TOLEDO, Ohio – Two firefighters battling a blaze Sunday at an apartment complex near downtown Toledo have been killed.

Toledo Fire Department Chief Luis Santiago said 42-year-old Stephen Machcinski and 31-year-old James Dickman died in the fire. Machcinski had served for 16 years, while Dickman had been on the job only six months.

Santiago said the fire department will fully investigate the blaze in the six-unit apartment building.

Avid skateboarder was Maryland mall gunman

COLUMBIA, Md. – The gunman who killed two people at a Maryland mall was a teenage skateboarding enthusiast who had no criminal record before he showed up at the shopping center armed with a shotgun, plenty of ammunition and a backpack filled with crude homemade explosives, authorities said Sunday.

Darion Marcus Aguilar, 19, took a taxi to the Mall in Columbia in suburban Baltimore on Saturday morning and entered the building near Zumiez, a shop that sells skateboarding gear. He went downstairs to a food court directly below the store, then returned less than an hour later, dumped the backpack in a dressing room and started shooting, police said.

Shoppers fled in a panic or barricaded themselves behind closed doors. When police arrived, they found three people dead – two store employees and Aguilar, who had killed himself, authorities said.

Police spent Sunday trying to piece together his motive, but it remained elusive.

End runs sought around Congress by Obama

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama will work with Congress where he can and circumvent lawmakers where he must, his top advisers warned Sunday in previewing Tuesday’s State of the Union speech.

Obama faces a politically divided Congress on Tuesday and will use his annual address to demand expanded economic opportunity. Absent legislative action, the White House is telling lawmakers the president is ready to take unilateral action to close the gap between rich and poor Americans.

The act-or-else posture bristled Republicans. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said: “It sounds vaguely like a threat, and I think it also has a certain amount of arrogance.”

Australian crocodile takes boy, mauls other

DARWIN, Australia – Rangers resumed hunting Monday for a 13-foot crocodile that snatched a 12-year-old boy and mauled his friend as they swam in a water hole in a popular Outback tourist destination in northern Australia.

The missing boy was taken by a saltwater crocodile as he and four other boys swam Sunday afternoon at Mudginberri Billabong in World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park, southeast of the Northern Territory capital of Darwin, Police Sergeant Stephen Constable said.

Moments earlier, his 12-year-old friend was mauled as he fought the crocodile and sustained deep wounds to both arms..

“One boy fought off the crocodile, and then the crocodile turned and took the other boy,” Constable said.

The missing boy is from the small Aboriginal settlement of Mudginberri, west of Jabiru.

Associated Press