Looks like it was the turkey after all. Meat giant Cargill has recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey after the Centers for Disease Control found that Cargill's meat samples were contaminated with the same strains of salmonella connected to the recent outbreak. So far, the salmonella surge has caused one death and 76 other cases of illness across the U.S. But since the samples tested had not directly caused any illness, the Agriculture Department has not been able to name Cargill the culprit. An antibiotic-resistant salmonella superbug is also on the rise in Europe, though officials believe it first came from Africa.

At least 45 people were killed Wednesday in an assault on the Syrian city of Hama, said one witness who managed to escape the besieged town. Other residents said earlier Wednesday that tanks advanced into central Hama and occupied the main square, where the largest protests against President Bashar al-Assad are taking place. Forty of those killed were shot to death by heavy shelling from the tanks, the witness told Reuters. Al Jazeera reported late Wednesday that three people were killed in Nawa. The Syrian government began its latest crackdown on Sunday—the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan—and the United Nations condemned the government’s human-rights violations in the assault against the protesters.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will donate $30 million of his personal fortune toward a far-reaching city program to help educate and improve the lives of young black and Latino men. Bloomberg’s contribution will be matched by billionaire George Soros, and a matching half will come from public funds. Bloomberg is expected to announce his donation in a press conference Thursday when he addresses New York’s disparity between minority men from the ages of 16 to 24 and the rest of the city; although New York has roughly the same amount of white, black, and Latino men, minorities make up 84 percent of the city’s detention facilities and nearly all those admitted to children’s and family services. Under the program, the city’s Probation Department will open five satellite probation offices in neighborhoods with the highest crime rates and inside community organizations that offer services from which young men might benefit.

Maybe the president can avoid another national crisis. On Wednesday, Obama said he expects a fix to the FAA shutdown this week. But there’s one group that’s happy Congress hasn't gotten around to reopening the FAA: U.S. airline companies. Those carriers stand to make $1.3 billion off the shutdown by raising ticket prices to reflect the taxes the FAA is unable to collect. Meanwhile, 4,000 workers are out of a job, and dozens of safety inspectors have been asked to work for free. The FAA has forgone $28.6 million a day in aviation taxes since midnight on July 22, when its collection authority expired, and Congress won’t reconvene until September. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says it’s “unfair” that airlines raised their prices based on the absent taxes and is looking into ways to retroactively collect them.

News Corp. has recently been hit with a pile of lawsuits, as investigators deepen their probe and people claim they were hacked by one of its tabloids. News of the World alone faces 35 privacy-invasion lawsuits, up from 24 in April, forcing News International to set aside up to $32.6 million in preparation for the suits. That money includes compensation for hacking victims who want settlements. Police first launched an investigation against News of the World in January, but now that the scandal has increased 100-fold, they are reaching out to more and more people who could have been hacked. Working from a list of 4,000 mobile-phone numbers compiled in notebooks of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire and News of the World's former royals correspondent, Clive Goodman, who are both in jail, police have called only 170 on the list so far, but they plan to continue reaching out to people.

Haiti prepared Wednesday night for a potential natural disaster, as Tropical Storm Emily approached its shoreline just 18 months after that country’s devastating earthquake. Some 600,000 people still live in temporary encampments in Haiti, meaning even drenching rain from the tropical storm could be a serious threat. The governments of Haiti and the Dominican Republic issued “red alerts,” and tropical-storm warnings were also issued for Guantánamo and Holguín in eastern Cuba, the southeast and central Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos Islands. The storm’s erratic path has made forecasters uncertain whether it will hit south Florida.

Oregon Rep. David Wu formally resigned from Congress on Wednesday night, having notified Gov. John Kitzhaber and House Speaker John Boehner. Accused of an “unwanted” sexual encounter with the underage daughter of one of his campaign donors, Wu announced that he was stepping down last week, but said he would wait until the debt-ceiling crisis was resolved before making it official. "However great the honor and engaging the work, there comes a time to hand on the privilege of elected office—and that time has come," he said in a statement.

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak denied all charges against him Wednesday. The ousted leader was wheeled into court on a hospital bed for the opening of his trial on charges of corruption and the unlawful killing of protesters. He’ll remain in bed—and behind a wire cage—throughout the trial, according to the Associated Press. It was his first public appearance since he was deposed on Feb. 11, and a raucous crowd of protesters greeted him outside the court building. He was flown to Cairo on Wednesday from the Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, where he’s been living since losing power. His trial will be aired on Egyptian state TV.

