Nation Digest
Data hints water may be on Mars

	DAVID MCNEW / GETTY IMAGES An act of civil disobedience A shopper steps through striking grocery workers, from left, Maria Loya, Ann Hiller, Vivian Rothstein and Brenda Hernandez during an intentional act of civil disobedience that led to their arrest outside a Von's supermarket in Santa Moncia, Calif., yesterday. Some 70,000 grocery workers in Southern California have been on strike or locked out since Oct. 11, 2003.
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The Opportunity rover has spent three days examining a 4-inch-deep, 20-inch-long trench it created with its front wheel in Meridiani Planum. The team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is awaiting the spectroscopic data.

Pictures of the trench wall, however, show it is composed of sand-size grains of red rock cemented together. The cement could have been formed by minute amounts of water rising to the surface, bringing with it salts that would act as a cement, geologist Albert Yen said.

Small spherules present on the surface — nicknamed Martian blueberries — also are present underground. To the team's surprise, the underground spherules are brighter and shinier than those on the surface.

"We're not sure what is going on here," Yen said.

Halfway around Mars at Gusev Crater, the Spirit rover wriggled its wheels slightly on the surface, revealing the top layer of soil to be much stickier than expected.

One possibility is the presence of minute amounts of water, forming a brine or salty solution that is holding the soil together. If that is the case, the team expects to see relatively high concentrations of salts when they examine the soil with Spirit's instruments.

The amount of salt should decline below the surface, said geologist Dave Des Marais of NASA's Ames Research Center.

Father suspected of killing children found dead in cell

BOSTON — A New Hampshire father who authorities believe murdered his two children, then drove their bodies halfway across the United States, was found dead yesterday in his jail cell, officials said.

Manuel Gehring, 44, apparently took his life by strangling himself in the Merrimack County Jail, according to New Hampshire Attorney General Peter Heed.
 
Sarah Gehring, 14, and her brother Philip, 11, last were seen at a July Fourth fireworks show in Concord, N.H. Authorities say Gehring shot them in his van, then drove across country.

He was arrested a week later in Gilroy, Calif., and later admitted to killing the children and burying them along Interstate 80, probably in Ohio or Indiana.

Utah moves step closer to eliminating firing squad

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah moved toward eliminating firing squads yesterday and executing condemned prisoners only by injection, as the Senate approved legislation banning the controversial punishment.

The bill passed 16-9 and returns to the House for approval of minor Senate amendments.

Idaho and Oklahoma retain the firing squad as an option but haven't used it in modern history.

Morocco-bound jetliner returns to United States

NEW YORK — A Moroccan jetliner flying from New York to Morocco was diverted to an airport in Maine yesterday and authorities gave conflicting reasons for the action.

A private investigator in Chicago said a missing investment banker had called his family from the plane before it left New York and the investigator said he had alerted the FBI.

The Boeing 767 landed in Bangor, Maine, and was expected to resume its trip early today, officials said.

Royal Air Maroc's Flight 201 took off from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at 7 p.m. EST and was headed for Morocco when it received a bomb threat, said Mark Hatfield, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration.

However, Holly Baker, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration in New England, said she knew nothing about a bomb threat. Baker said the plane was diverted because "there was a person aboard who they felt was a security risk."

The private investigator, Eddie Rizzo, said missing investment banker Zubair Ghias called from the Royal Air Maroc flight.

Prison guard arrested in plot with inmate to kill husband

CORCORAN, Calif. — A prison guard was arrested on suspicion of plotting with an inmate to use drugs to pay someone outside prison to kill her husband.

Authorities said the 43-year-old woman had a sexual relationship with the Corcoran State Prison inmate in recent months and the pair developed the unsuccessful murder-for-hire scheme.

Corrections investigators and county authorities arrested the guard Saturday at the prison and later found more than a pound of marijuana and 7 ounces of heroin at her Bakersfield home.

Also ...

Two Detroit-area men suspected of ambushing an armored car, killing one guard and critically wounding another, were in police custody yesterday. A third suspect, the alleged getaway driver, was being sought. ... Four teenagers were arrested in New Orleans yesterday, hours after gunfire erupted in a crowd of people watching a popular Mardi Gras parade, killing a woman bystander and wounding three people.

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