Explosives

An 18-year-old student accused of planning to bomb his high school was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and could face life in prison if convicted. Authorities allege that Ryan Schallenberger planned to detonate explosives in a suicide attack on his school in the small town of Chesterfield.

The Orange County Sheriff's Department bomb squad Monday destroyed explosives found under shrubs on a hillside at O'Neill Regional Park. Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino said investigators were notified about 7:30 a.m. Monday that explosives were buried in the yard of a home on Via Taliana. He said investigators found empty holes there but no explosives. A resident of the home, however, said he had dug up explosives and placed them at the nearby park, Amormino said. The explosives were recovered and detonated in a containment cylinder.

Two dozen homes and a medical building were evacuated for about four hours Friday after a man dropped off an unexploded mortar shell at an adjacent Huntington Beach fire station, authorities said. About 10:30 a.m., the man dropped off the World War II-era 81-millimeter mortar round -- still in its original box -- at the fire station at the intersection of Heil Avenue and Springdale Street.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in two war-on-terrorism cases Tuesday -- one that tests whether American civilians can seek the help of American courts if they are held in Iraq, and the other to determine whether the man who plotted to bomb Los Angeles International Airport will serve his full 22-year prison term. In both cases, the justices sounded as though they would rule on the side of the Bush administration. The first case, Munaf vs.

Police found a map of Camp David marked with a presidential motorcade route inside the Bethesda, Md., home of a teenager at the center of a bomb-making probe, along with a document that appears to describe how to kill someone at a distance of 200 meters, a Montgomery County, Md., prosecutor said Tuesday at a court hearing.

Serial numbers and other markings on bombs suggest that Iranians are linked to explosives used by Iraqi militants, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said. Speaking with reporters in Seville, Spain, before traveling to Munich, Germany, Gates said the markings provided "pretty good" evidence that Iranians were supplying weapons or technology for Iraqi extremists. Gates' remarks left unclear how the U.S.

A train traveling to Pakistan caught fire early today in northern India, killing at least 64 people, and officials said two suitcases filled with flammable material that appeared to be explosive devices were found at the scene. V.N. Mathur, general manager of the Northern Railway, said one of the suitcases was found inside a burned train car and the other was on the railroad track.

Three members of a suspected suicide bomb team died Saturday after their bike laden with explosives hit a bump outside a town in Pakistan's Punjab province, police said. Pakistan is in the grip of a nationwide security scare, with suicide bombers linked either to Sunni Muslim fanatics with ties to Al Qaeda or Pakistani Taliban killing more than 40 people in recent weeks. Police have also arrested several would-be bombers in cities around the country.

In the latest attempt to link the deadliest form of roadside bombs in Iraq to components manufactured in Iran, U.S. Army officers Monday displayed plastic explosives they said were made in Iran and uncovered during a raid Saturday in violence-racked Diyala province. An Army explosives expert said the C-4 plastic explosives were used to make bombs the military calls EFPs -- explosively formed projectiles.

A woman in a town near Naples, Italy, bought a sack of potatoes, put them into water to peel and discovered a dirt-covered hand grenade among them. The explosive found by Olga Mauriello, 74, apparently was left over from World War II and was believed to have traveled with the potatoes from France, ANSA news agency reported. An alarmed Mauriello called neighbors, who called police. Officers said they detonated the grenade in a park.