Deaths | featured news

Police say a boy who was rushed to the hospital Tuesday after a sand tunnel collapsed over him at a beach in Long Branch, N.J., has died.

Stephen R. Covey, author of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" as well as three other books that have all sold more than a million copies, has died. He was 79. In a statement sent to employees of a Utah consulting firm Covey co-founded, his family said the writer and motivational speaker died at a hospital in Idaho Falls, Idaho, early Monday due to complications from a bicycle accident in April.

Papua New Guinea police arrested 29 members of an alleged cannibal cult and charged them with the murder of at least seven suspected witch doctors.

A 29-year-old staffer in the Obama for America campaign has died after collapsing in President Obama's Chicago headquarters Friday. Alex Okrent worked in the campaign's paid media department, which handles advertising.

Film producer Richard Zanuck, who won the best picture Oscar for "Driving Miss Daisy" and was involved in such blockbuster films as "Jaws" and "The Sting" after his father, Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, fired him from 20th Century Fox, died Friday. He was 77.

A slab of ice broke off Thursday high in the French Alps, sparking an avalanche that swept nine Europeans to their deaths as they tried to climb Mont Blanc, authorities said. Eleven other climbers were hospitalized and at least four are still unaccounted for....

More than 100 people who rushed to scoop up fuel after a Nigerian petrol tanker tipped over Thursday were killed when the vehicle and pools of spilled oil caught fire. Children were among those killed, while dozens more were badly burned, despite a warning from troops who arrived at the crash site that a blaze could ignite at any moment.

The news that two parents in separate central Indiana incidents left their young child in a sweltering vehicle during a record heat wave has stirred outrage, but national child car-safety advocates say that, in reality, it happens more often than people realize and it happens to all kinds of parents.

A 6-foot-tall tombstone that weighed hundreds of pounds fell on and killed a 4-year-old boy who was posing for photos with family and friends at a historic cemetery in a Utah ski resort town, authorities said.

The summer heat just won't quit, with another scorcher forecast for the Midwest Friday. The sweltering temperatures may have claimed at least two lives so far, bringing back memories of the 1995 heat wave that killed hundreds. Much of the Midwest, and even parts of the East Coast are suffering.