The crew of the Russian Tu-134 passenger plane that crashed on Monday near the northern city of Petrozavodsk could have mistaken a highway near the airport for the runway, a test pilot said on Wednesday.

The RusAir Tu-134 jet took off from Moscow and was due to arrive in Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia, at 12:04 a.m. on Tuesday (20:04 GMT Monday), but crash landed on a nearby highway, which was shrouded in fog.

"We also took this highway for the runway on several occasions in poor weather," said Vadim Bazykin, who has flown passenger planes in and out of the Petrozavodsk airport for more than 10 years.

Bazykin said the Tu-134 was a very reliable aircraft and compared it with the famed Kalashnikov rifle.

Texas - Residents forced to evacuate wildfire-ravaged portions of Grimes County could do little Tuesday but sit and wait for word about their homes and businesses.

The Texas Forest Service said the fire, which prompted the evacuation of more than 1,800 homes and businesses, was 35 percent contained Tuesday.

Investigators believe it was sparked on Sunday by a backyard barbecue grill.

"Don't know if it's negligence," Sheriff Donald Sowell said. "We'll look into that later."

With college costs soaring, new grads staggering under record amounts of debt, and a grim employment picture, you'd think students (and universities) would be buckling down and focusing on serious academic pursuits.

Wrong! Crazy courses are a long-time college tradition. But even in the wake of the Great Recession, course catalogs are still loaded with goofy, lightweight classes, and students still are lining up to take them. Many of these offbeat offerings are consistently enrolled to capacity, and some, like "Geology and Cinema" or "Sport for the Spectator" are among the most popular classes on campus. On a per-credit basis, these classes cost just as much as organic chemistry or applied physics. Click here to see the courses.

Their Father's Day ended with a bang.

Nancy Passarella and her family found themselves picking up the pieces after their Martha Stewart Living glass top patio table suddenly exploded sending flying glass and food everywhere.

"All of a sudden we heard this loud explosion, and the table proceeds to disintegrate," Nancy told us.

The mother and grandmother took pictures right after it happened, and you can see the family's startled expressions and fresh injuries.

"My son and his girlfriend were cut by the flying glass," she said.

Passarella now believes the table she bought from K-Mart in 2008 or 2009 is unsafe. And she's not alone.

In what police say is an extremely rare and disturbing case, a Sacramento woman was arrested this morning for allegedly killing her 6-week-old daughter in March by placing her in a microwave oven.

Ka Yang, 29, was arrested at her Sacramento home this morning and charged with homicide after a three-month investigation into what caused unusual burns on the child, Mirabelle Thao-Lo, who was found dead on the afternoon of March 17.

Sacramento police spokeswoman Laura Peck said there have been only three previous cases involving a child being burned in a microwave, and that detectives studied those cases and consulted with medical experts and pathologists before making the arrest.

"It was a lengthy investigation to determine how these burns occurred," Peck said. "When the officers arrived on scene they immediately saw there were unexplained injuries because of the burns. That led to this very lengthy, involved investigation to determine how these unusual and rare injuries occurred."

The infant's fourth-degree burns were among the worst investigators at the Sacramento County Coroner's Office had seen, coroner's spokesman Ed Smith said.

Nearly two-thirds of deaths in the world are caused by non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart and lung disease, which are rapidly increasing at a cost to the global economy of trillions of dollars, according to UN estimates and preliminary results of a new study.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a report circulated yesterday that while the international community had focused on communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, the four main non-communicable diseases "have emerged relatively unnoticed in the developing world and are now becoming a global epidemic".

Brazilian police say a thief cut off and stole a woman's long hair while she waited at a bus stop.

Police say the hair was virgin, meaning it had not been chemically treated, and will probably be sold for the production of wigs.

Inspector Jose Carlos Bezerra da Silva said Friday to Globo TV's G1 website that the woman was waiting for a bus in the central city of Goiania when the man used a knife-like weapon to cut the hair, which reached past her waist. She said she thought the man was going to steal her purse so she turned her back to him.

Silva said he'd never seen a theft like it in 20 years.

He said the 24-year-old woman reported the case to police because she is evangelical and had to explain to her pastor why her hair wasn't long anymore.

Source: The Canadian Press

Captain Mark Kelly, the astronaut who commanded the final Space Shuttle Endeavour flight, will retire from the Navy and NASA to focus on his wife Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' recovery and work on a memoir with her.

"I want to be by her side. Stepping aside from my work in the Navy and at NASA will allow me to be with her and with my two daughters," Kelly said in a statement posted to his Facebook page on Tuesday.

Giffords is recovering after being shot through the head at a Congressional outreach event in Tucson on January 8.

The as-yet untitled memoir will be published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which said in a statement it will be a "deeply personal account" of the couple's courtship, Giffords' career in politics and the shooting.

It also will tell the story of her recovery process and trace Kelly's career from decorated Desert Storm combat pilot to his recent mission as shuttle commander, the statement said.

About 20 people were arrested for minor drug offences during summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge.

English Heritage said more than 18,000 revellers gathered at the prehistoric site in Wiltshire to witness the sunrise on the longest day of the year.

Cloudy conditions obscured the sunrise which occurred over the ancient stone circle at 0452 BST.

St John Ambulance treated 60 casualties on site for minor injuries and transported four to hospital.

The event is significant for pagans and druids, who mark it with religious ceremonies.

More migrants left New Zealand than arrived for a third straight month in May, the most prolonged decline in 10 years, as people relocated after an earthquake struck the nation's second-biggest city.

Permanent migrant departures exceeded arrivals by 360 in May following readings of 130 in April and 520 in March, Statistics New Zealand said in Wellington today. In the year ended May 31, arrivals outpaced departures by 4,625, the lowest number since the 12 months through January 2009.

Slowing migration adds to the evidence for weaker growth and a declining labor supply this year after the magnitude 6.3 quake killed more than 180 people, wrecked houses and closed businesses in Christchurch on Feb. 22. The central bank may hold borrowing costs at record lows for longer after Christchurch was struck last week by aftershocks, pushing interest-rate swaps to the lowest this month.

"Taxpayers fleeing the country will hamper the government's desire to swiftly restore the budget to surplus, while a softer economy for longer keeps the Reserve Bank on hold for longer," Annette Beacher, head of Asia-Pacific research at TD Securities in Singapore, said in an e-mailed note.

New Zealand's dollar was little changed after the report. It bought 81.08 U.S. cents at 12:25 p.m. in Wellington from 81.01 cents immediately before the release. The two-year swap rate, a fixed payment made to receive floating rates, rose one basis point to 3.32 percent, after touching 3.275 percent on June 17, the lowest since May 24.

Gross domestic product will rise 2.1 percent in the year ending March 31, 2012, according to the average forecast of 11 economists surveyed by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research Inc.

Christchurch Departures

Permanent departures of Christchurch residents in the three months through May were 1,300 more than the year-earlier period, the statistics agency said. About 400 fewer people arrived in the city, the statistics agency said.