An accident cast horror on Bangor's Independence Day celebrations when an antique firetruck crushed to death the rider of an antique John Deere tractor during the Fourth of July parade, police said.

Firetruck riders told police that a mechanical failure caused the truck to go out of control in front of a large crowd of parade-watchers and slam into the rear of the tractor as both turned onto a downhill stretch of Water Street at 12:40 p.m. Thursday, police said.

The firetruck "stalled and started to roll" as it turned onto Water Street from Main Street. That might have caused the truck's braking system to fail, speculated Tammy Haskell, who said she was standing at Main and Water streets when the accident occurred.

"It rear-ended the tractor and the [tractor] driver was not expecting it," Haskell added. "I saw the driver flying through the air. The tractor rolled onto him and [then] the truck" hit him.

"I saw the tractor tip over by the truck and somebody was underneath it," said witness John Bunker, 27, of Bangor. "I heard people screaming, people saying to stop the truck. Then I heard over a loudspeaker somebody saying to clear the area."

Tragedy at the Annapolis Fourth of July parade. A young boy is dead after an accident involving one of the parade floats.

Monique Griego has the very latest.

Police say a 7-year-old boy was riding in a vehicle in the parade when he somehow fell off.

It's still not clear whether he died because of the fall or whether he was struck and killed by another vehicle.

An Oklahoma Fourth of July parade turned tragic Thursday morning when a father accidentally ran over and killed his 8-year-old son, who had been on a parade float, police said.

Thousands of people had gathered on the streets of Edmond, Okla., to watch the 40th annual Fourth of July parade, which is part of the weeklong LibertyFest celebration.

Just before 11 a.m. (noon ET), the little boy "either jumped or fell off" of a flat-bed trailer that his father was driving for a local martial arts group, AKA Karate, according to Jenny Monroe, a spokeswoman for the Edmond Police.

The young boy was one of about 20 children on the float.

The seven-year-old boy shot in head by a stray bullet Thursday night has died, Chesterfield Police said. Police said Brendon Mackey, 7, was walking with his father in the parking lot of the Boathouse Restaurant in Midlothian about 9 p.m. Thursday when he was shot. The father and son were there to watch some nearby fireworks.

"A large crowd had been gathering over by the reservoir to watch fireworks and a young boy, seven years old, was walking through the parking lot with his dad. He was a few step behind his dad and he [the boy] fell to the ground," Chesterfield Police Capt. Brad Badgerow said. "Initially they thought he was just passed out. They saw some blood. They thought he may have hit his head."

But when the child was taken to the hospital, doctors made a startling discovery.

"When medical personnel were treating him, they found what they believe to be a bullet wound in the top of his head," Badgerow said.

A social media post has fueled a squabble between two local attorneys, leading to a defamation lawsuit and contributing to a crackdown on electronics use in the city's General District Court.

At issue is whether a Facebook post of a photo taken inside a courtroom this year was a harmless joke or a damaging misrepresentation, according to the lawsuit and response, filed in Circuit Court this spring.

The case also highlights the issues that courts must weigh in deciding whether to allow cellphones and other electronics inside and what limits to put on their use.

The lawsuit centers on the post, included in the court file, which shows defense attorney Jason Swango at the bench in General District Court, flanked by a police officer, a bailiff and his client in a city jail jumpsuit.

Food Network superstar Paula Deen is the latest celebrity to embark on an "apology tour," spending the past ten days releasing apology videos and making weepy teary appearances on TV shows begging for mercy for having used racial epithets in the presence of her employees, one of whom is currently suing her. I don't know the details of the case, and I don't want to know. The lawsuit will be decided by a court, not by me (and not by you). But I do want to say that I'm sick to death of people being forced to publicly apologize.

Perhaps it's because I was one of those people.

Two months ago, I was "outed" as having spent five years, from 1990 through 1995, making various claims, on shows like 60 Minutes, The Phil Donahue Show, 48 Hours, and Montel Williams, regarding the Auschwitz camp and its role and function during the Holocaust. What I said was controversial, but my views were based on what I perceived to be the facts. I never uttered a single word that was in any way hateful or pro-Nazi, because I am the exact opposite of those things.