Seems it was a false alarm. After a scary seven-hour standoff, Sydney police freed a teenage girl who had been strapped to what was thought to be a bomb, now confirmed to contain no explosives. An intruder reportedly broke into the 18-year-old's home in an affluent suburb and fitted her with the package. There are also reports that he left a ransom note for her father, a wealthy businessman.

Since everyone has just gotten used to the old Facebook News Feed, the social network might be changing it all over again. Sources told The Wall Street Journal Wednesday that Facebook is exploring changing the News Feed to increase the amount of information that advertisers can access—meaning it's seeking to create an unfiltered version. Facebook is also looking to expand the “Like” button to include other gestures that marketers and third-party developers can create, these sources said. This too would help marketers; the “Like” button is a hit with them, as it helps target ads. Facebook confirmed it is testing a real-time News Feed, but declined to comment further.

An Oklahoma City woman came forward Wednesday claiming to be the niece of infamous airline hijacker D.B. Cooper—the man who bailed out of a plane with $200,000 in ransom, thought to be the only unsolved hijacking in the FBI’s history. Marla Wynn Cooper, 48, said she was the one who gave the FBI new clues that have sparked renewed interest in the case, and said she remembers her uncle plotting the hijacking at a family event in 1971. While the FBI said a person close to the suspect has come forward, it declined to comment on who that person is. Marla Cooper said she is certain her uncle Lynn Doyle Cooper, who went by the name L.D. Cooper, seized the Seattle-bound Northwest Orient Airlines flight in November 1971 claiming to have a bomb and then vanished.

Former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has made a 9/11 educational cartoon for children. Victims of the attacks have accused him of "cashing in” on the tragedy. Huckabee, now a Fox News host, is marketing the DVD as part of a series aimed at teaching kids about important events. The videos’ website explains that the purpose of the film is to "teach children why America attacked Afghanistan and how 'the ongoing War on Terror protects Americans at home.’” It also features a cartoon version of George W. Bush as well as Osama bin Laden and his fellow jihadists.

With rumors swirling that Charlie Sheen’s character on Two and a Half Men will be killed off, CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler avoided the subject but did reveal details about his replacement, Ashton Kutcher’s new character. The model turned romantic-comedy star will play Walden Schmidt, an “Internet billionaire with a broken heart.” Tassler said, “There is great value in hiring an actor like Ashton Kutcher. He is extra-professional, a funny, talented, gifted actor who comes with a tremendous amount of commitment and enthusiasm.” All she would say about Sheen’s character's departure is “It’s going to be a big event.”

TLC is taking another pass at a Sarah Palin reality show—but this time it’s with her hair salon. The Beehive, where the former governor gets her famous up-do, will be featured in Big Hair Alaska, a two-part special. "This special goes inside a busy hair salon in Wasilla, AK, where the personalities of the owner and her staff are as big as the hairstyles they create,” reads TLC’s description. The show is scheduled to air on Sept. 20.

The U.K.'s Metropolitan police found a cache of cocaine worth £300 million (or roughly $500 million) on a pleasure cruiser in Southampton. Scotland Yard has arrested six people in connection to the drugs, which are 90 percent pure and believed to have come from Venezuela. After police seized the 65-foot yacht, it took investigators six days to find the drugs. Scotland Yard hopes the arrest is the final link in taking out a larger global network, including dealers in London who smuggled cocaine on a private boat from South America through the Caribbean and eventually into the U.K.

It will be an emotional goodbye for Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and his sister, Randi, who is leaving her post as director of marketing at the social-media giant to start a new media firm. Randi, who has contributed to The Daily Beast and was recently nominated for an Emmy for her work on Facebook Live, is leaving the company after six years of "pouring my heart and soul into innovating and pushing the media industry forward." She added in her resignation letter: "Now is the perfect time for me to move outside of Facebook to build a company focused on the exciting trends underway in the media industry." The company she is creating will allegedly be called RtoZ Media and will work on a broader scale to help other companies embrace social media.

