MONTOURSVILLE, Pa. – Police say a 2-year-old Pennsylvania boy found a handgun on a bed and shot himself in the leg while his mother and her boyfriend were showering. Investigators say the toddler took the .45-caliber gun from an upstairs bedroom at the boyfriend’s Montoursville home Thursday and played with …

POST FALLS, Idaho – The distraught woman messaged police this week telling them she was going to hurt herself, but she refused to pick up her phone. So dispatchers with Post Falls police used text messages — about 60 or so over the next hour — to help the woman. …

SAN FRANCISCO – The booming popularity of outdoor kitchens among homeowners in the San Francisco Bay Area has an increasing number of their neighbors coughing and hacking from the smoke, leading air-quality officials to consider tightening rules on wood-burning pizza ovens and smokers. Residents are calling complaint lines and public …

TheCenter for Science in the Public Interest (search)(aka the “food police”) is holding a big conference in Washington, D.C.,July 11 titled, “Conflicted $cience: Corporate Influence on Scientific Research and Science-Based Policy.” Though it escapes me how they can assert with a straight face that scientific research funded by corporations is …

JACKSON, N.J. – New Jersey authorities have decided that pictures posted on social media by a teenager of herself dressed like Hitler and of a popular Orthodox Jewish gathering spot with the caption “perfect bombing time” were not criminal. Al Della Fave, a spokesman for the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, …

LOS ANGELES – A scorpion stung a woman on the hand just before her flight from Los Angeles to Portland took off. Flight 567 was taxiing on the runway Saturday night when the passenger was stung, Alaska Airlines spokesman Cole Cosgrove said. The plane returned to the gate, and the …

ASPEN, Colo. – The Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado says the body of a skier who died in an Aspen Mountain avalanche has been recovered. The body had been found Monday afternoon at the bottom of a snow-covered chute at about 9,400 feet after a fellow skier notified emergency …

The ex-boyfriend of a Universal Studios employee in Hollywood shot and killed himself inside the theme park Friday afternoon, authorities said. A waitress at Mel’s Diner in the park called security at 2:00 p.m. after seeing her former boyfriend and father of her child around the park, Los Angeles County …

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The American Civil Liberties Union is calling for an independent investigation into conditions at Ohio’s super-maximum security prison amid a long-running hunger strike. The protest at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown began March 19 to draw attention to recreation and programming restrictions, including a ban on …

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A former mob enforcer in Rhode Island with ties to late New England crime boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca has died in a federal prison in North Carolina. Gerard T. Ouimette was 75. The Federal Bureau of Prison’s website reported that Ouimette, who had lived in Fall River, …