Bombs

Five bombs exploded in northern Spain, causing damage but no injuries, officials said. A person who claimed to speak for the Basque separatist group ETA had phoned in warnings about four of the bombs. The first detonated without warning around 5 a.m. outside a bank in the Basque town of Getxo, damaging a cash dispenser and breaking windows, the regional Interior Ministry said in Bilbao. Five hours later, a caller warned the Basque fire service that four bombs would explode in Laredo and Noja in the neighboring province of Cantabria, the ministry said.

ROME - A bomb exploded at the entrance of a high school in southern Italy named for the wife of a slain anti-Mafia judge, killing a 16-year-old girl and injuring at least four people as students were arriving at school for Saturday classes. Police were investigating the possibility of organized-crime involvement in the attack in the Adriatic port city of Brindisi, but authorities said it was too early to exclude other possibilities. They noted that the school is named for Francesca Morvillo, the wife of anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.

The government has warned airlines that terrorists are considering surgically implanting explosives into people in an attempt to circumvent screening procedures, according to U.S. officials. There is no indication of an immediate plot, but the new information could lead to additional screening procedures at the nation’s airports. Existing scanners would not necessarily detect bombs implanted under a person’s skin, experts said. While the information suggests such a threat would come from overseas rather than domestic groups, federal officials are ordering precautions both in the U.S. and abroad, the official said.

You absolutely have, have, have to get up at 6 a.m. - for a meeting at work, a flight to Paris, a casting call for your dog to be in a Fido's Faves commercial. But you worry. You don't trust yourself. You've snored through alarms before. Fear not. There are gadgeteers out there who've got your back. Some examples: Math Alarm Clock: An Android app that plays music you've chosen to wake up to. That might sound a tad sleep-through-able for a hard-core zzz-ster, except that it plays and plays and plays the music until you come up with the right answer to a math problem.

The Twilight of the Bombs Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons Richard Rhodes Alfred A. Knopf: 370 pp., $27.95

Wait a minute. How did this happen? A month or so ago, massive bombing of Libya was on no one's agenda. Libya's government was just as tyrannical and its leader was just as loony then as now. Other governments around the world were even worse, and still are. In fact, among the usual enthusiasts for this sort of thing, Libya was considered one of the least urgent cases of awfulocracy because we had supposedly de-fanged Col. Moammar Kadafi in 2003, when...

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By all appearances, Rebecca Kuzelka used her home to operate a child day-care business on a quiet, tree-lined street in Lake Elsinore. But a different picture of the 55-year-old mother emerged after her home was rocked by an explosion late Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, deputies arrested Kuzelka and her son Grey Kuzelka, 21, on suspicion of using their home to make bombs and grow marijuana. Another son, Benjamin Kuzelka, 23, injured his hand in the explosion and was hospitalized.

Note to future visitors of the Kansas State Capitol: Next time, you might want to leave your improvised explosive devices at home. Even if they're, um, fireworks. Police are still mum about the particulars of a Wednesday bomb scare in which they reenacted “Hurt Locker” on an illegally parked truck outside the statehouse. On its surface, the incident had all the hallmarks of a potential act of domestic terrorism. During a contentious and highly visible political debate happening in the Legislature, a suspicious truck covered in aggressive bumper stickers was found in a place it didn't belong.

We will feel much safer if we can be given early assurance that none of Gen. Alexander Lebed's 100 missing Russian nuclear bombs (Sept. 9) is on space station Mir. JOHN MAYS Malibu

WASHINGTON — The CIA takedown of an Al Qaeda plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner involved an international sting operation with a double agent tricking terrorists into handing over a prized possession: a new bomb purportedly designed to slip through airport security. U.S. officials Tuesday described an operation in which Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, working closely with the CIA, used an informant to pose as a would-be suicide bomber. His job was to persuade Al Qaeda bomb makers in Yemen to give him the bomb.

WASHINGTON - The FBI is analyzing a sophisticated explosive device, similar to the underwear bomb used in an attempt to blow up a passenger jet over Detroit in 2009, that U.S. officials believe was built by Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen in an effort to target Western aircraft. U.S. officials said Monday that no one was captured by U.S. agencies as part of the operation. The officials emphasized that they found no sign of an active plot to use the new bomb design against U.S. aviation or U.S.-bound jetliners.

In a second-grade homework assignment, Stephen J. Dunning wrote about his future in a passage that would be as brief as it was portentous. He wanted to go to college and he wanted to become a United States Marine. His father, Robert, who flew helicopters in the Marine Corps, hadn't stopped to consider its meaning. But after his son's death at age 31 on Oct. 27 in Afghanistan's Helmand province, the elder Dunning said those words, accompanied by a crayon self-portrait on the faded page, took on new, touching significance.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to seek a speed limit for skateboarders and penalize them for failing to follow a range of traffic rules, from stopping at stop signs to yielding to pedestrians. On a 12 to 0 vote, the council instructed City Atty. Carmen Trutanich to draft an ordinance that would prohibit "unsafe" skateboard activity and limit riders to a speed of 25 mph. The proposal was initiated by Councilman Joe Buscaino, who described it as a response to the death of two skateboarders over the last year.

BEIRUT - Even with the commander of the United Nations monitoring mission in place in Syria, explosions and attacks continued Monday as forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and opposition groups appeared no closer to a cease-fire after 13 months of unrest. In the northern city of Idlib, two early-morning car bombings killed at least eight people and injured more than 100, according to state media and activists. The explosions targeted the air force security and other military security buildings in the southern part of the city dominated by government buildings.

BEIRUT - Two weeks after a supposed cease-fire was meant to bring an end to violence in Syria, an explosion Friday ripped through the capital, Damascus, killing at least nine people and injuring almost 30. A suicide bomber in the pro-opposition Midan neighborhood detonated an explosives belt near a school and the Zein Abidin mosque as worshipers were leaving Friday prayers, the Interior Ministry said. Those killed included civilians and law enforcement officers, state media said.

Police evacuated residents of more than 60 apartments early Sunday after finding and confiscating three bombs in one apartment. Kevin Scobie, 27, was arrested in his apartment after three wired explosive devices were found there.

Two dozen Navy bomb experts departed from North Island Naval Air Station here Tuesday to assume responsibility for one of the most dangerous jobs remaining for U.S. military personnel in Iraq: detecting and defusing improvised explosive devices. The sailors, part of Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 1, will assume command of the 500-man Joint Task Force Troy, responsible for command and control of explosive ordnance disposal forces throughout Iraq. Part of the yearlong mission is to help teach Iraqi forces how to take over the assignment when the Americans leave by the end of next year.

Have you ever been frightened by a dumpling? Truly, genuinely scared? Because the juicy crab and pork buns at Wang Xing Ji - smoking-hot dumplings the size of water balloons, sneakily full of boiling juice - could probably be weaponized. You could deploy them as grenades, I'm pretty sure, lobbing the heavy spheroids over battlements. Or you could employ them as sub-lethal projectiles, splatting them into the enemy at will, although the sticky broth is undoubtedly prohibited in an obscure codicil of the Geneva Conventions.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Sudan and South Sudan teetered dangerously on the edge of war Thursday after South Sudan refused to withdraw its troops from a disputed border area despite calls to do so by the United Nations and African Union. Sudan, furious about South Sudan's seizure a day earlier of its most important oil field in the town of Heglig, bombed a bridge outside the South Sudan oil town of Bentiu, killing one civilian and wounding four, officials said. The fighting between the two nations was the worst since South Sudan seceded from the north in July after a January 2011 independence referendum.