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In a statement released earlier today, Fox Broadcasting Company announced that British producer Nigel Lythgoe would rejoin American Idol as the television series' executive producer. Lythgoe formerly held the position for the first seven seasons of the series. Lythgoe, who had been with American Idol since its inception, left to concentrate on dancing show So You Think You Can Dance two years ago. Fox said that Lythgoe would continue as a judge and executive producer of So You Think You Can Dance. He will join executive producers Simon Fuller,

An accident involving two school buses, a tractor trailer and an sport utility vehicle has left at least two people dead and fifty more injured about 40 miles outside of St. Louis, Missouri according to reports. The incident occurred Thursday morning on I-44 in Gray Summit between 10:15 AM (15:15 UTC) to 10:30 AM local time (15:30 UTC) according to Jorma Duran, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Transportation. The school buses were carrying students from St. James High School and were en route to the Six Flags St. Louis amusement par

According to new polls, US President Barack Obama's approval ratings have dropped across the board. According to a new USA Today/Gallup poll, Americans are losing faith in the president's plan in Afghanistan and Iraq, where wars have been going on for years and casualties have risen. 43% of those polled say that it was a mistake for Obama's predecessor George W. Bush to go to war after terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center buildings in New York on September 11, 2001. Barely a third of respondents favoured Obama's strategy in the

A Manchester, Connecticut beer driver caught stealing beer from the warehouse he works for has killed nine people, including himself, after he resigned and went on a shooting rampage. The man, whose name is Omar Thornton, went on his killing spree after being showed video evidence of him stealing beer from Hartford Distributors Inc, a wholesaler of beverages. Company Vice President Steve Hollander said that Thornton "was cool and calm. He didn't yell. He was cold as ice. He didn't protest when we were meeting with him to show him the video of

The pilot of a small plane that crahed into a warehouse near Deer Valley Airport in Phoenix, Arizona has been confirmed dead. The plane veered off the airport runway early Wednesday, shortly before landing, and then slammed into a pest-control building a quarter-mile away, bursting into flames. The cause of the crash is unknown, and no one knows how many passengers were in the plane. The small plane was a four-seat single-engine Cirrus SR 22, which is built out of a composite of plastics and fiberglass. Cindy Cross, a witness of the crash,

A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage in the state, violates the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. "Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment," wrote U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker. "Each challenge is independently meritorious, as Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry

Jurors in the Rod Blagojevich corruption trial began their fifth day of deliberations this morning, having sent no notes to the judge at all yesterday. Notes they sent out last week, however, suggest that the discussions could take much longer. The jury has sent two notes to US District Judge James B. Zagel since deliberations began last Wednesday. The first came on Thursday, when the jury requested a transcript of one of the prosecution's closing arguements. Zagel refused, saying that closing arguments are not evidence. The second note came

Five children were killed by a suicide car bomb in the Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan on Monday. Officials say the suicide bomber was trying to attack the governor of the Dand district, Ahmadullah Nazak. Nazak was unharmed. "I dropped down. Then I heard a second explosion. It hit our car, but it didn't injure me," Nazak later recalled. There have not been any claims of responsibility for this bombing. Assassinations and attempts have become more common this year in Kandahar, and between January and April, at least 27 government o

A United States House of Representatives ethics panel has charged Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) with violating unspecified ethics rules, making her the second Democrat in a week to be charged with ethical violations. Since 2008, the Office of Congressional Ethics has investigated Waters for requesting a meeting with former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson. Although the meeting was supposed to be about minority-owned banks, the actual conversation focused on one bank, OneUnited. Water's husband, Sidney Williams, had been a

NASA is scrambling to solidify plans to fix the broken down cooling systems on the International Space Station during two spacewalks, currently planned for Friday and Monday. The systems broke down late Saturday July 31, triggering alarms that woke the six astronauts (three Russian and three American) currently onboard the station. NASA's flight controller said the astronauts are not in any danger, but that science experiments are on hold until the problem can be fixed. The first spacewalk is set to begin Friday at 6:55 a.m. EDT, NASA official

This article mentions the Wikimedia Foundation, its projects, and people related to it. Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has asked the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), host of Wikinews and its sister projects, to take down its image of the FBI seal from its websites. However, the WMF declined, saying that FBI lawyers had misinterpreted the relevant federal law. In a letter dated July 22, David C. Larson, Deputy General Counsel of the FBI demanded that the WMF remove the seal

Forecasters predict that northern lights could be visible to the naked eye late tonight and early tomorrow morning across Canada, northern parts of the U.S., and possibly the United Kingdom. Solar storms caused a large ejection of plasma from the Sun's surface on Sunday, and the plasma is heading directly towards Earth. The plasma, a cloud of rapidly moving hydrogen gas atoms and subatomic particles, is expected to reach us late Tuesday. The plasma will interact with the Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere, which will cause northern lights,