Briefs of the Nation and World

U.S., China agree on plan to bring plane home

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. surveillance plane stranded in China for nearly two months will be cut into big chunks, flown home aboard a Soviet-made cargo aircraft and reassembled so that it can go back into action, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.

"We're glad to get the airplane back in a condition that it can be repaired and used again," said Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman.

After weeks of negotiations, U.S. and Chinese officials reached a compromise over the weekend that resolves the fate of the Navy EP-3E Aries, which made an emergency landing on Hainan Island after an April 1 collision with a Chinese fighter jet, Quigley said. Four officers from the U.S. Pacific Command will go to Beijing this week to work out details of the airplane's departure, he added.

Supreme Court says thou shalt not post Ten Commandments

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court said no to the Ten Commandments again Tuesday, as the justices refused to review a ruling that could force hundreds of cities to

remove from government property granite monuments listing the Old Testament mandates.

On a 6-3 vote, the justices turned away lawyers for the Christian Coalition who argued that the Ten Commandments deserve a place of honor because of their history and their significance as a code of conduct.

China's trading status to be renewed, Bush says

LOS ANGELES -- President Bush said Tuesday that he would renew for another year the provisions that give China the same trade advantages that the United States gives to most other nations.

In a speech on trade and energy to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, Bush presented the decision as one to help democracy in China.

The move was expected, reflecting the president's emphasis on reducing barriers to trade and using economic pressure to encourage China's economic and political modernization.

4 guilty in U.S. embassy bombings in Africa

A federal jury in New York on Tuesday convicted four men of plotting to bomb the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania three years ago as part of a terrorist conspiracy led by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.

The verdicts followed the largest FBI investigation ever on foreign soil, and the biggest foreign terrorism trial in the United States in more than five years, a complex effort that pulled in defendants and witnesses from three continents.

After three months of testimony, the jury deliberated for 12 days before declaring the defendants guilty on all charges. Prosecutors said the convictions were only the first in what they promised would be a sustained legal assault on al Qaeda, the network allegedly headed by bin Laden, the heir to a Saudi Arabian construction fortune who tops the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List.

Continued violence muffles talk of cease-fire

JERUSALEM -- Ambushes, grenade battles and suicide bombings claimed at least six lives Tuesday and drowned out fledgling U.S. efforts to push Israelis and Palestinians toward a meaningful cease-fire.

Palestinian gunmen killed two Jewish settlers on their way to the funeral of a third settler killed earlier in the day. The gunmen overtook the women's van on a road several miles south of Jerusalem and opened fire.

Four other occupants of the van were wounded. The shooters fled to nearby Bethlehem, a West Bank city under Palestinian rule.

Arm-muscle cells transplanted into man's failing heart

LOS ANGELES -- Researchers said Tuesday that they had implanted arm muscle cells into the heart of a 62-year-old heart-attack victim in hopes of restoring damaged heart tissue and avoiding a heart transplant.

The technique has proved successful in animals and in safety trials in three human patients, but the transplant at the University of California, Los Angeles, represents the first time it has been tried in the United States in an effort to rejuvenate a human heart.

NATO doesn't agree on threat or need for missile defense

BUDAPEST, Hungary -- Despite weeks of intensive diplomacy, the United States on Tuesday failed to convince its NATO allies that the world faces a common threat of missile attacks -- a significant setback for President Bush's most ambitious foreign-policy goal.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had hoped to win agreement from 19-nation NATO on language affirming the existence of the threat as the basis for discussions of Bush's controversial plan to build a defense shield against strategic missiles.

Instead, a communique issued after a conference of NATO foreign ministers here mentions only the danger that missiles "can pose" and pointedly calls for further talks on the matter.