After a large monetary bounty was put on my head by a violent extremist group, I changed my name, and spent the last eighteen years as David Stein. I built a very successful GOP event-organizing operation, and my political writing was carried by every major conservative site on the 'net, from FrontPageMag to Commentary and The Weekly Standard, from the Breitbart sites to The Daily Caller and HotAir, from The Blaze to The Washington Times and OReilly.com, and on shows including Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the Larry Elder Show (where I had become an occasional guest...he and I were even working on a documentary film together).

Chinese police have reportedly seized 20 tonnes of out-of-date meat from a Vietnamese smuggling gang, including chicken feet that were 46 years past their sell-by-date.

During a raid conducted in May but only reported this week, police in Guangxi said they smashed an underground network that had been swamping the Chinese food market with substandard chicken feet, tripe and throat.

Among their stomach-churning discoveries were chicken feet that date back to 1967, a time when China was still ruled by Chairman Mao.

Li Jianmin, a local security chief, told the state news agency Xinhua that after smuggling the decades-old feet into China, the expired meat was treated with chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, "to kill bacteria, prolong the expiry date" and make the feet "look white and big".

Beijing - The son of a Chinese general has been charged with rape, state media said, in a case that has sparked public anger over the seemingly privileged lives of elite youths.

Li Tianyi, 17, "is among five suspects who allegedly gang-raped a woman in a hotel" in February, the Xinhua state news agency said, citing a Beijing district public prosecutor.

The boy's father Li Shuangjiang holds the rank of general as dean of the music department for the Chinese army's Academy of Arts, and is known for singing patriotic songs.

The public prosecutor's office only provided the surname of the suspect but confirmed "the case is the same gang rape case", Xinhua said.

Li Tianyi triggered public controversy in 2011 after he and another teenager, both driving expensive cars, attacked a couple who reportedly blocked their passage, while the victims' child looked on.

Several models of Emergency Alert System decoders, used to break into TV and radio broadcasts to announce public safety warnings, have vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to hijack them and deliver fake messages to the public, according to an announcement by a security firm on Monday.

The vulnerabilities included a private root SSH key that was distributed in publicly available firmware images that would have allowed an attacker with SSH access to a device to log in with root privileges and issue fake alerts or disable the system.

IOActive principal research scientist Mike Davis uncovered the vulnerabilities in the application servers of two digital alerting systems known as DASDEC-I and DASDEC-II. The servers are responsible for receiving and authenticating emergency alert messages.

When Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed on landing at San Francisco International Airport, Todd Thrush was shocked. The Destrehan resident, a retired airline pilot who estimates he has flown into San Francisco 400 times, considers that airport one of the easiest in the United States for landing, with a runway posed against the bay so that pilots arriving from the east can enjoy a long, leisurely approach.

Besides, the weather at the time of Saturday's crash was so ideal that even the wind had calmed. After the crash landing, smoke from the ensuing fire lingered over the plane, instead of blowing out across the water.

On top of that, the aircraft model at issue, the Boeing 777, had experienced only two accidents, neither responsible for a death, since it went into service in 1994. And the part that had caused the most recent crash before Sunday's, an engine prone to icing, had been modified. The National Transportation Safety Board noted that the San Francisco plane did not seem to experience a mechanical failure. "The engines indicate that both engines were producing power," Chairman Deborah Hersman said.

So what had gone wrong on this flight, which ended with the deaths of two 16-year-old passengers and the hospitalization of 182 others? Why did the plane, which originated in Shanghai and flew into San Francisco on a routine 10-hour leg from Seoul, Korea, end in a fiery snarl?

With the safety board set to further review the data recorders that detail the final 30 minutes of the flight, Thrush and other New Orleans area pilots, monitoring the news from afar, began to wonder whether the fault might not lie with the pilots.