BMW is recalling almost 570,000 cars in the U.S. and Canada because a battery cable connector can fail and cause the engines to stall.

The recall affects popular 3-Series sedans, wagons, convertibles and coupes from the 2007 through 2011 model years. Also included are 1-Series coupes and convertibles from 2008 through 2012, and the Z4 sports car from 2009 through 2011.

The cable connectors and a fuse box terminal in the cars can degrade over time, and that can break the electrical connection between the trunk-mounted battery and the fuse box at the front. If that happens, the cars could lose electrical power, causing the engines to stall unexpectedly, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents posted on its website Saturday.

The company says in documents sent to NHTSA that the problem stems from movement between the battery cable and the fuse box.

BMW says it knows of one minor collision in Canada due to the problem, but no injuries.

The German automaker says dealers will replace the battery cable connector and secure it for free. It will start notifying owners in March.

The 3-Series is BMW's most popular car in the U.S., dominating the small luxury car market. The company sold nearly 100,000 of them in the U.S. last year.

The recall affects more than 504,000 cars in the U.S. and another 65,000 in Canada.

Pakistani police have revised the cause of a blast that killed 83 people on Saturday, saying a suicide bomber was behind the attack that pulverized a busy marketplace.

The explosion targeted Shiite Muslims in Hazara, on the outskirts of the southwestern city of Quetta, authorities said.

Police now say a suicide bomber, driving an explosive-laden water tanker, rammed the vehicle into buildings at the crowded marketplace.

The water tanker carried between 800 and 1,000 kilograms (1,760 to 2,200 pounds) of explosive material, Quetta police official Wazir Khan Nasir said.

Previously, police said explosives were packed in a parked water tanker and were remotely detonated.

The blast demolished four buildings of the marketplace, leaving dozens dead and 180 injured.

As of Sunday morning, no group had claimed responsibility for the attack.

The assault left some wondering what could stop the bloodshed in Quetta.

Zulfiqar Ali Magsi, the governor and chief executive of Balochistan province, told reporters Saturday that law enforcement agencies were incapable of stopping such attacks and had failed to maintain law and order in Quetta.

Pakistan, which is overwhelmingly Sunni, has been plagued by sectarian strife and attacks for years.

 It was hours before dawn on a heaving Arctic sea, and snow showers were making it hard for Kurt Ludvigsen to find his fishing buoys with the trawler's powerful searchlight.

But the 49-year-old Norwegian was less bothered by the conditions than by the large numbers of cod flailing in the nets he and his younger brother, Trond, winched aboard.

"It's paradoxical but we have too many fish this year," the older Ludvigsen said. "Prices have fallen 30 percent ... We're having to work far harder."

Just over six years ago, an article in the U.S. journal Science projected that all fish and seafood species, on current trends, would collapse by 2048.

A cod bonanza off north Norway and Russia, and recovery of some fish stocks off the coasts of developed nations from the United States to Australia, have led many scientists to say the future for overfished world stocks is a bit less bleak.

Stocks off the coasts of developing nations — from the Pacific to the Caribbean — are still in sharp decline, but the recoveries give hope that the problems are not irreversible.

"The outlook is improving relative to what we saw in 2006," said Boris Worm, a professor of biology at Dalhousie University in Canada and lead author of the 2006 study in Science.

"It's more than isolated examples — it's a substantial number" of successes, he said.

A lot is at stake. Fisheries, both marine and farmed, provide livelihoods for up to 820 million people, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, which emphasizes that globally, overfishing is still on the rise.

Cod, the 11th most-caught fish species on the FAO list (behind the Peruvian anchovy, skipjack tuna and Atlantic herring), has had a mixed fate.

While a 1990s fishing moratorium off eastern Canada is still in place, and European Union quotas are unchanged this year, the quota off northern Norway and Russia is a record 1.1 million tons, up a third from 2012, and six times as high as in 1990.