Heather Mills, the ex-wife of Sir Paul McCartney, claims that her phone was hacked by a senior journalist at Britain’s Mirror Group, which publishes the Daily Mirror and other papers. Mills tells the BBC's Newsnight that in 2001 a writer called her and quoted parts of a voicemail that had been left on her phone by McCartney. Mills says she accused the journalist of hacking, and he or she admitted to the scam. The Mirror Group denies her account, saying, “All our journalists work within the criminal law.” It gets fishier, though. In a 2006 Daily Mail article, CNN host and former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan talks about listening to a recording of a voicemail left by McCartney for Mills. Mills is convinced that it’s the same one. (Corrected to reflect that Mills and McCartney were married.)

McAfee, the computer-security firm, has uncovered evidence of the hacking of more than 70 government and private organizations—and experts have fingered China as the likely culprit. Targets include the Associated Press, the International Olympic Committee, a U.S. Department of Energy lab, and a dozen U.S. security firms. All the evidence came from a single server, and McAfee said hundreds of other servers have been used in similar attacks. While McAfee did not point the finger at a culprit, a computer expert familiar with the study said the attacks, the biggest ever recorded, appear to have originated in China. The hackers were apparently after information on such matters as U.S. military systems, satellite communications, electronics, and natural-gas companies.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has refused to accept requests for his resignation, saying his government is "up to the task" of rejuvenating the unstable economy. "Today more than ever, we need to act together," he said. The center-left opposition and leaders in the financial market feel differently. Rates on Italy's 10-year bond remained above 6 percent Wednesday, a slight cutback from Tuesday's record-breaking highs. Also on Wednesday, Berlusconi called for Italy's own budget balance, following a $70 billion austerity package passed in mid-July and the United States striking its own budget deal. Berlusconi and other government officials argue that Italy is stronger than investors believe it to be; however, the country's growth rate sits at a mere 1.0 percent.

What do you get the woman who has everything? The Motion Picture Academy anounced Wednesday that Oprah Winfrey will receive this year's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an honorary Oscar for her charitable work. Winfrey was nominated for her acting work in The Color Purple, but never won a competitive award from the academy. James Earl Jones and makeup artist Dick Smith will also get honorary awards for lifetime achievement. The statues will be handed out a separate event from the Oscars telecast in February.

Seventy-two people in the United States have been charged with participating in a massive international child-pornography ring. Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the result of the investigation on Wednesday, which discovered almost 600 people around the world. Members of the group traded heavily encrypted images using a private Internet bulletin board called Dreamboard. It’s the largest U.S. prosecution of an international child-porn ring, according to the Justice Department.

The campaign never stops, not even for President Obama's birthday. He turns 50 on Thursday, and he’ll begin celebrating Wednesday night with a fundraiser in Chicago. He’s expecting a crowd of about 1,000 people—some of whom will have paid as much as $38,500—at the Aragon Entertainment Center to listen to performances by Jennifer Hudson, OK Go, and Herbie Hancock. Before the event, the president will celebrate his birthday with thousands of campaign volunteers via teleconference; he’ll then speak at the Aragon before heading back to Washington. His plans for Thursday are unknown.

It’s a full Weiner: A local politician in New Jersey, Cumberland County freeholder Louis Magazzu, has resigned after naked photos that he took of himself emerged on a political opponent’s website. The photos were taken by Magazzu with his smartphone in front of a mirror. He has admitted to sending the photos to a woman with whom he had corresponded for several years; he says she requested the photos but was secretly working for an “avowed political enemy.” Magazzu has retained legal help to have the photos removed.

Film scholars, rejoice! Archivists in New Zealand say they have discovered what they believe to be Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest surviving feature film. The three reels show the first half of 1924’s The White Shadow, on which the 24-year-old Hitchcock worked as an assistant director, art director, editor, and writer. It stars Betty Compton as a pair of twins, one good and one evil. The reels “offer a priceless opportunity to study [Hitchcock’s] visual and narrative ideas when they were first taking shape,” said one Hitchcock scholar. The film will be preserved in New Zealand, and a new print will be made so that the film can “re-premiere” in the U.S.

