The likely death of a planned nuclear waste site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain has left federal agencies looking for a possible replacement. A national laboratory working for the U.S. Department of Energy is now eying granite deposits stretching from Georgia to Maine as potential sites, along with big sections of Minnesota and Wisconsin where that rock is prevalent.

Three decades after the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act said the federal government would handle disposal of high-level radioactive waste, the United States still has no agreed-upon solution for where and how to dispose of about 70,000 metric tons of it. About 10 percent is from the military's nuclear weapons programs; most of the rest is piling up at commercial reactor sites around the country.

Nigerian officials said they have launched a broadcast satellite into orbit to replace one that was lost in space.

Project manager Abdulrahman Adejah said Monday on state-run television that NIGCOMSAT-1R launched successfully from a Chinese launch pad.

A man from the San Francisco Bay area has fathered 14 children in the last five years through free sperm donations to women he meets through his website — and is now in trouble with the federal government.

The case of Trent Arsenault has drawn attention to the practice of informal sperm donation, which physicians and bioethicists call unsafe but some people say is a civil liberties issue.

David Villa has only a slim chance of playing for Barcelona again this season and could also miss the 2012 European Championship after undergoing surgery on his broken leg on Monday.

One of the doctors who performed the operation said the 30-year-old Spain striker would be sidelined for four to five months.

Former Miss Venezuela Eva Ekvall, whose struggle with breast cancer was closely followed by Venezuelans, has died at age 28.

Her family said Ekvall died Saturday at a hospital in Houston.

The Philippine government shipped more than 400 coffins Tuesday to two flood-stricken cities in the south where the death toll neared 1,000 as President Benigno Aquino III declared a state of national calamity and relief agencies rushed to help.

The latest count listed 957 dead and 49 missing and is set to climb further as additional bodies are being recovered from the sea and mud in Iligan and Cagayan de Oro cities.

The body of North Korea's long-time ruler Kim Jong Il was laid out in a glass coffin Tuesday as weeping mourners filled public plazas and state media fed a budding personality cult around his third son, hailing him as "born of heaven."

North Korea's official television showed still photos of Kim in the coffin surrounded by wreaths, his body covered with a red blanket and his head on a white pillow. A giant red curtain covered a wall behind Kim.

The future of the U.S. Global Positioning System is taking shape in a vast white room south of Denver, where workers are piecing together the first of more than 30 satellites touted as the most powerful, reliable and versatile yet.

The new generation of satellites, known as Block III, will improve the accuracy of military and civilian GPS receivers to within three feet (about one meter), compared with 10 feet (about three meters) now, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Even if you love the iPad, you're probably not keen to write your next novel using its on-screen virtual keyboard. You may not be thrilled to type up a lengthy email with it, either.

Steve Isaac felt the same way. A Seattle-based software designer who worked on an early tablet at computing startup Go in the 1990s, Isaac was delighted when the iPad came out last year. He loved its svelteness, battery life and wireless connectivity.

At The Apothecarium, a quaintly upscale medical marijuana club in San Francisco's Castro District, the vibe is even jollier than usual this month. To boost holiday spirits, the dispensary is giving a storewide 15 percent discount to patrons who donate to its canned food drive, making year-end contributions to local charities and raffling off a seriously spiked "ganja-bread" house made with a whopping 80 "doses" of pot-infused butter.

"We have a whole bunch of decorations up, holiday music playing. It's pretty festive here right now," said Ryan Hudson, The Apothecarium's executive director. "Why not? We are just like any other business, in that regard."