Nation and world digest

Asian carp could threaten Great Lakes fishing

LOCKPORT, Ill. — Environmental officials say they have found a single Asian carp in a canal leading to Lake Michigan — the closest any of the giant fish have come to the Great Lakes.

Environmentalists fear the Asian carp could starve out other fish and devastate the $7 billion-a-year Great Lakes fishing industry.

Department of Natural Resources assistant director John Rogner says the single fish was found Thursday among tens of thousands of other species scooped up during a kill operation in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Prosecutor: Teen confessed strangling his brother, 10

INDIANAPOLIS — Ignoring his younger brother’s plea of “Andrew, stop,” a 17-year-old who told authorities he identified with a television serial killer strangled the boy, dragged the body to his car and drove to see his girlfriend, an Indiana prosecutor said Thursday.

Andrew Conley of Rising Sun was calm and showed no remorse or emotion as he described strangling 10-year-old Conner Conley as the two wrestled Sunday, a probable-cause affidavit said. Conley told investigators he dumped his brother’s body near a park in the Ohio River community about 90 miles southeast of Indianapolis.

Prosecutors filed preliminary charges of murder against Conley along with a supporting affidavit Thursday. Conley is being charged as an adult and will appear today in court, Negangard said.

Dems look to bailout cash to fund job-related efforts

WASHINGTON — Democrats are looking to tap as much as $70 billion in unused funds from the Wall Street bailout to pay for new spending on roads and bridges and to save the jobs of firefighters, teachers and other public employees, officials said Thursday.

After talks with the administration officials such as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Democratic lawmakers are eyeing what remains from last year’s $700 billion financial rescue package as a way to finance job-related legislation. Two House Democratic aides said the figure could be as high as $70 billion.

Child-killer executed

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A 44-year-old Texas man was executed Thursday evening for raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl, despite pleas from his attorneys he was too mentally impaired to qualify for capital punishment.

Bobby Wayne Woods received lethal injection about a half-hour after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt his punishment, which was delayed briefly until the high court ruled in his case. His lawyers had argued Woods was mentally impaired, making him ineligible for execution, and that previous appeals to spare Woods’ life were unsuccessful because of shoddy work by his lawyer at the time.

Tests administered to Woods put his IQ anywhere from the 60s to the 80s. An IQ of 70 is considered the threshold for mental impairment.

Ice-age sloth skull found

The skull of an ice-age giant ground sloth was recently uncovered at a construction site in Riverside County, Calif., and could be headed for display at the San Bernardino County Museum.

The bones dating back 1.8 million years were discovered Nov. 18 on the site of a future Southern California Edison substation as earth movers flattened the land in a hilly area west of Beaumont, said Rick Greenwood, director of Edison’s environment health and safety division. Work in the area was immediately halted.

This is the first time sloth fossils so old have been found west of the Rocky Mountains, said Jennifer Reynolds, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Museum.

Veteran, 90, fights for right to have flagpole

RICHMOND, Va. — One of the nation’s oldest Medal of Honor winners was back in the fight Thursday, this time against a neighborhood association that wants him to take down a front-yard flagpole.

Supporters, including a U.S. senator, have been falling in behind 90-year-old retired Army Col. Van T. Barfoot, a World War II veteran awarded the lofty congressional honor for actions including standing up to three German tanks with a bazooka and stopping their advance.

Barfoot put up the 21-foot flagpole in September in front of his suburban Richmond home. He raises the American flag daily at sunrise and retires it at sunset.

The Sussex Square homeowners’ association says the flagpole violates the neighborhood’s aesthetic guidelines. It originally ordered him to remove it by 5 p.m. Friday or face a lawsuit, but on Thursday it pushed back the deadline until next Friday.

Combined dispatches