Nation in brief

Utah man charged with wife's murder

SALT LAKE CITY - A first-degree murder charge was filed Monday against Mark Hacking, who allegedly confessed to relatives that he shot his sleeping wife in the head and threw her body in a trash bin. Lori Hacking's body has not been found.

The murder charge carries a sentencing range of five years to life in prison. Hacking is in jail on bail of $1-million.

A probable-cause statement released Monday states that Hacking, 28, told his brothers that he and his wife had been arguing the night of July 18 when he revealed to her that he had lied about his education and plans.

Lori Hacking later went to bed, and Mark Hacking stayed up to play Nintendo. As he continued packing for the couple's planned move to the medical school in North Carolina, he came across a .22-caliber rifle, walked into the couple's bedroom and shot his wife, according to the probable-cause statement.

He then wrapped her body in garbage bags and put the body in a trash bin at the University of Utah, the statement says.

Hacking is scheduled to make his first court appearance today.

PHOENIX - In Arizona's deadliest border crossing in three years, five illegal immigrants from Mexico died after running out of water while trekking through the desert.

Two adults and two juveniles survived, but wind storms Monday forced authorities to scale back efforts to search for a 10th member of the group who was missing.

Two of the dead were female, but the victims' ages weren't known. Autopsy results were still pending, but initial findings pointed toward heat exhaustion and dehydration.

79 IMMIGRANTS INSIDE TRUCK: A trucker was arrested in Texas after 79 illegal immigrants were found in the unventilated trailer of his 18-wheeler during a traffic stop.

Alvin Auxter, 52, was stopped Sunday morning in Fort Worth and arrested on suspicion of human smuggling. The truck was carrying Mexican immigrants to Dallas from the border city of El Paso, authorities said.

The trailer was unventilated and hot, but the people inside had drinking water and appeared to be unharmed, said city police Officer Otto Janke, who stopped the truck.

WASHINGTON - NASA chief Sean O'Keefe gave scientists and engineers the go-ahead Monday to start planning an ambitious robotic mission to save the popular but ailing Hubble Space Telescope.

"Everybody says, "We want to save the Hubble' - well, let's go save the Hubble," O'Keefe said. "Rather than just sitting there and talking about how we think we're going to do it, we've got an option we're ready to go with."

The challenge for NASA is to come up with a way to replace the telescope's aging batteries and gyroscopes, as well as some of its scientific instruments.

O'Keefe said the Hubble team at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland would essentially cobble together a mission from ideas the agency received earlier this year. He met with the group Monday afternoon.

The agency chief said the mission would cost about $1-billion to $1.6-billion. But he warned that it was almost impossible to estimate the cost until a plan was developed.

That won't happen for another nine months to a year, O'Keefe said, at which point a final decision on whether to proceed will be made.

FORT LEWIS, Wash. - Retired Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the first half of the Clinton presidency, has been hospitalized in guarded condition at an Army hospital here, a spokesman said Monday.

Shalikashvili, 68, entered Madigan Medical Center on Saturday, and the family is requesting that no more information be released, said Mike Meines, a hospital spokesman.

MIAMI - The U.S. Coast Guard in Puerto Rico scoured thousands of miles of open sea Monday in a desperate search for a boat packed with at least 78 Dominican illegal migrants that has been missing for at least nine days.

"This is potentially the largest recorded tragedy in recent years," said Eric Willis, a Coast Guard spokesman in San Juan. "The search is by no means canceled, but we don't want to put out any false hope."

The reports of the missing boat, a fishing craft commonly known as a yola, came as a record number of Dominicans have been fleeing their homeland in the midst of an economic crisis. Since Oct. 1, the Coast Guard has intercepted more than 5,500 Dominicans at sea, compared to 2,500 during the previous 12-month period.

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