The asteroid, named Toutatis, flies by Earth every four years. During its closest approach on Wednesday, the celestial rock will pass about 4.3 million miles (7 million km) from Earth, which is about 18 times farther away than the moon.

The Red Cross continues to mobilize resources and relief workers to respond to Hurricane Sandy’s impact. Your help is desperately needed to provide essential aid including shelter, meals, basic health care, emotional support and other emergency services.

Eastern Maryland cleaned up from storm surge, while western Maryland dealt with as much as 29 inches of snow. Dueling disasters are straining emergency resources.

At the height of the disaster, more than 8.2 million lost electricity — some as far away as Michigan. Nearly a quarter of those without power were in New York, where lower Manhattan's usually bright lights remained dark for a second night.

The financial district of New York is closed for a second day. Extensive flooding has turned streets into streams.

The storm caused the worst damage in the 108-year history of New York's extensive subway system, according to Joseph Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The storm knocked out electricity to more than 2 million people and figured to upend life for tens of millions more. It clobbered the boarded-up big cities of the Northeast corridor, from Washington and Baltimore to Philadelphia, New York and Boston.

The hurricane is on path to meet a winter storm and a cold front, plus high tides from a full moon, and experts said the rare hybrid storm that results could impact 800 miles from the East Coast to the Great Lakes.

The city closed the subways before Hurricane Irene last year, and a Columbia University study predicted that an Irene surge just 1 foot higher would have paralyzed lower Manhattan.

A monster blast of geomagnetic particles from the sun could destroy 300 or more of the 2,100 high-voltage transformers that are the backbone of the U.S. electric grid, according to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

The United States Department of Agriculture has declared natural disaster areas in more than 1,000 counties and 26 drought-stricken states, making it the largest natural disaster in America ever.

The March flare produced high-energy gamma rays for about 20 hours, two and a half times longer than any event on record, researchers said.

A stream of highly charged particles from the Sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt.

Mahdi will only reappear, Shiites believe, when Israel is destroyed and the U.S. is brought to its knees; [and] two-thirds of the world’s population will die in a nuclear exchange.

Military insiders in Iran have been told that, thanks to their North Korea ally, they already have neutron bombs. These are nuclear weapons designed to kill people with radiation while minimizing damage to buildings. They are known as Enhanced Radiation Warhead (ERW). If they are detonated at high altitudes they become electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons that could destroy much of the infrastructure a modern nation needs to survive, including electric power, telecommunications, transportation, banking and finance, and the distribution of food and water. A report by the Congressional EMP Commission says that one year after an EMP attack, about two-thirds of the U.S. population, 200 million people, would have perished from starvation, disease or societal collapse.

According to the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) Iran has launched missiles from ships and detonated devices at high altitute, and have already armed their naval vessels with ballistic missiles. They also plan to deploy warships in the Atlantic Ocean.

A giant blast of plasma spat from the sun at as much as 4 million miles per hour Tuesday -- by some measures the largest solar event since late 2006 -- and it could lead to serious issues on Earth.