Businesses blocked doors with sandbags and officials warned residents of waterfront homes to be ready to evacuate as the northeastern United States braced for a powerful storm on Friday that threatened to flood coasts from Maine to North Carolina.

A women died after she was hit by an eastbound Amtrak train near the Williamsburg Premium Outlets in the 5700 block of Richmond Road, according to officials from James City County.

A train carrying Republican lawmakers to their retreat in West Virginia collided with what appeared to be a garbage truck on Wednesday.

For years, one small disaster after another followed Verdon Taylor. He would buy a used car, own it for a while, and it would catch fire. He would move into a rental property and soon his belongings would go up in flames.

Almost two dozen cars were stolen this wintry month while left running unattended or with keys inside, Norfolk police said.
Department officials are urging people not to leave their cars alone and running in attempts to warm them up.

As snow moves through the area Wednesday, Virginia State Police troopers have responded to 268 crashes and 126 disabled vehicles. This includes a snow plow that overturned on the median of Interstate 85 in Dinwiddie.

A Florida man was convicted by a federal jury in Richmond on Wednesday in a 15-year insurance fraud scheme involving at least 27 fires in Richmond, Henrico County and Florida. Four co-defendants earlier pleaded guilty in the case.

A judge Friday denied a bond request from a former police officer accused of, among other things, plotting to burn down the Stafford County Public Safety Building and attempting to burn the residence of her child’s father in Fairfax County.

A recall on papayas has been expanded to three brands, with more recalls possible, after the Food and Drug Administration narrowed in on the source of a salmonella outbreak that has been blamed for at least one death and has sickened over 100 more dating back to May.

A Spotsylvania jury has recommended a 28-month prison for a county man who defrauded an insurance company out of nearly $200,000 in disability payments while he was working in another state.

Drug users, desperate to break addictions to heroin or pain pills, are pawns in a sprawling national network of insurance fraud, an investigation by The Boston Globe and STAT has found.They are being sent to treatment centers hundreds of miles from home for expensive, but often shoddy, care that is paid for by premium health insurance benefits procured with fake addresses.

Between 11% and 18% of injured workers in 15 states do not return to work within a year of their accident, a range that is in line with previous studies, according to reports released Tuesday by the Workers Compensation Research Institute.

If you want some idea of the complex interconnections of the packaged food industry, just try to figure out how one seemingly innocuous ingredient could lead to massive recalls of millions of units of everything from fish sticks to meatballs to chicken fingers.

Forecasters say the Atlantic could see another above-normal hurricane season in 2017. Forecasters predicted 11-17 named storms, five to nine hurricanes and two to four hurricanes could be "major" with sustained winds of at least 111 mph.

In 2015, Tina Grimes left a microwave running unattended in her Virginia Beach hotel room, according to court documents. It started a fire, and the sprinkler system activated. The hotel’s insurance company now wants Grimes to pay $1.83 million.