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• But the news has renewed discussion over delays for emptying the tanks, which were installed decades ago and are long past their intended 20-year life span.
• "None of these tanks would be acceptable for use today. They are all beyond their design life. None of them should be in service," said Tom Carpenter of Hanford

Challenge, a Hanford watchdog group. "And yet, they're holding two-thirds of the nation's high-level nuclear waste."
• Just last week, state officials announced that one of Hanford's 177 tanks was leaking 150 to 300 gallons a year, posing a risk to groundwater and rivers. So far, nearby monitoring wells haven't detected higher radioactivity levels.
• ___

• PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) -- North Korea warned the top American commander in South Korea on Saturday of "miserable destruction" if the U.S. military presses ahead with routine joint drills with South Korea set to begin next month.
• Pak Rim Su, chief of North Korea's military delegation to the truce village of Panmunjom inside the Demilitarized Zone, sent the warning Saturday morning to Gen. James Thurman, Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said, in a rare direct message to the U.S. commander.
• The threat comes as the U.S. and other nations discuss how to punish North Korea for conducting an underground nuclear test on Feb. 12 in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions banning Pyongyang from nuclear and missile activity.
• North Korea has characterized the nuclear test, its third since 2006, as a defensive act against U.S. aggression. Pyongyang accuses Washington of "hostility" for leading the charge to punish North Korea for a December rocket launch that the U.S. considers a covert missile test.
• The U.S. and North Korea fought on opposite sides of the three-year Korean War, which ended in a truce in 1953, not a peace treaty, and left the Korean Peninsula divided by a heavily fortified border monitored by the U.S.-led U.N. Command.
• ___

• GOLDEN, Colo. (AP) -- A search that set parents in the Denver area on edge

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