A four-story building in Center City Philadelphia collapsed on Wednesday morning, possibly trapping people inside. News cameras at the scene showed at least one person being taken from the wreckage on a stretcher.

Three more bodies were recovered today bringing the official death toll to 17 for a mine collapse in Papua, Indonesia. The mine, which extracted both gold and copper, is owned by a Phoenix-based company.

Two Metro-North Railroad trains collided during rush hour in Connecticut last night, injuring 60 people, 5 of them critically.

This massive plume of gray-white smoke from the wildfires raging through Southern California's transverse mountain ranges is being pushed over the Pacific Ocean by the notorious Santa Ana winds. A weather satellite operated by NOAA captured this image late Thursday—you can see five of the narrow Channel Islands between Santa Barbara and San Diego County beneath the thick smoke.

An illegally-constructed, half-completed building in the Mumbai suburb of Thane collapsed on Thursday evening, killing at least 45 people, including several children. Over 50 people were injured, and more than 20 are still missing; rescue workers, wielding construction equipment and driving bulldozers, are still at the scene, attempting to dig out possible survivors. Police, meanwhile, were trying to track down Jamil Qureshi and Salim Shaikh, the two builders who had illegally constructed the seven-story building and used substandard materials to do so. Of the dead, seven were construction workers from West Bengal, staying in the building as they added an eighth story—making it fully twice as high as zoning regulations are said to have allowed. "The entire incident reeks of corruption at many levels and in many departments," Anant Rangaswami writes at First Post. "From the local civil authorities who allowed the building to come up, to the electricity department which made connections available, to the water department which provided connections, to the local police station which failed to see something wrong, to the local politicians who seem not even to have noticed the illegal building coming up, to buyers of space in the building, which, if unauthorized, would not have registered the purchases." Prithviraj Chavan, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, visited the site of the accident on Friday. [NDTV | Guardian | First Post]

A pipeline carrying crude oil from tar sands in Canada ruptured Friday in the small Arkansas town of Mayflower, forcing the evacuation of 22 homes. The Pegasus pipeline, owned by Exxon, spilled almost 10,000 barrels of oil into a development, with the oil now sitting outside of homes and in wooded areas as emergency workers try to clean it up. This is the second spill of Canadian oil this week after a train carrying crude oil derailed on Wednesday, spilling 15,000 gallons of oil.

Apocalyptic Snor'eastercane Sandy is upon the Northeast: flights are cancelled, school is closed, public transportation is shut down, and the supermarket is out of batteries and good soups. Here's a map of Sandy's projected path; New Yorkers, if you're wondering whether or not you live in an evacuation zone, here's a map. We recommend you read the following pieces (and write it all down on a piece of paper in case the power goes out).

A 7.6-magnitude earthquake has hit off the coast of the Philippines, triggering tsunami warnings in Indonesia and Belau.

This jobless recovery of ours is now officially just joblessness. According to new data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP grew by just 1.3% last quarter. Worse, the growth we thought we've been seeing since 2003 has been more anemic than we thought: According to the revised numbers, the economy grew a lousy .4 percent of the first quarter of 2011—or almost a fifth of what we thought it had grown.

What with all the headlines about financial markets behaving like drunk girls, it seems appropriate to update you on the very latest state of the global econometric system. To wit:

A 7.4 magnitude earthquake in the Pacific, 100 miles east of Atka, Alaska, has put a tsunami warning into effect. A second quake, this one measuring 7.2, struck the same region a half-minute later. Yikes! [Reuters]

Sure, you've lost everything and your entire town has been obliterated by one of the most devastating series of tornadoes in history. Doesn't mean you can't still eat smart, local and organic!

This is the World Trade Center attacks, as seen from an NYPD helicopter. I'm not sure I can do it justice, except to say that it's among the most transfixing 17 minutes of video I've ever seen. The clip was originally obtained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology under the Freedom of Information Act for their investigation into the attacks, and anonymously sent, released, along with several still photographs taken from another helicopter, to the secret-sharing website Cryptome by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request. You can download the photos here.

"This issue of space weather has got to be taken seriously," UK science advisor John Beddington said this week, and boy, John, we are right there with you on that, especially because you are telling everyone that a bad solar storm could lead to a $2 trillion "global Katrina." We are taking especially seriously, for example, the fact that a period of maximum solar energy is approaching (it kicks off in 2013), and, shockingly, we appear to be deeply reliant on complex networks of technology that are inadequately protected:

Australia's ABC News has put together a fascinating, and sort of terrifying, set of interactive before-and-after satellite photos of the apocalyptic floods in Brisbane, Australia. Above: The suburb of Fairfield. [ABC News]

A fire in a 28-story high-rise in China's largest city has killed an early estimate of 42 people. A section of the building was under renovation when the blaze started. The fire is out now, but search-and-rescue efforts continue.

Repent! Flee! Social accessory Twitter has been besieged by a virus that sends you to porn and makes your Twitter Tweet automatically, simply by mousing-over a link, no clicking needed! A former British Prime Minister's wife is a prominent casualty.

An offshore rig to the West of the Deepwater Horizon disaster site has exploded. Luckily, it was non-producing and there are no reported deaths. But man, oil companies really shouldn't have listened to that sinister Explode-O-Rig 5000™ salesman. [NYT]

[A barber cuts a customer's beard on a makehift barbershop at a camp for people displaced by floods in Pakistan's Punjab province. Floods have receded in north and central Pakistan, but are continuing in the south. Pic via AP.]

[The Taliban hinted on Thursday that they might attack foreigners doing aid work in Pakistan. Here, Pakistani villagers stand on the remains of an embankment washed away by heavy flooding in Thatta near Hyderabad. Pic via AP.]