Deaths, Traffic | featured news

One person died and dozens of elementary school children were taken to hospitals Friday after a school bus crash in northern Illinois that left two cars mangled and the bus on its side, authorities said. All 35 people aboard the bus survived the crash in Wadsworth, Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran Jr. said.

Parts of the Southeast were digging out Friday from a winter storm that dumped up to a foot of snow around the region and played a role in at least one death.

Five young siblings and one adult died early Saturday when a sport utility vehicle went off an eastern Mississippi road and plunged into a rain-swollen creek, authorities said.

A high-speed pileup of up to 150 vehicles on a fog-bound Texas interstate highway killed at least two people on Thursday and injured up to 100, a sheriff's spokesman said. The chain reaction of collisions shut down Interstate 10 about 15 miles west of Beaumont for several hours, said Deputy Rod Carroll of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office.

Some 32,885 people died on the nation's roadways in 2010 -- a number that, while slightly higher than preliminary figures released in April, shows the downward trend in traffic deaths is continuing, now reaching low levels not seen since 1949, the U.S. Department of Transportation reported Thursday.

Three major road accidents in China killed 56 people on the last day of a weeklong holiday, including 35 people who died when a bus collided with a car on a northern expressway, state media reported Saturday.

Traffic deaths have hit their lowest level since 1950, the year fatalities behind the wheel began to be tracked, according to the latest government statistics.

Three officers and a suspect are dead and another officer is in grave condition after related shootings, the police said.