, hemolytic uremic syndrome, is grabbing headlines. The condition , which can shut down the kidneys, is potentially fatal—as evidenced by the mounting death toll. Though most strains of E. coli are harmless, this particular outbreak appears to be caused by a virulent strain known as enterohemorrhagic E. coli. It leads to hemolytic uremic syndrome in about 8% of those infected , often children.

The Chilean government said Thursday that correcting errors in tabulating the victims in Saturday's devastating earthquake may reduce the death toll, even as a second, unrelated temblor shook northern Chile. President Michelle Bachelet said the number of missing was added to the number of dead in Maule, the hardest-hit province. The death toll there was revised to 315 from about 565. Overall, the government previously said that slightly more than 800 people were confirmed dead.

BAGHDAD - Car bombs around Iraq killed at least 65 people Monday amid the worst wave of violence in the country since U.S. troops withdrew a year and a half ago. The attacks, which occurred along busy commercial streets in Shiite and Sunni areas, followed a string of bombings and other attacks last week that killed more than 200 people. The ongoing violence has stoked the impression among Iraqis that the country is sliding back into chaos reminiscent of the civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives between 2005 and 2008.

Chinese health officials are warning that the death toll from the H7N9 bird flu is likely to rise in the weeks and months ahead. In a report on the outbreak that began in China in February, doctors and researchers from from several public health agencies said they suspected that most of the 82 people with confirmed cases of bird flu contracted the H7N9 virus from healthy-looking animals. “To date, the mortality rate is 21%, but since many of [sic] patients with confirmed H7N9 virus infection remain critically ill, we suspect that the mortality may increase,” they wrote in their study, published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

NEW DELHI - As rescue workers clawed through the wreckage Thursday after a building collapsed in Bangladesh, the toll rose to at least 225 people killed, most of them apparel workers, and over 1,000 injured. News footage showed desperate workers digging through the night, crafting escape chutes from bolts of fabric. Labor rights activists reported that workers noticed large cracks in the building but were ordered back to their sewing machines shortly before the Rana Plaza building pancaked Wednesday morning just outside the nation's capital of Dhaka.

Gunmen reportedly overtook a town north of Baghdad as battles continued to rage Thursday between Iraqi government forces and Sunni fighters. The violence began Tuesday after security forces stormed a Sunni Muslim protest encampment in Hawija, spurring clashes and revenge attacks that spread throughout Sunni areas. More than 100 people have reportedly lost their lives over the past three days. Protests had simmered for months ahead of the Hawija clashes, as Sunni demonstrators charged that they had been marginalized and mistreated by the Shiite Muslim-dominated government.

KANO, Nigeria - Local government officials and a military spokesman in Nigeria agreed that security forces and Islamist militants had battled in recent days in the country's far northeast. But they offered widely varying accounts Monday of how many people, including civilians, had been killed. Some officials said about 185 people were slain in the clashes, with some residents blaming government troops in part for the deaths. Security officials put the number lower. The fighting began Friday in Baga, a fishing community near Lake Chad, but news of the violence reached Abuja, the capital, only late Sunday.

Reporting from Beijing --  A strong earthquake struck China's mountainous Sichuan province  Saturday morning, leaving at least 113 people dead and more than 3,000 injured. Chinese authorities assessed the magnitude of the quake at 7.0, while the U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.6. Although nowhere near in magnitude, the tremor evoked troubling memories of the great earthquake almost exactly five years ago along the same fault line that killed almost 90,000. The earthquake's epicenter was about 80 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, in Lushan country near the city of Ya'an.

The enormity of the human toll from Japan's worst earthquake in recorded history pressed persistently into the consciousness of the island nation's rattled citizens as rescue workers extracted thousands more bodies from the coastal wastelands that were once thriving communities. More than 1,000 bodies washed ashore Monday in Miyagi prefecture, the northeastern area hardest hit by the magnitude 8.9 quake that struck offshore on Friday and the devastating tsunami it triggered. Search-and-rescue crews, now finding few survivors among the waterlogged debris, extracted about 2,000 corpses on the fourth day of the disaster that Prime Minister Naoto Kan has proclaimed Japan's greatest national tragedy since World War II. Confronted with an escalating threat from three reactors at a nuclear power plant damaged by the earthquake, Kan's government turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency with an appeal for "expert missions" to help avert major releases of radioactivity.

NEW DELHI -- Police and demonstrators in Bangladesh clashed for a second day Friday as the death toll rose to at least 37 in violence sparked by a controversial death sentence handed down against the head of an Islamic party for war crimes committed during the country's 1971 war of independence. Local media reported that two people were killed in the rioting Friday, adding to 35 or more deaths after the sentencing of Delwar Hossain Sayedee, a senior leader in Bangladesh's largest Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami.

BEIJING -- A strong earthquake struck China's mountainous Sichuan province Saturday morning, leaving at least 156 people dead and more than 3,000 injured. Chinese authorities assessed the magnitude of the quake at 7.0, while the U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.6. Although nowhere near as powerful in magnitude, the tremor evoked memories of the great earthquake almost exactly five years ago along the same fault line that killed almost 90,000. The earthquake's epicenter was about 80 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, in Lushan county near the city of Ya'an.