Arson | featured news

A shipyard worker who set fire to rags aboard a nuclear submarine because he wanted to go home was sentenced to a little more than 17 years in federal prison Friday for the blaze that transformed the vessel into a fiery furnace, injured seven people and caused $450 million in damage.

A 15-year-old boy poured gasoline throughout his home and set it ablaze Wednesday, killing his adoptive father and two brothers, police said. Michael Pilato was charged with second-degree murder and arson, hours after the early morning fire at his two-story home in Webster, a Rochester suburb.

Authorities continued investigations Saturday in the torching of a northern Mexico casino that left at least 52 people dead.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared three days of mourning Friday for the 52 victims of a casino fire set by presumed drug traffickers, branding the attackers "true terrorists" and ordering authorities to offer a $2.4 million reward for their capture.

Five people were arrested on Monday in connection with 29 fires intentionally set over the weekend in Morgantown, West Virginia, authorities said.

Federal prosecutors portray Michael Jacques as a racist who was so upset when Barack Obama was elected president that he and two other white men burned down a predominantly black church in western Massachusetts.

A Connecticut man will be sentenced to death for a night of terror inside a suburban home in which a woman was strangled and her two daughters tied to their beds, doused in gasoline and left to die in a fire.

Maine fire investigators say a former boyfriend of a waitress at a topless coffee shop is being charged with arson for last year's fire that destroyed the shop and some adjoining apartments in the small town of Vassalboro.

Two arrests have been made in a string of deliberately set church fires in east Texas, a fire official said Sunday.

Arsonists in Malaysia struck at a convent school and a fifth church on Sunday amid rising tensions between majority Muslims and Christians over the use of the word "Allah" to describe the Christian God.