Fire | featured news

A forensic official in Honduras says a fire that swept through a prison has killed at least 272 inmates.

Josh Powell planned the deadly house fire that killed him and his young sons for some time, dropping toys at charities and sending final emails to multiple acquaintances before the blaze, authorities said Monday....

An "intentional" house explosion on Sunday near Tacoma, Washington killed the husband and two sons of a Utah woman missing since December 2009, fire department officials said.

Authorities say firefighters in southern New Jersey uncovered a cache of child pornography while battling flames in the home of an architecture professor.

Firefighters extinguished a massive fire aboard a docked Russian nuclear submarine Friday as some crew members remained inside, officials said, giving assurances that there was no radiation leak and the vessel's nuclear-tipped missiles were not on board....

A research assistant was fatally burned when chemicals burst into flame. Her death three years ago has focused attention on safety issues. Felony charges have been filed against the University of California and a UCLA chemistry professor in connection with a laboratory fire that killed a staff research assistant three years ago. On Dec. 29, 2008, Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji, 23, was severely burned over nearly half of her body when air-sensitive chemicals burst into flames during an experiment and ignited her clothing. Sangji, who was not wearing a protective lab coat, died 18 days later.

A woman burned to death in the elevator of her Brooklyn apartment building Saturday after a man ambushed her, sprayed her with liquid and set her afire with a Molotov cocktail, police said. The unidentified man was waiting for the woman, who was in her 60s, when the elevator doors opened to her floor of the Prospect Heights building. The man sprayed her with an accelerant and set her on fire, New York City police spokesman Paul Browne said.

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.

Ninety schools in northern Nevada are closed as crews battle a wind-whipped wildfire in Reno that has burned several homes and injured people. Crews fighting the 400-acre blaze wanted to clear the roads of school traffic to make way for emergency workers.

Joshua Komisarjevsky was convicted Thursday of murdering a woman and her two daughters in a gruesome 2007 home invasion in which family members were tied up, molested, doused in gas and left to die in a fire.