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• MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexican troops and federal police kept a nighttime watch on a rural field where thieves abandoned a stolen shipment of highly radioactive cobalt-60, while officials began planning the delicate task of recovering the dangerous material.
• Juan Eibenschutz, director general of the National Commission of Nuclear Safety and Safeguards, said late Wednesday that it could take at least two days to safely get the material into a secure container and transport it to a waste site.
• "It's a very delicate operation," Eibenschutz said. "What's important is that the material has been located and the place is being watched to guarantee no one gets close."
• The missing shipment of radioactive cobalt-60 was found Wednesday near where the stolen truck transporting the material was abandoned in central Mexico.
• The highly radioactive material had been removed from its container, officials said, and one predicted that anyone involved in opening the box could be in grave danger of dying within days.
• ___

• BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) -- Some people were choosing to stay indoors as an arctic blast swept across the Northern Plains, but the prospect of temperatures not cracking single digits had a different effect on the roustabouts, roughnecks and thousands of others working outside in western North Dakota's oil patch.
• For them, it was just another challenge to face as they go about the task of pulling nearly a million barrels of oil a day out of the ground.
• "This is what I love to do," said Craig Hovet, during a break from maintenance work on a well near Mandaree. "The joke around here is: This kind of weather keeps out the riffraff."
• Hovet and his crew shrugged off blowing snow and single-digit temperatures on Wednesday, but the real deep freeze was just ahead. Thursday's projected high was minus 6 degrees, falling to minus 10 by Saturday, with overnight lows to 24 below as a major winter storm bulldozed from the Rockies eastward.

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