NEW ORLEANS – A steamship that sank off the Louisiana coast during an 1846 storm has produced a trove of rare gold coins, including some produced at two, mostly forgotten U.S. mints in the South, coin experts say. Last year, four Louisiana residents salvaged hundreds of gold coins and thousands …

BEIJING – First, the water level in a pond inexplicably plunged. Then, thousands of toads appeared on streets in a nearby province. Finally, just hours before China’s worst earthquake in three decades, animals at a local zoo began acting strangely. As bodies are pulled from the wreckage of Monday’s quake, …

RANGOON, Burma – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Burma, which has been renamed Myanmar by the ruling military junta, to focus on saving lives, not on politics, after the military government on Wednesday shunned a U.S. proposal for naval ships to deliver aid to cyclone survivors. The U.N. says up …

LONDON – Britain’s government has begun a campaign of graphic Internet advertisements aimed at warning young people about the dangers of carrying a knife. The ads were designed with input from teenagers and include graphic images of real stab wounds. They will be distributed through social networking sites and mobile …

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority. The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium …

LONDON – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is downplaying the idea of a nuclear attack by terrorists after recent postings on Al Qaeda-affiliated Web sites exhorted militants to pursue weapons of mass destruction for use against the U.S. Chertoff, speaking at Oxford Union on Friday, said that while officials acknowledge …

CONCORD, N.H. – Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain. The process is called alkaline hydrolysis and was developed in this country …

GALVESTON, Texas – Four students and a safety officer had less than a minute to escape their sinking ship once it began taking water during a regatta on the Gulf of Mexico, two survivors said Monday. The survivors praised the boat’s other safety officer, 53-year-old Roger Stone, for rushing them …

WASHINGTON – Jack Alderson was ordered never to talk about the secret weapons tests he helped conduct in the Pacific during the 1960s. He kept quiet for decades. Sparse attendance at a 1993 reunion prompted Alderson, a retired Navy Reserve lieutenant commander, to speak out. He learned that more than …

This is a rush transcript of “Special Report With Brit Hume” from June 20, 2008. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SCOTT MCCLELLAN, FORMER WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Well, it was a marketing campaign or a propaganda campaign, however you …