RENO, Nev. (AP) — As thousands watched in horror, a World War II-era fighter plane competing in a Nevada event described as a car race in the sky suddenly pitched upward, rolled and did a nose-dive toward the crowded grandstand.

The plane, flown by a 74-year-old veteran Hollywood stunt pilot, then slammed into the concrete in a section of VIP box seats and blew to pieces in front the pilot’s family and a tight-knit group of friends who attend the annual event in Reno.

“It absolutely disintegrated,” said Tim O’Brien of Grass Valley Calif., who attends the races every year. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

(CNN) — Mexico’s state-owned oil company searched in rough seas Friday for 10 workers missing from a U.S.-owned oil vessel in the tropical-storm-roiled Gulf of Mexico.

The workers, contracted by Texas-based Geokinetics, abandoned ship Thursday afternoon after Tropical Storm Nate caused their liftboat to take on water in the Bay of Campeche, according to Brenda Taquino, spokeswoman for Geokinetics.

The crew of a ship several miles away saw the workers board a life raft, but conditions were too dangerous for them to assist, Taquino said.

Izaiah Wallis lies on his back, machine tubes hooked to his small body, legs stretched out and toes curled.

A white sheet of paper hangs on an aquarium-themed painted wall behind his bed, bearing a request written on his behalf by his grandmother.

“If you love me, please don’t kiss me,” it reads in blue marker. “I don’t want to end up back in the hospital.”

Baby steps.

The Vista, Calif., toddler who became paralyzed last year after a drunk-driving teenager struck him and his grandfather can now voluntarily move his legs, his doctor announced this week, a significant breakthrough in the 2-year-old’s recovery.

(CNN) — Tristin Saghin might only be 9 years old, but he knew just what to do after his 2-year-old sister was found floating in her grandmother’s swimming pool unconscious Sunday.

“I went running outside … and I did CPR on her,” the boy told affiliate KNXV in Mesa, Arizona.

TOKYO – The operator of Japan’s crippled nuclear plant laid out a blueprint Sunday for stopping radiation leaks and stabilizing damaged reactors within the next six to nine months as a first step toward allowing some of the tens of thousands of evacuees to return to the area.

PHOENIX – Boeing was surprised when a section of a Southwest jetliner’s fuselage ripped open in flight because the plane wasn’t old enough to be worrisome, a company official said Tuesday, as the airline cleared most of its older 737 planes to return to the skies.

Southwest said it had inspected nearly all of the jets it grounded after the accident on Friday. Five were found with the same kinds of cracks suspected of causing the 5-foot-long hole to open as the jet cruised around 34,000 feet. The planes are being repaired, the airline said.

The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, which has suffered numerous fires, explosions and subsequent radiation leaks since Friday’s earthquake, could get worse, and just how much worse is unknown.

But health and nuclear safety experts agree that even if radiation levels around the plant reach Chernobyl-like levels, Japan’s disaster will not pose a health hazard to the United States.

(CNN) — A 25-year-old man was declared dead Friday afternoon after being swept out to sea off a northern California beach while trying to photograph a tsunami launched by the massive earthquake near Japan, according to a Del Norte County, California, official.

The man’s identity was withheld as authorities tried to contact his family, said Joey Young, a spokesman for the emergency operations center of Del Norte County.

A fourth child died today as a result of a fire in a Houston home day care center, a local television station reported, and investigators are trying to determine whether the center’s owner was out shopping when the deadly blaze ignited.

Eighteen-month-old Elias Castillo died this morning, Houston television station KTRK reported. Two other children who had been transferred to Shriners Hospital for Children in Galveston — which specializes in burn care — remain in critical but stable condition. A third child was released from Houston’s Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital on Friday.

BEIJING — A dawn explosion in a Chinese coal mine killed 20 and trapped 17 workers underground Saturday in the country’s central region, a national work safety official said.

The blast came shortly after the world was riveted by Chile’s dramatic rescue of 33 trapped miners after they spent more than two months underground.

It wasn’t yet clear how far underground the 17 workers were trapped at the state-owned mine, a man surnamed Li with the state work safety administration said by telephone. He had no details on the cause of the 6 a.m. (6 p.m. EDT on Friday) blast in Henan province, a couple of hours outside the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, about 430 miles south of Beijing.