The Obama administration dispatched high-level officials from several agencies Monday to allay concerns about swine flu and to demonstrate that it was fully prepared to confront the outbreak even as the president said there was

Responding to what some health officials feared could be the leading edge of a global pandemic emerging from Mexico, American health officials declared a public health emergency on Sunday as 20 cases of swine flu were confirmed in this country, including eight in New York City.

The explosion that tore through the Bayer CropScience chemical plant here last August, killing two employees, was an easily avoidable accident caused by management decisions and human error, a federal agency said Thursday.

A House subcommittee held a hearing Tuesday on a fatal blast at a West Virginia chemical plant.

Smoking causes lung cancer and is implicated in a dozen other cancers, but scientists have generally dismissed its importance in breast cancer, saying it plays little role, if any.

The effects of climate change, especially rising seas, threaten trillions of dollars

An unusual strain of swine flu is circulating among people in the Southwest but is not known to have caused any deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

The agency, which has found only seven cases, expects to find more now that it has begun looking intensively for them.

Wildfires swept through a coastal region of South Carolina on Thursday and threatened North Myrtle Beach, destroying about 70 homes and forcing more than 2,500 people to evacuate, state officials said.

Gov. Mark Sanford declared a state of emergency in Horry County, which includes the Myrtle Beach area, and officials of North Myrtle Beach scrambled to get residents to pack up and flee.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Thursday that the government wanted to move the Group of 8 summit meeting scheduled for July in Sardinia to L

On a visit to North Korea, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Thursday predicted a continued stalemate in international efforts to stop the North from restarting its nuclear weapons program.

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.