200 teenagers dead in nightclub fire in southern Brazil.

     In a horrific tragedy that would raise serious questions about public safety in Brazil, some 200 people — mostly teenagers — were killed in an inferno that swept through a nightclub, Kiss, in Santa Maria, a small city in Rio Grande do Sul, the prosperous southern state which shares its border with Argentina and Uruguay.

Earth adds leap second on Saturday night

     Washington : Saturday night will stretch longer by a second. A leap second.

     International timekeepers are adding a second to the clock at midnight universal time Saturday, June 30, going into July 1. That's 8 p.m. EDT Saturday. Universal time will be 11:59:59 and then the unusual reading of 11:59:60 before it hits midnight.

     A combination of factors, including Earth slowing down a bit from the tidal pull of the moon, and an atomic clock that's a hair too fast, means that periodically timekeepers have to synchronize the official atomic clocks, said Daniel Gambis, head of the Earth Orientation Service in Paris that coordinates leap seconds.The time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis - the definition of a day - is now about two milliseconds longer than it was 100 years ago, said Geoff Chester, spokesman at the U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the official U.S. atomic clocks. That's each day, so it adds up to nearly three-quarters of a second a year.