Nation in brief

Nebraska teenager arrested with 20 homemade bombs

MALCOLM, Neb. - A teenager was charged with attempted murder after police found him outside school with 20 homemade bombs, a rifle and a note saying he wanted to injure everyone at his high school except for three friends.

Authorities believe they averted what could have been the worst school shooting since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School.

Josh Magee, 17, was arrested Tuesday in the parking lot of Malcolm High School after a staff member saw him swigging liquor from a flask and putting on a black overcoat.

Police who searched Magee's car found a bolt-action rifle, several rounds of ammunition, small bottles of propane and rigged containers of a petroleum-based propellent.

"It had the potential of going badly," said superintendent Gene Neddenriep. "With this student, at this school, on this particular day, we were successful. We got lucky."

Parents and school officials in this tiny town north of Lincoln said Magee often spoke about Columbine, where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves.

The arrest came in the same week that authorities in another rural town in the heartland avoided a potentially violent school encounter.

Two second-grade boys and an 11-year-old schoolmate were arrested Wednesday in Forsyth, Mont., on charges that they buried a loaded handgun in a playground sandbox and plotted to shoot and stab a third-grade girl during recess. Authorities said the boys intended to harm the girl because she had teased two of them.

Magee, who has attended Malcolm schools since kindergarten, was always been on the district's radar, Neddenriep said.

"All the way through, he was just a little different," he said. "He liked to be alone, he didn't take part in many things. His enjoyment was weapons."

DETROIT - General Motors Corp. said Thursday it is recalling 4-million 2000-2004 pickups worldwide because their tailgates can break without warning.

GM said there have been 134 minor injuries but no crashes or fatalities due to the problem. In at least one case, a tailgate separated from a moving vehicle, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In another, the tailgate broke as a consumer was loading an all-terrain vehicle onto his pickup.

The recall involves 2000-04 Chevrolet Silverados and GMC Sierras built between October 1999 and October 2003. Some 2002-04 Chevrolet Avalanche and Cadillac Escalade EXT trucks built between March 2001 and October 2003 are also being recalled.

GM said the cables that hold tailgates in place on those vehicles can corrode or fracture. Dealers will replace the existing galvanized, braided steel cables with stainless steel cables for free.

Customers will be notified by GM in phases because replacement cables will not be available immediately for all vehicles. Until the repair can be made, GM said owners should avoid applying direct loads to the tailgate.

PASADENA, Calif. - A 100-foot-diameter asteroid passed close but harmlessly by Earth on Thursday, astronomers said.

The hurtling rock passed about 26,500 miles above the southern Atlantic Ocean at 2:08 p.m. PST.

It was the closest recorded encounter between Earth and an asteroid, said Steven Chesley, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who works on a program looking for such objects.

Such encounters, however, are actually believed to occur at the rate of one every two years and have simply not been detected, he said.

Astronomers were continuing to observe the asteroid, 2004 FH, which was expected to be beyond the moon's orbit by early today.

DAYTON, Tenn. - Commissioners in the county that convicted John Scopes of teaching evolution 79 years ago reversed a vote on Thursday they made two days earlier to ban homosexuals.

Rhea County attorney Gary Fritts said the commission's 8-0 vote Tuesday started a "wildfire" of reaction that he says stemmed from a misunderstanding.

After the vote that took about three minutes, the commissioners hastily left the meeting in a room filled with about 300 noisy spectators.

"I've never seen nothing like this," Fritts said before the commission meeting in the rural community about 30 miles north of Chattanooga.

SEASIDE PARK, N.J. - An elderly couple tied themselves together back-to-back with speaker wire and walked into the ocean in a suicide attempt, but the husband survived, authorities said.

Jacqueline Sindlinger, 72, and Norman Sindlinger, 74, of Brick Township, wrote out a suicide note, then drove to the beach early Wednesday, lashed themselves together and plunged into the ocean. The water was 39 degrees, with swells up to 8 feet high.

A fisherman found the couple unconscious at the water's edge, and alerted authorities.

A police officer used CPR and an automatic defibrillator to resuscitate Norman Sindlinger. He was listed in critical condition Thursday.

His wife died, apparently of hypothermia, authorities said. It was unclear how long they had been in the water.

WASHINGTON - Senate Democrats, reacting to disclosures that Thomas A. Scully, the former Medicare administrator, had prevented his chief actuary from sharing information with Congress, said Thursday that they believed a federal law had been violated and called on the General Accounting Office to investigate.

In a letter signed by 18 senators, including the minority leader, Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the lawmakers cited a provision in an appropriations measure that bars using federal money to pay the salary of any employee who "prohibits or prevents, or threatens to prohibit or prevent" another employee from communicating with Congress.

The letter was sent amid a growing furor on Capitol Hill over recent accounts by the actuary, Richard S. Foster, that Scully threatened to fire him if he disclosed cost estimates of the prescription drug legislation Congress passed last year.

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