USA

November 24, 2008

NASA will squeeze in a fourth and final spacewalk Monday to lubricate a rotary joint on the International Space Station. On Saturday, two astronauts unjammed a clogged joint used to reposition a solar wing. One problem that may go unresolved on this trip to the station by the shuttle Endeavour involves a faulty water recycling system needed to double the station's crew from three to six.

Roberts Gibbs will join the incoming White House team as press secretary, this after serving as communications director for President-elect Barack Obama's campaign, it was announced Saturday. Gibbs has been an Obama adviser since 2004.

Nebraska lowered the age limit of its "safe haven" law Saturday, but not before a California mother made her 14-year-old son the last of 36 children given over to licensed hospitals under the unrestricted law. The state will now only take in infants no more than 30 days old. The teenager was placed in a foster home.

Leaders of the Screen Actors Guild will conduct a strike- authorization vote of its 120,000 members, the union said Saturday after the first contract talks with Hollywood studios in four months broke off in Los Angeles. No new talks are scheduled, and the vote is expected to take more than a month to complete. The guild is concerned that the studios want to use nonunion actors and avoid paying residuals – payments that occur when a production airs.

Penn State's 81-year-old football coach Joe Paterno will return next season, he said Saturday after his team defeated Michi-gan State, 49-18, to secure its first Rose Bowl berth since 1995. Penn State finished the regular season 11-1.

To save thousands of wild horses, Madeleine Pickens, the wife of Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, is negotiating to purchase about 1 million acres as a Western refuge for horses now kept in holding facilities. The Bureau of Land Management has said it might have to consider euthanasia as a last-resort, population-control option for the animals.