Nation in brief

Jury is finally seated in trial for Laci Peterson's murder

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - Completing an arduous process that began nine weeks ago, a jury of six men and six women was selected Thursday to decide whether Scott Peterson murdered his pregnant wife, Laci, so that he could carry on an affair.

Opening statements in the former fertilizer salesman's murder trial are set for Tuesday. He could get the death penalty if convicted.

The jurors, who appear to range in age from their 20s to more than 60, include a school coach, a social worker, a firefighter, a former police officer, an adoption worker and a former security guard.

Others include a Teamster who works the graveyard shift and hasn't followed the high-profile case and a woman whose fiance was convicted of murdering a stranger two decades ago. Six alternates also were chosen.

Before the jurors left the room, Judge Alfred A. Delucchi ordered them to avoid news coverage of the case and told them to hunker down for a trial that could last up to six months.

"Unless you're dead, you're it," Delucchi said.

Jury selection involved nearly 1,600 prospective jurors, all of whom had to fill out long questionnaires. The court twice had to summon additional people. Many were excused because they opposed the death penalty or because they had already concluded Peterson is guilty.

NASHVILLE - An American Airlines jet flying from Dallas/Fort Worth to Boston was diverted Thursday after a flight attendant found a note saying there was a bomb in the cargo hold.

Investigators were examining a "suspicious package," said Ronald Robert, a spokesman for Nashville International Airport. He did not know on what part of the plane the package was found.

The flight attendant found the note in one of the plane's lavatories. The 129 passengers were taken off the plane and were being rescreened by the Transportation Security Administration and FBI.

Flight 306 left Dallas/Ft. Worth at 1:46 p.m. CDT and landed in Nashville shortly after 3:30 p.m.

Doug Riggin of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force said authorities were interviewing every person on the flight and will unload all the baggage. He said the plane could be delayed overnight.

Tracking the brightness of the Earth by looking at its reflection on the moon, scientists have concluded that sunshine on Earth brightened in the 1990s, then dimmed after 2000.

The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, add a new level of mystery to the recent debate about "global dimming" and its causes. Measurements by ground-based instruments around the world have shown a decrease of up to 10 percent in sunlight between the late 1950s and early 1990s.

"This would say that it reversed through the '80s and '90s to a global brightening and now it's flattening," said Dr. Philip R. Goode, a professor of physics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The output of the sun varies only slightly, so scientists believe global dimming probably results from pollution.

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