Explosions

By all appearances, Rebecca Kuzelka used her home to operate a child day-care business on a quiet, tree-lined street in Lake Elsinore. But a different picture of the 55-year-old mother emerged after her home was rocked by an explosion late Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, deputies arrested Kuzelka and her son Grey Kuzelka, 21, on suspicion of using their home to make bombs and grow marijuana. Another son, Benjamin Kuzelka, 23, injured his hand in the explosion and was hospitalized.

Scaled Composites, the fledgling space tourism company founded by rocket pioneer Burt Rutan, was fined $25,870 on Friday as a result of an accident last July that killed three workers at the firm's Mojave, Calif., testing facility. The fine covered five violations of workplace safety codes, including a failure to maintain a safe working environment and to properly train workers handling hazardous materials, according to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health.

An LAPD officer was injured slightly by an underground explosion that sent two manhole covers into the air in downtown L.A. on Monday. The explosion, which was apparently triggered by a short-circuit in an electrical vault under the street, occurred just after 2 p.m. in Little Tokyo near a shopping center and two apartment complexes. Officer Craig Allen, 34, was responding to reports of smoke coming from a manhole cover near the intersection of 3rd and Alameda streets, authorities said.

Volatile dust was blamed Friday in an explosion that leveled a sugar refinery, and crews pulled four bodies from tunnels beneath the mangled mass of metal and beams. At least four people known to be inside when the explosion occurred were missing. Savannah Police Sgt. Mike Wilson said no attempts would be made to search for the dead until today, when heavy equipment will be brought in to remove debris. Search efforts were slowed by the instability of what was left of the Imperial Sugar Co.

A senior commander of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian group waging hostilities against Israel, was killed late Friday along with his wife, two of their children and three young militants in an explosion that flattened the family's home in the Gaza Strip, officials said. The 8:45 p.m. explosion damaged seven nearby homes in the Bureij refugee camp and wounded at least 30 people, 10 of them seriously, said Moawiya Hassanain, a Health Ministry official in Gaza.

A blast that killed one firefighter and injured another this week in Westchester was a freak occurrence and indirectly the result of the decaying underground infrastructure, officials said Friday. Firefighter Brent A. Lovrien, 35, was fatally injured Wednesday when a spark ignited combustible smoke behind an electrical panel door that he was trying to open with a circular saw. Smoke had migrated into the electrical room from the underground burning of a conduit 200 feet away.

An explosion Thursday flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing seven people. The militant group Hamas initially blamed Israel and unleashed a barrage of rockets and mortar shells, but later suggested that the blast was accidental. An Israeli army spokeswoman said the military was not operating in the area at the time of the blast. "We deny any connection to this incident," Maj. Avital Leibovich said.

A car exploded Friday, killing seven soldiers outside Russia's military headquarters in South Ossetia, and Russian authorities said it was a terrorist bombing meant to wreck the tense cease-fire that ended the war with Georgia. Georgia's Interior Ministry blamed Russia, accusing it of arranging the blast to provide a pretext for delaying next week's scheduled withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgian territory around South Ossetia and another Kremlin-backed separatist region, Abkhazia.

An explosion in the Thai prime minister's office compound injured about 45 people, an emergency official said early today. The blast at the Government House, which has been occupied by thousands of anti-government protesters since August, occurred about midnight Saturday during a rally by supporters of the People's Alliance for Democracy, officials said.

All they wanted was a hot meal. Three days into a wet, cold offensive through a lawless region east of Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers persuaded their American counterparts to let them pull back to their command post for a dinner that wasn't out of a Meals Ready to Eat packet. As dusk fell Saturday, an urgent message came in over a crackling radio: A blast, apparently an antitank mine, had ripped through one of the vehicles in the Iraqi convoy.