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Why settle for dusty ol' Mayan calendars and 12/12/12 apocalyptic visions, when 2012 has been offering up so many stellar—and planetary—sightings? We Earthlings have already been treated to nice meteor showers as well as a magnificent supermoon, and this weekend brings an annular solar eclipse. That's not even the best treat: Venus will be ambling between Earth and the sun in a rare (though non-earth-shattering) planetary alignment. Sure, the event might look like a black pimple floating across the face of the sun, but this celestial rarity once guided adventurous astronomers in their quest to determine the size of the solar system and yielded the first-ever global scientific collaboration. Don't blink—Venus doesn't cross our path again until December 2117.   An annular solar eclipse and that ring of fire: A solar eclipse happens this Sunday, except for the Eastern seaboard (sorry). It's an "annular" eclipse rather than a total one, which means t...

The U.S. Border Patrol on Tuesday unveiled its first national strategy in eight years, a period in which the number of agents more than doubled and apprehensions of people entering illegally from Mexico dropped to a 40-year low. The new approach — outlined in a 32-page document that took more than two years to develop — uses buzzwords like "risk-based" and "intelligence-driven" to describe a more nuanced, targeted response to constantly evolving threats. The Border Patrol previously relied on a strategy that blanketed heavily trafficked corridors for illegal immigrants with agents, pushing migrants to more remote areas where they would presumably be easier to capture and discouraged from trying again. "The jury, for me at least, is out on whether that's a solid strategy," Chief Mike Fisher told The Associated Press. The new strategy draws on intelligence to identify repeat crossers and to try to determine why they keep coming, said Fisher,...

 A polluted drainage ditch that once flowed with industrial waste from Lake Charles, La., petrochemical plants teems with overgrown, wild plants today.A light-rail line zips past the spot where a now-defunct Portland, Ore., gasoline station advertised in 1972 that it had run out of fuel.A smoking Jersey City, N.J., dump piled with twisted, rusty metal has disappeared, along with the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan that were its backdrop. Forty years after the Environmental Protection Agency sent an army of nearly 100 photographers across the country to capture images at the dawn of environmental regulation, The Associated Press went back for Earth Day this year to see how things have changed. It is something the agency never got to do because the Documerica program, as it was called, died in 1978, the victim of budget cuts. AP photographers returned to more than a dozen of those locations in recent we...

 In an unusually early and strong warning, national weather forecasters cautioned Friday that conditions are ripe for violent tornadoes to rip through the nation’s midsection from Texas to Minnesota this weekend.As states across the middle of the country prepared for the worst, storms were already kicking off in Norman, Okla., where a twister whizzed by the nation’s tornado forecasting headquarters but caused little damage. It was only the second time in U.S. history that the Storm Prediction Center issued a high-risk warning more than 24 hours in advance, said Russ Schneider, director of the center, which is part of the National Weather Service. The first such warning was issued in April 2006 before nearly 100 tornadoes tore across a large swathe of the southeastern U.S. The latest warning covers portions of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas. The worst weather is expected to develop late Saturday afternoon between Oklahoma City and Salina, Kan...

At least two tornadoes ripped across northern Texas Tuesday, flipping huge trucks like toys, tearing off roofs and grounding flights but apparently causing only minor casualties.One twister touched down in a parking lot full of tractor-trailers -- large trucks that move shipping-container sized cargos, and television images showed several containers twisting and flying dozens of feet up into the air. "It was raining and hailing like I said... and then all of a sudden, the rain and hail ceased... that's when we saw the tornadoes touch down," witness Jonathan Cook told CNN. The resident of Burleson said he dashed out of the bank when he saw hail the size of nickel coins start falling and leapt back into his truck to get it to the cover of a nearby gas station. "We were just under the gas pump awning, hoping it didn't come our way. We had a good visual of it, but we really had nowhere to go... we just had to run in the gas station." Texas resi...