Part of the reason is that global warming has expanded the cod's habitat northwards. And strict management of quotas by Oslo and Moscow have played a role, fisheries experts say.

Among other encouraging examples: Fish landings off the United States rose to a 14-year-high in 2011, "thanks in part to rebuilding fish populations," according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

U.S. successes include Atlantic swordfish, summer flounder, New England scallops, Pacific lingcod and mid-Atlantic bluefish, the Washington-based Pew Environment Group said.

In September, another study in the journal Science said catches of the best-studied stocks off the coasts of developed nations were shifting towards sustainable levels.

"We now know that we can make fisheries recover," said Christopher Costello, lead author of that study, and a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"That sounds obvious, but even 10 years ago many people would have disagreed, saying 'we've already decimated them to a point of no return.'"

Many experts are now dropping a belief that overfished stocks, like cod off Canada, can never revive. Closing fishing grounds, or cracking down on illegal catches, usually gives stocks a needed respite, he said.

That is much harder for developing nations, from the Philippines to Ecuador, to enforce, with the result that better conservation in one area may simply shift problems elsewhere.

The White House is not directly commenting on a newspaper report that the administration is considering a path for illegal immigrants to become legal permanent U.S. residents within eight years.

USA Today said it obtained a draft of a White House immigration plan that contained the proposal.

The White House wouldn’t comment Saturday night directly on the USA Today report but released this statement:

“The President has made clear the principles upon which he believes any commonsense immigration reform effort should be based. We continue to work in support of a bipartisan effort, and while the President has made clear he will move forward if Congress fails to act, progress continues to be made and the administration has not prepared a final bill to submit.”

Since his re-election – which got a boost from Hispanic voters -- President Barack Obama has renewed his push for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration policy, including the topic in his inaugural address and State of the Union speech and making a trip to Nevada last month to highlight the issue.

And there’s been some progress in the Senate: A bipartisan group of senators announced in late January that they had agreed on goals for a major rewrite of immigration laws. Those include creating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are here already and creating a system to ensure that employers don’t hire illegal immigrants.

But reaction to the USA Today report by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., points to the difficulty in passing any package. Rubio issued a statement Saturday saying that if the president's eventual proposal follows the draft described by USA Today, it "would be dead on arrival in Congress."   

A meteor streaked through the sky and exploded Friday over Russia's Ural Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb, its sonic blasts shattering countless windows and injuring almost 1,000 people. The spectacle deeply frightened thousands, with some elderly women declaring the world was coming to an end.

The meteor — estimated to be about 10 tons — entered the Earth's atmosphere at a hypersonic speed of at least 33,000 mph and shattered about 18-32 miles above the ground, the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

It released the energy of several kilotons above the Chelyabinsk region, the academy said.

Amateur videos broadcast on Russian television showed an object speeding across the sky about 9:20 a.m. local time, just after sunrise, leaving a thick white contrail and an intense flash.

The explosions broke an estimated 1 million square feet of glass, city officials said.

Russia's Interfax news agency said close to 1,000 people sought medical care after the explosions and most were injured by shards of glass, according to officials. Athletes at a city sports arena were among those cut up by the flying glass. It was not immediately clear if any people were struck by space fragments.

"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people's houses to check if they were OK," said Sergey Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, about 930 miles east of Moscow, the biggest city in the affected region.

"We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud thundering sound," he told The Associated Press by telephone.

Amateur videos posted to Youtube showed a bright streaks of light crossing the morning sky. In some videos, a large boom was heard -- possibly an impact or possibly a sonic boom of the meteor sailing through the Earth's atmosphere at more than the speed of sound.

 South African model Reeva Steenkamp was looking forward to Valentine's Day.

"What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow?" the 29-year-old asked her thousands of followers on Twitter a day before. "Get excited."

Steenkamp was killed early Thursday in a shooting at the Pretoria home of Olympian Oscar Pistorius, her boyfriend.

