From local Houston headlines, we bring you these weekend news bits... • Two men were rescued from the Gulf of Mexico 130 miles southeast of Galveston when their helicopter crashed. • Deer Park resident and former Astros pitcher, Andy Pettitte, admitted to using a human growth hormone during his recovery from an elbow injury in 2002. • During future evacuations and before boarding public transportation criminal background checks will be standard operating procedure to......

Good morning, Houston. Are you feeling particularly crunk today? Maybe you should be: Crunk is among the words added to Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary this year. Also among the 100 new words are DVR, IED, gray literature and smackdown. But we think we'll get the most use out of crunk, which M-W defines as a style of Southern rap music but which has a variety of definitions in the Urban Dictionary. Which brings us to......

Good morning, Houston. Are you planning on taking a summer vacation? Here's something to consider, if you are: Continental, along with several other airlines, raised their fares in 30% of the top U.S. markets this week. Some one-way fares are up $10, some $5, and some remain the same. This was a relatively small increase, but will still hit the wallets of summer vactioners. With airfare increasing and gas prices so high, how about......

Good morning, Houston. Blah blah blah, et cetera. (Yeah, you can tell it's Friday again.) >> BP: Managers to blame for 2005 blast: An internal BP report on the deadly 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery recommends that four top managers be fired for bad judgment and failing to do their jobs. The report — completed in February but kept confidential until it was released under court order Thursday — named Pat Gower,......

Good morning, Houston. If you attended mass on Ash Wednesday, we hope it went more smoothly than one at the cathedral in Santa Fe, N.M. During the mass, CD players duct-taped to the undersides of pews began blasting sexually explicit language — as you might expect, it was disruptive. Church staff members took the CD players to the basement, after which a bomb squad arrived and blew two of the three players up. For......

Good morning, Houston. You know what the problem is around this town? We'll tell you: mismatched news racks. But never fear — City Council is trying to save us. Under an ordinance presented to council this week, newspaper vendors would have to make their racks relatively the same size, keep them clean and in working order and paint them all the same color: forest green (we had some details back in the summer). The reaction?......

Good morning, Houston. In case you were wondering, the threat of a "sickout" by HISD teachers upset over the district's new merit pay program ended up not happening after all. "It never crossed my mind [to call in sick]," Anderson Elementary teacher Linda Burks told the Chronicle. "I had a job to do." She added that all her colleagues showed up for work Tuesday, too — but then again, most of them got bonuses.......

Good morning, Houston! There's some good news: If you graduated from high school, you're already ahead of a third of Texas students. Of course, that means there's also some bad news — namely, that a third of Texas students don't finish high school. And according to statistics, the situation is even worse in the state's big cities: There, more students drop out than finish high school. Elleen Coppola, a Rice University researcher, said dropouts......

Maybe we're just getting on in years and remembering the past better than it actually was, but it seems that when Houstonist was in elementary, middle and high school, we had a decent summer vacation — beginning at the end of May, say, and ending sometime in late August. But lately it seems like schools have been letting kids out later and bringing them back earlier, leaving an approximately 10-day summer vacation sometime in mid-July.......

If you've ever thought that the food you've had from Taco Bell tasted a little weird, you might not have been wrong: One La Porte family is suing the chain, claiming they got sick after eating at a Deer Park Taco Bell location. The cause of the illness, apparently, was food that had been contaminated with cleaning solutions. According to the lawsuit filed by Emily McDuffie, she, her three kids and her mother all became......

HISD trustees voted 6-3 yesterday to reject a 4-cent tax hike that would have brought the district $44 million, saying they didn't want to burden homeowners with extra taxes St. John Baptist Church in Missouri City, founded by freed slaves in 1869, burned early this morning in what police say was a deliberately started fire; an investigation is under way As we head into the holiday weekend, looks like storms may be coming, KHOU's David......

If you think traffic on I-10 was a bad repercussion of yesterday’s downpour, try being washed away from your nest. You would have to be a bird to have experienced that, but you get the idea. Rain storms usually cause a lot of phone calls to come into Wildlife Rehab and Education, a non-profit organization, and yesterday was no different. Among those the group rescued Monday were a family of cottontail rabbits flooded out of......

The day's storms, now to our east, will probably return tonight and could dump between 5 and 10 inches of rain on some already-soaked areas of the city And here's the wrapup of today's flooding; some areas had nearly 11 inches of rain, the Chron reports A shelter-in-place order in Deer Park was lifted early this afternoon after emergency workers contained a leak at the Shell Chemical Plant In Pearland, firefighters spent most of the......

And the water keeps coming: The Chronicle is now reporting that as much as 10.5 inches of rain has fallen on parts of the Houston area today, and there's more on the way. Among the hardest-hit areas is the east side, where the Red Cross has opened shelters at Channelview High School and Denver Harbor Community Center (6402 Market St.) and is looking at opening others. Near Hobby Airport and Pasadena, 6 inches of rain......

OK, Texas history buffs, today's your day: San Jacinto Day is being celebrated at the San Jacinto Battleground, complete with battle re-enactments, a mini-zoo and an archaeological dig. Some of the highlights: • At 3 p.m., costumed re-enactors will replicate the historic Battle of San Jacinto (and, we hear, other battles from the Texas Revolution), with period weapons and pyrotechnics. (We hope the re-enactment condenses the day-long search for Santa Anna.) • Sulters, civilians......

Police have arrested a La Marque couple in connection with a series of robberies at fast-food restaurants in Houston and the southeastern suburbs. John T. Mock and Maxine Sallie, who KPRC call "a modern day Bonnie and Clyde," targeted Subway and Church's restaurants in Houston, Pasadena, Deer Park, Baytown, League City and Alvin. According to KTRK, Mock and Sallie weren't the sharpest plastic knives in the package: They robbed a Subway shop in Alvin, but......

Police are looking for a serial robber who's targeting fast-food restaurants in Houston and the eastern suburbs. He robbed eight restaurants — mainly Subway and Church's — between Thursday and Sunday last week, and authorities and employees are worried he may strike again. Of course, things aren't always easy for armed robbers. At first, some employees thought he was kidding when he came into their restaurants and demanded money: "He said 'no, I'm not kidding.'......

No cause has been announced yet for a fire at a Deer Park chemical plant yesterday that shut down part of Highway 225 and injured one worker. The fire broke out in an aluminum handling warehouse at Akzo Nobel Chemicals on Battleground Road at about 3:25 p.m. and was followed by a series of small explosions. The employee, who suffered second- and third-degree chemical burns, was taken to the UTMB in Galveston, where he's in......

An aluminum oxide fire at a Deer Park chemical plant has shut down part of Highway 225 this afternoon; one injury is reported Marcus Anthony Wilson has been charged with four counts of burglary in a string of East End crimes during the fall and winter A Houston family is offering a $500 reward for information on who killed more than two dozen goats at their Waller County ranch last week Today was Taxi Appreciation......