CHICAGO (Reuters) – Severe thunderstorms storms that raked the Southeast with scattered tornadoes, large hail and high winds on Saturday reemerged across the region on Sunday after an overnight lull, meteorologists said.

The storms on Sunday pelted parts of Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina with hail stones, some as large as tennis balls, but no serious damage was immediately reported.

"The storms abated overnight but with the heat of the day Sunday, they reignited and are very strong, and some are severe across Alabama and Georgia," said Jack Hales, lead forecaster for the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. "Storms will continue through the afternoon."

Hail stones on Saturday measured as large as softballs in Georgia, and on Sunday there were reports of hail the size of tennis balls in South Carolina.

The storms, known to have caused only minor wind damage so far, were expected to begin subsiding after dark on Sunday as temperatures dip and the air mass becomes more stable, Hales said.

The world's largest hail on record, measured at 8 inches in diameter, fell in Vivian, South Dakota, on July 23, 2010.

Separate storms currently developing over southern Arkansas may also produce hail, Hales said.

To the north, forecasts were calling for "significant snowfall" in part of the Ohio and Great Lakes regions, he said, adding, "It will certainly be cold enough."

(Reporting by Eric Johnson; Editing by Steve Gorman)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Police in northern California are investigating the origins of a bomb that was concealed inside a newspaper and exploded when a man picked it up off his driveway on Sunday morning.

The man, who was not identified, was taken by ambulance to a hospital with unspecified injuries he suffered in the blast, according to a statement posted online by police in the town of Vacaville, about midway between San Francisco and Sacramento.

The man's injuries were described as "non-fatal," but the blast touched off a security scare that lasted several hours.

Police said they ordered the evacuation of 40 to 50 nearby homes as a precaution as investigators were called in from the Travis Air Force Base bomb squad, the FBI, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the California Highway Patrol.

Teams with bomb-sniffing dogs and bomb-detection equipment searched the immediate vicinity for more explosives, but none were found, police said. Calls from residents elsewhere in the city worried about suspicious packages also turned up nothing.

Most residents were allowed to return to their homes by 4 p.m. local time, about five hours after the bomb exploded.

Police said the bomb appeared for now to be an isolated incident, but it remained unclear whether the man injured was singled out for the attack or was a random victim.

(Reporting by Gabrielle Saveri in San Francisco; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Peter Bohan)

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – Two men were killed and eight of their relatives were hurt when the family's rented sailboat capsized in San Diego Bay on Sunday evening, harbor police said.

The 25-foot sailboat tipped over in the chilly waters between Shelter Island and Harbor Island, just south of the city's airport, at about 5 p.m. local time.

"The call came in at 5:12 p.m., and the harbor police arrived within five minutes," said Marguerite Elicone, spokeswoman for the Port of San Diego, which operates its own police department.

She said patrol officers on the scene found other boaters pulling victims from the water and performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation "to try to save people."

Two men in their 50s or 60s perished, and the surviving eight family members, two of them children, were taken to area hospitals, Elicone told Reuters. The victims' names were being withheld until next of kin could be notified.

The two children were released from the hospital about three hours after the accident, but one woman remained in an intensive care unit for treatment of hypothermia, Elicone said.

The cause of the accident was under investigation, a U.S. Coat Guard spokesman said. Harbor police divers were trying to bring the partly submerged sailboat out of the bay, Elicone said.

(Reporting by Marty Graham; Editing by Steve Gorman and Peter Bohan)