In brief: Carbon monoxide kills man at New York mall, sickens dozens

Huntington Station, N.Y. – A 55-year-old restaurant manager died and more than two dozen others were taken to hospitals Saturday after being overcome by carbon monoxide at a New York mall, police said.

Suffolk County police identified the man who died as Steven Nelson, a manager at the Legal Sea Foods restaurant at the Walt Whitman Shops in Huntington Station on Long Island.

Police said 28 others affected by carbon monoxide were taken to area hospitals.

Three officers were among those overcome by carbon monoxide at the mall, which is about 35 miles east of New York City, police said. They responded to a call shortly after 6 p.m.

Carbon monoxide is odorless and colorless and can lead to death by suffocation. The source of the gas leak was under investigation.

WhatsApp crashes, gets running again

Los Angeles – WhatsApp is starting to work again after the messaging app that Facebook is buying for $19 billion had some technical trouble.

Associated Press reporters noticed that the app wasn’t functioning Saturday starting at about noon, but by 2:30 p.m., Twitter users around the world began saying WhatsApp was working again.

WhatsApp and Facebook didn’t respond to emails seeking comment, but the WhatsApp Status account on Twitter said service had been restored and apologized for the downtime.

Service outages are common for rapidly growing technology companies, and the WhatsApp Status account has tweeted about an outage about once a month going back through May.

Firefighter dies at university apartments

Columbia, Mo. – A 23-year veteran firefighter was killed Saturday while helping evacuate students from a University of Missouri-run apartment complex after a second-story walkway collapsed, according to Columbia Fire Department officials.

Columbia Fire Chief Chuck Witt said at a news conference that Lt. Bruce Britt became trapped beneath rubble while responding to the collapse at University Village Apartments and was pronounced dead at University Hospital.

No residents were injured.