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The death toll from twin earthquakes rose to 300, officials said Sunday, as rescue efforts in northwest Irancontinued and more bodies were expected to be found.

Chinese officials say a strong earthquake has struck a remote area of the country's far-western Xinjiang region. The government earthquake monitoring center said the quake registered magnitude 6.2 and hit Sunday evening. It said it was centered 175 miles southeast of the oasis city of Hotan. The area is deep in the thinly populated Kunlun mountains.

Two strong earthquakes leveled villages and damaged homes in northwestern Iran on Saturday, killing at least 180 people and injuring more than 1,350 others, state TV reported. Thousands of people spent the night outdoors as aftershocks rattled the area.

NASA's rover carries a sophisticated weather station offering data on the Red Planet's environment that astronauts might one day encounter.

The punishing Midwest drought is expected to reduce the nation's corn crop to its lowest level in almost two decades. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut its estimate for the corn crop by nearly 17% and raised the upper end of its price forecast by 39% to almost $9 a bushel. In its report, the USDA forecast the nation's corn yield to be about 123.4 bushels per acre -- the lowest level in 17 years.

Global alarm over a potential repeat of the 2008 food crisis escalated on Thursday after data showed food prices had jumped 6 percent last month and importers were snapping up a shriveled U.S. grain crop, helping drive corn prices to a new record.

July was the hottest month ever recorded in the United States, beating the previous record set in the 1930s Dust Bowl era, according to new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A cluster of earthquakes that began Tuesday night continued Wednesday in northern Orange County, keeping residents on edge but causing little significant damage. Photos emerged of bottles falling off a supermarket shelf in Anaheim Hills, but fire officials said they didn't get reports of anything more serious. At a news conference Wednesday morning, Kate Hutton of the U.S. Geological Survey at Caltech said there had been at least 30 quakes since last night, but only three could be felt by residents.

Christopher Carlson sprang into action when smoke and embers ushered a fire that threatened to envelop his Noble, Oklahoma, home. After taking his 12-year-old stepson to safety, Carlson raced against time to assist neighbors and try to save his trailer from one of more than a dozen wildfires that, as of Saturday, had destroyed more than 120 structures.

The relentless, weather-gone-crazy type of heat that has blistered the United States and other parts of the world in recent years is so rare that it can't be anything but man-made global warming, says a new statistical analysis from a top government scientist.