Two people were injured when a barge carrying a New Year fireworks display caught fire at an Australian beach. A few minutes into the show at Terrigal Beach in New South Wales, an apparent malfunction caused fireworks to go off at random, some towards the beach. Thousands of people on the beach had to be moved to safety and police sealed off the area.

A December oil pipeline spill in western North Dakota might have been three times larger than first estimated and among the biggest in state history, a state environmental expert said Friday. About 530,000 gallons of oil is now believed to have spilled from the Belle Fourche Pipeline that was likely ruptured by a slumping hillside about 16 miles northwest of Belfield in Billings County, Health Department environmental scientist Bill Seuss said. The earlier estimate was about 176,000 gallons.

A dead pilot whale lies on a sandbank after one of the country's largest recorded mass whale strandings, in Golden Bay, at the top of New Zealand's South Island. REUTERS/Anthony Phelps

It was January. The place was Boston. And when 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst from a gigantic holding tank in the city’s North End, 21 people were killed and about 150 more were left injured. The wave of syrup — some reports said it was up to 40 feet tall — rushed through the waterfront, destroying buildings, overturning vehicles and pushing a firehouse off its foundation. For the past 100 years, no one really knew why the spill was so deadly.

Rescue teams have recovered the bodies of 31 victims while seven people were still listed as missing Monday following a landslide at the site of a hydropower project in southern China after days of heavy rain, authorities said. Rescuers aided by experts sent by the central government were searching with tools and sniffer dogs for signs of life, while mechanical diggers hauled away stones and soil, part of a 100,000-cubic-meter (3.5 million-cubic-foot) mountain...

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site.