Illinois: Hazing brings suspensions

A suburban high school Monday suspended several seniors involved in a brutal off-campus hazing melee and will recommend the girls be expelled.

Principal Michael Riggle of Glenbrook North High said he took the steps after the district’s lawyer advised him that the school had broader powers to discipline students for the videotaped incident than he had thought.

The 10-day suspensions are the longest the school can mete out, Riggle said. He said it would be up to the district to decide whether to expel the students, which would bar them not only from campus but from the prom and graduation ceremonies.

Junior girls from the school were beaten and showered with mud, feces and garbage by seniors on May 4 at a Cook County park. Five girls were injured seriously enough that they had to go to the hospital.

Montana: Open containers still legal

Montana drivers can continue to keep one hand on the wheel and the other on a cold beer after the state Legislature packed up and went home without passing a ban on open containers of alcohol.

While 36 states have such prohibitions — and some federal highway aid is tied to state passage of open container bans — Montana has drivers who measure their cross-state drives by how many six-packs they consume along the way.

Montana has the nation’s third highest rate of alcohol-related traffic deaths: 1.04 deaths for every 100 million miles driven, compared with 0.63 deaths nationally.

Iraq: Trailer may be weapons lab

U.S. forces found another trailer in northern Iraq that appeared to be a mobile biological weapons laboratory, Pentagon officials said Monday.

The trailer was similar to one seized last month that U.S. officials believe may have been a germ weapons workshop for the Iraqis, two officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

American troops found the second trailer around the northern city of Mosul Friday night or Saturday morning, one official said. U.S. experts are examining it in Mosul before sending it to the Baghdad airport, where the first trailer is being held, officials said.

President Bush said he waged war against Saddam Hussein’s government to eliminate Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs. So far, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, despite visits to more than 100 suspect sites by U.S. investigators.

Russia: Chechnya blast kills dozens

Suicide bombers exploded a truck laden with explosives at a government compound in northern Chechnya on Monday, reducing eight buildings to rubble and killing at least 41 people.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the attack was aimed at derailing a resolution of the 3 1/2-year-old war.

Three suicide bombers, including one woman, carried out the attack in the town of Znamenskoye.

The explosion, which had the force of at least 1.3 tons of TNT, wounded more than 110 people, 57 of them critically, said Maj.-Gen. Ruslan Avtayev. Nearly all the dead were civilians, including six children under the age of 12.