ROLLING FORK, Miss. (AP) — A massive tornado obliterated the modest one-story home that Kimberly Berry shared with her two daughters in the Mississippi Delta flatlands, leaving only a foundation and some random belongings — a toppled refrigerator, a dresser and matching nightstand, a bag of Christmas decorations, some clothing. During the storm Friday, Berry and her 12-year-old daughter huddled and prayed at a nearby church that was barely damaged, while her 25-year-old daughter survived in the hard-hit town of Rolling Fork, some 15 miles away.

NEW YORK (AP) — Keep an eye to the sky this week for a chance to see a planetary hangout. Five planets — Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus and Mars — will line up near the moon.

WEST READING, Pa. (AP) — A fourth person was confirmed dead and three people remained unaccounted for Sunday, two days after a powerful explosion at a chocolate factory shook a small town in Pennsylvania.

Help began pouring into one of the poorest regions of the U.S. after a deadly tornado wrought a path of destruction in the Mississippi Delta, even as furious new storms Sunday struck Georgia, where two tigers briefly escaped their badly damaged safari park.

SILVER CITY, Miss. (AP) — Nothing remained of William Barnes’ home in the tiny western Mississippi town of Silver City after a killer tornado tore it off its foundations. He stood in disbelief Saturday as he surveyed the lot where he'd lived for 20 years, twisted debris of cinder blocks and mangled wood siding scattered across where his home once stood.

ROLLING FORK, Miss. (AP) — Powerful tornadoes tore through parts of the Deep South on Friday night, killing at least 23 people in Mississippi, obliterating dozens of buildings and leaving an especially devastating mark on a rural town whose mayor declared, “My city is gone.”

WEST READING, Pa. (AP) — An explosion at a chocolate factory in Pennsylvania on Friday killed two people and left five people missing, authorities said. One person was pulled from the rubble overnight. Rescue crews using dogs and imaging equipment continued to search through the rubble Saturday — hours after the blast that erupted just before 5 p.m. Friday at the R.M. Palmer Co. plant in the borough of West Reading, about 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

ROLLING FORK, Miss. (AP) — Storms producing tornadoes, damaging wind gusts, and hail up to the size of golf balls were moving through several southern states Friday night with widespread damage and injuries reported in Mississippi from a large tornado.

HOUSTON (AP) — A hostage rescue in Houston in which one person was fatally shot on Thursday first began days ago when three migrants were kidnapped from a vehicle in a neighboring county, according to a prosecutor. The three migrants had been traveling in a vehicle on Interstate 10 in the southern part of Waller County on March 18 when they were stopped by an unknown number of individuals and forced into another vehicle, said Sean Whittmore, a prosecutor with the Waller County District Attorney’s Office.

DENVER (AP) — A body found in the Colorado woods near an abandoned car was that of a 17-year-old student accused of wounding two administrators in a shooting at his Denver high school, a coroner's office said. Park County Sheriff Tom McGraw said the body was discovered Wednesday not far from the student's car in a remote mountain area about 50 miles southwest of Denver, near the small town of Bailey, in Park County. The town had been ordered to shelter in place while officers from a number of agencies including the FBI combed the forest.

DENVER (AP) — A 17-year-old student shot and wounded two administrators at his Denver high school Wednesday as they searched him for weapons, a daily requirement because of the boy’s behavioral issues, authorities said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Only 10% of U.S. adults say they have high confidence in the nation’s banks and other financial institutions, a new poll finds. That's down from the 22% who said they had high confidence in 2020.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Scattered in crates, dirty and difficult to read, the gospel music of composer Charles Henry Pace sat packed away, unorganized — and unrealized — for more than 20 years. Frances Pace Barnes, the pioneering music publisher’s daughter who remembers how he could turn a hum into a song, knew the crates held pieces of her family’s past. But she was not expecting those decaying printing plates and papers to reveal an important part of gospel music history.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Norfolk Southern's CEO is offering support for some parts of a bipartisan U.S. Senate bill to put tougher safety regulations on railroads after last month’s fiery hazardous materials train derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. CEO Alan Shaw is under pressure from senators and federal safety regulators to step up his commitment to safety regulations as he appears before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday. Under aggressive questioning from senators earlier this month in a separate hearing, he committed to voluntary safety upgrades and earnestly apologized for the derailment that upended life in East Palestine, Ohio.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tens of thousands of workers in the Los Angeles Unified School District walked off the job Tuesday over stalled contract talks, and they are being joined in solidarity by teachers in a three-day strike that has shut down the nation’s second-largest school system. Demonstrations began at a bus yard and are expected at schools across the city by members of Local 99 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents about 30,000 teachers’ aides, special education assistants, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers and other support staff.

RENO, Nev. (AP) — State lawmakers nationwide are responding to the deadliest overdose crisis in U.S. history by pushing harsher penalties for possessing fentanyl and other powerful lab-made opioids that are connected to about 70,000 deaths a year.

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Idaho is poised to allow firing squads to execute condemned inmates when the state can't get lethal-injection drugs, under a bill the Legislature passed Monday with a veto-proof majority. Firing squads will be used only if the state cannot obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections — and one death row inmate has already had his scheduled execution postponed multiple times because of drug scarcity.

SCARSDALE, N.Y. (AP) — Five children from Connecticut, ranging in age from 8 to 17, were killed in a fiery early morning crash Sunday on a New York highway, police said.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Miami Beach officials imposed a curfew beginning Sunday night during spring break after two fatal shootings and rowdy, chaotic crowds that police have had difficulty controlling.

ANACORTES, Wash. (AP) — Two BNSF trains derailed in separate incidents in Arizona and Washington state on Thursday, with the latter spilling diesel fuel on tribal land along Puget Sound. No injuries were reported. It wasn't clear what caused either derailment.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — California’s 11th atmospheric river left the storm-soaked state with a bang Wednesday, bringing flooded roadways, landslides and toppled trees to the southern part of the state as well as drought-busting rainfall that meant the end of water restrictions for nearly 7 million people.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Moonwalking astronauts will have sleeker, more flexible spacesuits that come in different sizes when they step onto the lunar surface later this decade. Exactly what that looks like remained under wraps. The company designing the next-generation spacesuits, Axiom Space, said Wednesday that it plans to have new versions for training purposes for NASA later this summer.

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Parts of New England and New York were digging out of a nor'easter Wednesday that caused tens of thousands of power outages, numerous school cancellations and whiteout conditions on the roads. The storm began Monday night and lasted throughout Tuesday, dumping as much as 3 feet of snow and gusty winds. Others got just a few inches or a wintry mix. More high winds and below-normal temperatures were in Wednesday's forecast before a warm-up later in the week.

NEW YORK (AP) — For the first time in three decades, the U.S. has a new favorite dog breed, according to the American Kennel Club. Adorable in some eyes, deplorable in others, the sturdy, push-faced, perky-eared, world-weary-looking and distinctively droll French bulldog became the nation's most prevalent purebred dog last year, the club announced Wednesday. Frenchies ousted Labrador retrievers from the top spot after a record 31 years.

Ohio filed a lawsuit against railroad Norfolk Southern to make sure it pays for the cleanup and environmental damage caused by a fiery train derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border last month, the state's attorney general said Tuesday. The federal lawsuit also seeks to force the company to pay for groundwater and soil monitoring in the years ahead and economic losses in the village of East Palestine and surrounding areas, said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.