CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - NASA will try again to launch the shuttle Discovery to the international space station on Wednesday after having to call it off early Tuesday because of thunderstorms.
The storms popped up unexpectedly late Monday all around the launch site, and lightning lit up the sky. A strike was reported just five miles from the pad, and then it started to pour. The storms finally eased, but not fast enough.
Forecasters put the odds of good launching weather Wednesday at 70 percent. Launch is scheduled for 1:10 a.m.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday that a massive school closing wouldn’t stop the spread of the swine flu virus, saying vaccinations must be the defense against a menace that one report said could infect up to half of the population.
“What we know is that we have the virus right now traveling around the United States,” Sebelius said in a nationally broadcast interview. “And having children in a learning situation is beneficial … What we learned last spring is that shutting a school down sort of pre-emptively doesn’t stop the virus from spreading.”
Sebelius appeared on NBC’s “Today” show one day after a special presidential advisory panel presented a grim report to the Obama White House, saying among other things that a “plausible scenario” for the United States later this year is wide-scale infections, possibly 30,000 to 90,000 deaths, mostly among young children and young adults, and perhaps as many as 300,000 sick enough to require intensive care unit treatment at hospitals.

NEW YORK (AP) - A closely watched index shows home prices posted their first quarterly increase in three years, signaling the housing market has turned a corner.
The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller’s U.S. National Home Price Index released Tuesday rose nearly 3 percent from the first quarter, though was still down almost 15 percent from the second quarter last year.
Home prices are at levels not seen since early 2003.
The monthly index of 20 major cities increased 1.4 percent from May to June, the second straight month the index registered a gain. It was still 15 percent below June a year ago.

OAK BLUFFS, Mass. (AP) - Praising him as the man who shepherded the United States past the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, President Barack Obama on Tuesday announced plans to keep Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in his job for another term.
Bernanke, credited with guiding the economy away from its worst recession since the 1930s, now faces the challenge of meeting the White House expectations to guide an economic recovery critical to Obama’s legacy. Widely lauded for taking aggressive action to avert an economic catastrophe after the financial meltdown last year, Bernanke stood beside the president - and before reporters - while Obama took a brief break from his summer vacation on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts.
“Ben approached a financial system on the verge of collapse with calm and wisdom; with bold action and outside-the-box thinking that has helped put the brakes on our economic freefall,” Obama said. “Almost none of the decisions he or any of us made have been easy.”
In sticking with Bernanke, Obama is looking to reassure the financial sector as well as foreign central banks that his administration has no plans to change course on its largely well-received approach to rescuing the industry from its meltdown or its management of overall monetary policy.

MIAMI (AP) - Forecasters say a tropical depression has formed in the Pacific and it’s likely to turn into a tropical storm, though it’s not threatening land.
As of Monday evening, the National Hurricane Center said the tropical depression had maximum sustained winds near 35 mph with stronger gusts. It was expected to become a tropical storm Monday or Tuesday.
Its center was located about 660 miles southwest of the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. It was moving west-northwest near 10 mph.

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A law enforcement official tells The Associated Press that the Los Angeles County coroner has ruled Michael Jackson’s death a homicide.
The finding makes it more likely criminal charges will be filed against the doctor who was with the pop star when he died.
The official says the coroner determined a fatal combination of drugs was given to Jackson hours before he died in his rented Los Angeles mansion on June 25. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the findings have not been publicly released.
Forensic tests found the powerful anesthetic propofol in Jackson’s system along with two sedatives, the official says.
Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson’s personal physician, is the target of a manslaughter probe headed by Los Angeles police.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - Two firefighters - one searching for a person reported to be trapped and the other responding to a mayday call - plunged through the collapsed first floor of a burning building and died early Monday.
Rescue crews tried repeatedly to get to the two fallen firefighters, but were beaten back by fire and further collapses inside the corner brick building, Commissioner Michael Lombardo said.
The first firefighter to fall through the floor, Lt. Charles “Chip” McCarthy, was a 22-year veteran of the Buffalo Fire Department who was assigned to a team whose members are trained to find and free trapped victims.
Firefighter Jonathan Croom, who was working on his scheduled day off, responded to McCarthy’s mayday call and also fell through the collapsed floor, Cunningham said.
Firefighters continued to search the building Monday afternoon but had not yet determined whether anyone else was still inside, officials said.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Food and Drug Administration is investigating reports of liver damage in patients taking alli, the only nonprescription weight loss drug approved by the agency.
Regulators say they have received more than 30 reports of liver damage in patients taking alli and Xenical, the prescription version of the drug. Twenty-seven patients had to be hospitalized, and six suffered liver failure.
Alli and Xenical are both marketed by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, though Xenical is manufactured by Swiss firm Roche.
The FDA says it has not established a definitive relationship between the weight loss drugs and liver injury.
The agency says patients should continue using the drugs as directed.

EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) - Scotland’s justice minister on Monday defended his much-criticized decision to free the Lockerbie bomber, as the U.S. State Department said that though it disagreed “passionately” the move would not affect relations between America and Britain.
The Scottish administration has faced unrelenting criticism from the both the U.S. government and the families of American victims of the 1988 airline bombing since it announced last week it was freeing Abdel Baset al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds. The terminally ill Al-Megrahi, who has prostate cancer, returned to his native Libya on Thursday, where he was greeted by crowds waving Libyan and Scottish flags.
The United States will stand by Britain, even though it believes the decision was a mistake, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

HOUSTON, Pa. (AP) - Emergency crews are trying to rescue an injured man trapped in a grain silo on a southwestern Pennsylvania farm.
A Washington County 911 supervisor says the call came in shortly after noon that the man was trapped some 35 feet above ground in the silo.
Dispatchers don’t know how the man got stuck in the silo, or what kind of injury he supposedly has. But by 2 p.m. they were still working to get him out.