HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — One of two contract workers injured in an explosion Wednesday while removing a propellant from rockets at Redstone Arsenal ha...

— The Associated Press sought independent statistical analyses of global temperatures to determine if there is a true cooling of Earth's climate.

The AP contacted University of South Carolina statistics professor John Grego, a longtime reliable statistics source. In addition, the American Statistical Association sent an e-mail request from the AP seeking statisticians willing to examine certain sets of numbers and look for trends without being told what those numbers represented.

Three professors of statistics agreed: David Peterson, retired from Duke University; Mack Shelley, director of public policy and administration at Iowa State University; and Edward Melnick from New York University.

Each was given two spreadsheets, neither of which had any indication they were temperature data.

One spreadsheet was year-by-year global temperature changes from 1880 to 2009, adjusted through most of this year from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's ground measurements. The other was year-to-year temperature changes from 1979-2009 gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville from atmospheric measurements by satellite.

A southern Tennessee man faces homicide charges in the slayings of his wife, her father, brother and teenage son, along with two other people in two states, authorities said Sunday.

The bodies of the relatives, along with a teenage neighbor, were found Saturday in two rural homes near Fayetteville in southern Tennessee, said the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. A sixth body discovered at a business about 30 miles south in Huntsville, Ala., has not been identified, and authorities have not said how the killings are linked.

Jacob Shaffer, 30, of Fayetteville in Lincoln County, faces six counts of homicide, his motive described as domestic, according to TBI spokeswoman Kristin Helm. She identified the victims as as Shaffer's wife, 38-year-old Traci Shaffer; her son, 16-year-old Devin Brooks; her brother, 34-year-old Chris Hall; her father, 57-year-old Billy Hall; and a neighbor, 16-year-old Robert Berber. Jacob Shaffer was being held in the Lincoln County jail without bond and no lawyer for him was listed at the jail.

Lincoln County Sheriff Murray Blackwelder said Saturday that his department was investigating three crime scenes and would not confirm the causes of death in what he called "horrendous" killings and "one of the worst crimes Lincoln County has seen." Autopsies were being performed Sunday.

Helm said the Tennessee victims were killed Friday night or early Saturday. Shaffer was sitting on the porch of one of the Fayetteville houses when authorities first arrived Saturday. Huntsville police said based on information from Shaffer, they found the sixth victim at Hall Cultured Marble Granite on Saturday morning.