He has been charged with murder. In keeping with South African law, Pistorius will be named officially as the suspect when he appears in court Friday.
Oscar Pistorius charged with murder

Pistorius spokeswoman Kate Silvers said the athlete is "assisting the police with their investigation but there will be no further comment until matters become clearer later today."

Read more: Woman found fatally shot in home of 'blade runner' Oscar Pistorius

Pistorius, nicknamed the "Blade Runner," made history when he became the first Paralympian to compete in the able-bodied Olympics last year. He ran on special carbon fiber blades affixed to his legs, which were amputated below the knees as a toddler because of a bone defect.


Capacity Relations, the agency that represents Steenkamp, announced her death. "She was the kindest, sweetest human being; an angel on earth and will be sorely missed," the agency said on Twitter.

Passengers who finally escaped the disabled Carnival cruise ship Triumph were checking into hotels early Friday for a hot shower, fresh-cooked food and sleep or boarding buses for a long haul home after five numbing days at sea on a powerless ship.

The vacation ship carrying some 4,200 people docked late Thursday in Mobile after a painfully slow approach that took most of the day. Passengers raucously cheered after days of what they described as overflowing toilets, food shortages and foul odors.

"Sweet Home Alabama!" read one of the homemade signs passengers affixed alongside the 14-story ship as many celebrated at deck rails lining several levels of the stricken ship. The ship's horn loudly blasted several times as four tugboats pulled the crippled ship to shore at about 9:15 p.m. CST. Some gave a thumbs-up sign and flashes from cameras and cellphones lit the night.

Less than four hours later, the last passenger had disembarked.

Some, like 56-year-old Deborah Knight of Houston, had no interest in boarding one of about 100 buses assembled to carry passengers to hotels in New Orleans or Texas. Her husband Seth drove in from Houston and they checked into a downtown Mobile hotel.

"I want a hot shower and a daggum Whataburger," said Knight, who was wearing a bathrobe over her clothes as her bags were unloaded from her husband's pickup truck. She said she was afraid to eat the food on board and had gotten sick while on the ship.

Buses arrived in the pre-dawn darkness at a Hilton in New Orleans to reporters and paramedics on the scene with wheelchairs to roll in passengers who were elderly or too fatigued to walk.

Many were tired and didn't want to talk. There were long lines to check into rooms. Some got emotional as they described the deplorable conditions of the ship.

"It was horrible, just horrible" said Maria Hernandez, 28, of Angleton, Texas, tears welling in her eyes as she talked about waking up to smoke in her lower-level room Sunday and the days of heat and stench to follow. She was on a "girls trip" with friends.

She said the group hauled mattresses to upper-level decks to escape the heat. As she pulled her luggage into the hotel, a flashlight around her neck, she managed a smile and even a giggle when asked to show her red "poo-poo bag" — distributed by the cruise line for collecting human waste.

This was only part of her journey to get home. Hernandez, like hundreds others, would get to enjoy a brief reprieve at the hotel before flying home later in the day.

"I just can't wait to be home," she said.

It wasn't long after the ship pulled into the Port of Mobile that passengers began streaming down the gang plank, some in wheelchairs and others pulling carry-on luggage. One man gave the thumbs up.

If your Valentine’s Day plans include an engagement, congratulations! Besides romance, you also are more likely to experience financial joy – if your marriage works out.

Couples who get and stay married can have as much as four times the wealth of their single or divorced peers. Experts say that's not only because they can combine their salaries and share expenses once they get married.

Spouses are better off because of a combination of factors, starting with who is getting married these days.

“It’s more educated, more affluent and also more religious Americans that tend to get married in the first place,” said Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

That gives them a starting advantage over their peers who aren’t married. 

Once they are married, the couples also are able to take advantage of economies of scale – anything from buying just one dishwasher to relying on one another’s health insurance. That allows them to build wealth more quickly than their peers who are single, divorced or  living together romantically.

“You have further advantages,” said Pamela Smock, director of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.