Alabama

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- As airport officials tried to figure out how a 300-pound arrival-departure panel fell off the wall and onto a family, the mother of a boy who was killed by the sign lay in a hospital with her own injuries, still unaware of what happened.

MOBILE, Ala. — This is not at all how it looked in the brochure: Pulled by a tugboat at a maddeningly slow pace, the ill-fated cruise ship Carnival Triumph finally drew within sight of land on Thursday as miserable passengers told stories of overflowing toilets, food shortages, foul odors and dangerously dark passageways.

MIDLAND CITY, Ala. -- For six anguished days, people in this small Alabama town asked just one question about the 5-year-old boy being held hostage in an underground bunker by a menacing, unpredictable neighbor: "Is he free yet?"

MIDLAND CITY, Ala. — The standoff between police and a gunman accused of holding a kindergartner hostage in an underground bunker dragged into a fourth day on Friday, as authorities sought to continue delicate conversations with the man through a pipe and worked to safely end the tense situation.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Like vinyl records and skinny ties, good things eventually come back around. At NASA, that means looking to the Apollo program for ideas on how to develop the next generation of rockets for future missions to the moon and beyond.

Young engineers who weren't even born when the last Saturn V rocket took off for the moon are testing a vintage engine from the program.

A man carrying an assault weapon fired into a crowded bar in Tuscaloosa, Ala., shortly after midnight Monday, injuring 17 people and leaving chaos in his wake, officials said.

GADSDEN, Ala. -- An Alabama police chief says he recently discovered that his department has two unmanned aerial vehicles.