Nation & World Digest

1st body scanners to be installed in Boston airport

WASHINGTON — The first of 150 full-body scanners planned for U.S. airports will be installed in Boston next week, officials said Tuesday.

The plan is to install three machines at Logan International Airport, according to a homeland security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement has not yet been made. In the next two weeks, officials plan to install another machine at Chicago’s O’Hare International.

The rest of the 150 machines that were purchased with $25 million from President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan are expected to be installed in airports by the end of June, another homeland security official, spokeswoman Amy Kudwa, said.

WHO: H1N1 pandemic has not yet peaked

LONDON — The World Health Organization says the H1N1-flu pandemic still has not peaked.

The agency’s emergency committee met Tuesday and suggested it was “premature” to recommend downgrading the global flu outbreak. Swine-flu cases have dropped dramatically in recent weeks in Western countries, but the virus has only recently hit Africa. The Southern Hemisphere also is bracing for another wave of illness in the next few months.

H1N1 flu mostly causes mild symptoms, and most people don’t need treatment to get better. WHO’s expert committee recommended another meeting in a few weeks to monitor the situation.

Al-Qaida in Yemen warns of more attacks on US

CAIRO — A senior operative of the al-Qaida network in Yemen — the group that claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day attack on an American passenger jet over Detroit — has threatened more attacks on the United States.

The U.S. has become increasingly worried about militants based in Yemen since al-Qaida groups there and in Saudi Arabia merged last year to become al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The group has openly targeted U.S. and other Western interests in Yemen, and — as demonstrated by the Dec. 25 attack — abroad.

Qasim al-Raimi, a top military commander for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, warned Americans in an article published in an online militant magazine that the group “will blow up the earth from below your feet.”

Doctors cut back hours

CHICAGO — Doctors have steadily cut their work hours over the past decade, a new study finds, something that experts say may only worsen the health-care situation.

It’s not that doctors are terrible slackers. Average hours dropped from about 55 to 51 hours per week from 1996 to 2008, according to the analysis, appearing in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

That’s the equivalent of losing 36,000 doctors in a decade, according to the researchers. And it raises policy questions amid a looming primary-care doctor shortage and Congress considering an expansion of health-insurance coverage that would mean more patients.

Man shoots 2 teens at Colo. middle school

LITTLETON, Colo. — A teacher tackled a man armed with a high-powered rifle just after he shot two teenage students Tuesday at a suburban Denver middle school that’s just miles from Columbine High School, the site of one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings, authorities said.

One male and one female were shot about 3:30 p.m. outside Deer Creek Middle School in Littleton, Jefferson County Sheriff’s office spokeswoman Jacki Kelley said. Both students were taken to a nearby hospital and were expected to survive.

Pentagon moves to lift ban on women on subs

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has moved to lift a decades-old policy that prohibits women from serving aboard Navy submarines, part of a gradual reconsideration of women’s roles in a military fighting two wars whose front lines can be anywhere.

At issue is the end of a policy that kept women from serving aboard the last type of ship off-limits to them. The thinking was that the close quarters aboard subs would make coed service difficult to manage.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates notified Congress in a letter signed Friday that the Navy intends to repeal the ban on women sailors on subs. Congress has 30 days to weigh in.

A defense official told The Associated Press that numerous physical changes to submarines would have to be made but that cadets who graduate from the Naval Academy this year could be among the first Navy women to take submarine posts.

Associated Press