When mass-producing packaged foods, one of the goals is to prevent pieces of the processing equipment out of the food. A plant that makes José Olé products came up short of that aspiration, resulting in a recall of 17.5 tons of taquitos that could contain pieces of plastic and rubber.

Seven people were taken to the hospital late Monday after 35 vehicles were involved in two separate chain-reaction crashes less than a mile apart on the Kennedy Expressway.

When most people think of hurricanes, they think of mighty storm surges pounding coastal communities. But a team of researchers who studied 28 hurricanes from 2001 to 2014 found that freshwater flooding, sometimes thousands of miles inland, can cause even greater destruction.

The Midwest was slammed with 29 reported tornadoes Monday, according to the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center, leaving behind a trail of damaged homes and displaced and injured residents.

Sanford Heisler, LLP has filed a $50 million amended complaint in the US District Court on behalf of claims specialists Debra Julian and Stephanie McKinney, against MetLife, Inc., the nation’s largest insurance company, and two of its subsidiaries, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and MetLife Insurance Company USA.

On Friday, the meteorology community was riding a major high as stunningly high-definition images came in from the nation’s newest and much-anticipated earth observation satellite. The high came crashing down that evening, though, as the first hints of significant cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began to emerge.

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times: You don’t want your vehicle to catch on fire. For that reason, Mercedes-Benz is recalling more than 354,000 vehicles.

An annual state-by-state analysis of auto insurance reveals rates continue to increase after filing just a single claim. According to a fourth annual study by insuranceQuotes, drivers now pay an average of 44 percent more for car insurance after making a single claim of $2,000 or more.

A man was killed in a crash with a semi truck on an icy bridge Thursday morning in southwest suburban Elwood. The crash happened at 5:25 a.m. on the Arsenal Road bridge between I-55 and Elwood International Port Road, Elwood Police Chief Fred Hayes said.

Residents began the long process to clean up the damage left behind by a tornado outbreak that hit the Midwest, where three people were killed. About 20 tornadoes have been confirmed from the outbreak, and survey teams from the National Weather Service had more work to do Thursday.

It didn’t last long, but the impact of the storm that hit Edwardsville Tuesday evening will be felt for months. While much of the city was sparred damage, the southern portion of Edwardsville — along Goshen Road east of Troy Road — was dealt a serious blow.

Tornadoes touched down in the upper Midwest and northern Arkansas on Tuesday, killing at least two people, as a spring-like storm system posed a risk to 45 million people.

People sparked most US wildfires in recent decades, causing longer fire seasons and increasing the amount of scorched earth, according to a new study published Monday. Researchers found that humans caused 84 percent -- or four out of five -- of the total 1.5 million wildfires studied between 1992 and 2012.



In addition, human actions tripled the length of the fire season during those two decades and were responsible for 44 percent of the total acreage burned, researchers reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

United Technologies Corp’s (UTX.N) Carrier unit expanded a recall of some air conditioners and heat pumps as their power cord plugs can overheat, posing a fire risk, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said on Thursday.

A Sunday afternoon fire left a St. Charles home uninhabitable, fire officials said. When firefighters arrived at the home, they found a fire had burned from the exterior of the building into the house and the attic, they said.