Jaycee Lee Duggard wasn’t Philip and Nancy Garrido’s only victim: Video released Tuesday shows Nancy luring an 11-year-old girl into their van and asking her to do splits before a video camera. “Can you go all the way down?" Nancy asks the girl, who was picked up in 1993, two years after they kidnapped Duggard. When the girl asks if she’s being videotaped, Nancy says, "I don't know anything about that camera.” The new video came as part of a report on the justice system’s failure to adequately deal with Philip, who was a convicted kidnapper and rapist already when he captured Duggard. (One of the failures mentioned is authorities’ unawareness that Garrido was passing drug tests by wearing a prosthetic penis and pouring warm Mountain Dew into a cup.) Nancy says she made 10 to 20 videos for her husband; another video released showed the couple watching children at a playground.

Crisis averted? Moody’s and Fitch both maintained the U.S. government’s triple-A credit rating Tuesday, but that doesn’t mean all is clear. Both companies also warned of future downgrades if the U.S. doesn’t enact further deficit-reducing measures and the economy continues to stall. Moody’s, in fact, marked the U.S. outlook as “negative.” Standard & Poor’s, the third ratings agency, hasn't made an announcement at this point, but has said anything less than $4 trillion in cuts would put the U.S.’s rating at risk.

RIM's last stand? The beleaguered BlackBerry maker will unveil five new smartphones Wednesday, including its first all-touch phone. The company, which basically invented the smartphone with the BlackBerry, has been struggling, falling to third place in North America behind Apple and Android and losing 68 percent of its share price over the past year. The new phones, however, won’t run on the company’s new operating system, QNX, which RIM bought last year. Phones using that system won’t be ready until next year.

The economy took an unexpected hit in July, with planned layoffs surging to a 16-month high, according to a report by consultant Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Employers announced 66,414 layoffs last month, many of them in industries that had previously been relatively safe. Layoffs in pharmaceutical and retail sectors overtook nonprofit and government cuts. "A casual observer certainly might conclude that the wheels just fell off the recovery wagon," said John Challenger, chief executive officer of the firm.

There will no be reconciliation: The fall premiere of Two and a Half Men will feature the death of Charlie Sheen’s character, Charlie Harper. Deadline Hollywood says Harper’s girlfriends will turn up for the service, and that his house will be put up for sale. Ashton Kutcher, who was hired to replace Sheen, will be one of the interested buyers. Other celebrities, including stars from producer Chuck Lorre’s current and previous series, are rumored to turn up as potential buyers.

The deficit-reduction deal isn’t a "solution,” it’s “just a step forward,” Erksine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the former co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, write in The New York Times. The $2.1 trillion in reductions is half of what the country needs—and cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security as well as tax reform are necessary, they argue. “The tax code is riddled with annual tax breaks amounting to $1 trillion—most of which are just government spending in disguise.”

After the big bang, there might have been a "big splat." Astronomers believe the Earth once had two moons, until the smaller moon was pulled by gravity and into the larger one. This crash left behind the single, semi-lopsided moon that orbits our planet today. They proposed the theory in a presentation through a series of pictures depicting the collision, which would explain why the dark side of the moon has more craters and hills than the one that always faces Earth. "The physics is really surprisingly similar to a pie in the face," said the author of the study. They predict the collision took place 4.4 billion years ago, before there was life on Earth, and long before man could have waxed poetic about the lunar pair.

Sources said Wednesday that Pfizer Inc. is considering seeking over-the-counter permission for the world’s bestselling drug, the cholesterol medication Lipitor. If the Food and Drug Administration does allow it to be made available without a prescription, it will help Pfizer make a profit off the drug after it loses its patent distinction in November—and generic versions hit the market soon after. Approval is anything but certain, however: The FDA has rejected previous overtures by other companies to put cholesterol medicines over the counter, since studies have shown that 30 percent of people who thought they needed cholesterol medication had only a 5 percent or lower risk of a heart attack. Lipitor is sold without a prescription in British pharmacies, but it is “behind the counter,” meaning the drug seeker must consult with a pharmacist first.

Syria continues to wield military might against its own people, sending more tanks into the city of Hama. The military began to storm the rebellious city Sunday, using snipers and armored vehicles to seize the central square and suppress the civilian uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. The city was under fire beginning in the early morning and has reportedly seen more than 100 casualties since Sunday. Western powers including the United States and the European Union have condemned the government’s actions, as have Syria's allies Turkey and Russia. Assad has “lost all sense of humanity," remarked U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council issued its first international response to the "widespread violations of human rights" and bloodshed after debating the issue for more than two months.