Attorneys told a federal judge Tuesday that a Lebanese immigrant accused of placing a backpack he thought held a bomb near Chicago's Wrigley Field will plead guilty under an agreement worked out with prosecutors — a deal experts say may reflect the enormous odds the 23-year-old would face at trial.

John Shoemaker visited six doctors in his quest to find the best treatment for his early stage prostate cancer — and only the last one offered what made the most sense to the California man: Keep a close watch on the tumor and treat only if it starts to grow.
Very few men choose this active surveillance option. Yet Shoemaker is one of more than 100,000 American men a year deemed candidates for it by a government panel. That is because their prostate cancer carries such a low risk of morphing into the kind that could kill.

Doctors in Chile are optimistic about the survival of a 10-month-old girl who was separated from a conjoined twin who died following the surgery.
Little Maria Paz awoke for the first time since the operation nearly a week ago, and Dr. Carlos Acuna calls that "an excellent sign." He says she's been successfully switched to a common respirator and her condition is favorable.

The likely death of a planned nuclear waste site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain has left federal agencies looking for a possible replacement. A national laboratory working for the U.S. Department of Energy is now eying granite deposits stretching from Georgia to Maine as potential sites, along with big sections of Minnesota and Wisconsin where that rock is prevalent.
Three decades after the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act said the federal government would handle disposal of high-level radioactive waste, the United States still has no agreed-upon solution for where and how to dispose of about 70,000 metric tons of it. About 10 percent is from the military's nuclear weapons programs; most of the rest is piling up at commercial reactor sites around the country.

Nigerian officials said they have launched a broadcast satellite into orbit to replace one that was lost in space.
Project manager Abdulrahman Adejah said Monday on state-run television that NIGCOMSAT-1R launched successfully from a Chinese launch pad.

A man from the San Francisco Bay area has fathered 14 children in the last five years through free sperm donations to women he meets through his website — and is now in trouble with the federal government.
The case of Trent Arsenault has drawn attention to the practice of informal sperm donation, which physicians and bioethicists call unsafe but some people say is a civil liberties issue.

David Villa has only a slim chance of playing for Barcelona again this season and could also miss the 2012 European Championship after undergoing surgery on his broken leg on Monday.
One of the doctors who performed the operation said the 30-year-old Spain striker would be sidelined for four to five months.

Former Miss Venezuela Eva Ekvall, whose struggle with breast cancer was closely followed by Venezuelans, has died at age 28.
Her family said Ekvall died Saturday at a hospital in Houston.

The Philippine government shipped more than 400 coffins Tuesday to two flood-stricken cities in the south where the death toll neared 1,000 as President Benigno Aquino III declared a state of national calamity and relief agencies rushed to help.
The latest count listed 957 dead and 49 missing and is set to climb further as additional bodies are being recovered from the sea and mud in Iligan and Cagayan de Oro cities.

The body of North Korea's long-time ruler Kim Jong Il was laid out in a glass coffin Tuesday as weeping mourners filled public plazas and state media fed a budding personality cult around his third son, hailing him as "born of heaven."
North Korea's official television showed still photos of Kim in the coffin surrounded by wreaths, his body covered with a red blanket and his head on a white pillow. A giant red curtain covered a wall behind Kim.
