Nation in brief

Offices reopen after ricin

WASHINGTON - Senate office buildings began reopening Thursday as investigators said they still had not determined how the poison ricin got into the mail room of the Senate majority leader on Monday.

Hundreds of congressional staffers lined up outside the Russell Senate Office Building across Constitution Avenue from the Capitol, when the doors opened just after noon, eager to return to their desks, which had been off limits for days. The nearby Hart building is scheduled to reopen today and the Dirksen building, where the poison was discovered, is supposed to be ready Monday.

Officials said the collection of unopened mail, the decontamination of the office and the environmental testing of the Senate buildings were proceeding smoothly and more quickly then they had first anticipated.

Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, which is overseeing the testing, said ricin had not been detected anywhere except in the fourth floor mailroom of Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., where it was first spotted by a congressional intern about 3 p.m. Monday.

The highest-ranking Army officer ensnared in a crackdown on the mishandling of intelligence at the Guantanamo Bay terror prison will have a hearing later this month to determine whether he should be court-martialed, the military disclosed Thursday.

Col. Jackie Duane Farr, 58, was charged Nov. 29 after a spot check of his luggage allegedly found he tried to take classified documents off the Navy base as he finished his tour there Oct. 11.

A senior Army intelligence officer, Farr is the highest ranking of the four men at the base who have been charged, separately, with mishandling classified information at the offshore prison for al-Qaida and Taliban suspects.

A Muslim Army chaplain and two former Arabic translators have also been arrested and face more serious charges.

ATLANTA - The state superintendent of schools, Kathy Cox, said she would reinstate the word "evolution" in the proposed biology curriculum for the state's schools. She had ordered it removed because it is "a buzzword that causes a lot of negative reaction," she said last week.

In a statement on Thursday, Cox said the controversy was greater than the one she had hoped to avoid by deleting the word in the first place.

"I am here to tell you that I misjudged the situation, and I want to apologize for that," Cox said.

The draft had replaced "evolution" with the phrase "biological changes over time." The deletion drew a flood of criticism from biology professors across the state as well as from parents and former President Jimmy Carter.

Cox's statement did not address complaints that the evolution curriculum's subject matter had been gutted. Some critics said the draft left references to evolution incomplete and scattered. Physicists also complained about the draft's treatment of the origin of the universe, saying it omitted specific references to its age.

MODESTO, Calif. - A witness who claimed to have seen Laci Peterson hours after police allege her husband killed her has died, potentially dealing a blow to Scott Peterson's defense.

Vivian Mitchell, 78, died early Wednesday of natural causes, according to her family.

She was one of three people who said she saw Laci Peterson alive midmorning on Dec. 24, 2002. Authorities assert Scott Peterson killed his pregnant wife the night before or early that morning, then dumped her body.

Prosecutors have charged Scott Peterson, 31, with two counts of murder. His trial may start later this month in San Mateo County, where it was moved because of extensive publicity in Modesto, where the couple lived. If convicted, Peterson could face the death penalty.

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