NEW YORK

Passenger hides bullets in baby diaper at airport

NEW YORK>> It was a loaded diaper, but not like you might think.

Security officers found 17 bullets concealed inside a disposable baby diaper Wednesday at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, the Transportation Security Administration said.

Officers pulled the otherwise clean diaper from a passenger’s carry-on bag after it triggered an alarm in an X-ray machine at an airport security checkpoint, the TSA said.

According to the agency, the passenger initially claimed he didn’t know how the bullet-filled diaper ended up in his bag. Later he suggested his girlfriend put it there, the agency said.

The TSA identified the passenger as a man from Arkansas who was ticketed for a flight to Chicago’s Midway Airport but did not disclose his name. Port Authority police cited him for unlawful possession of the 9mm ammunition.

NASA

International astronaut will be invited on moon landing

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.>> An international astronaut will join U.S. astronauts on the moon by decade’s end under an agreement announced Wednesday by NASA and the White House.

The news came as Vice President Kamala Harris prepared to convene a meeting of the National Space Council, the third such gathering under the Biden administration.

There was no immediate word on who the international moonwalker might be or even what country would be represented.

NASA has included international astronauts on trips to space for decades. Canadian Jeremy Hansen will fly around the moon a year or so from now with three U.S. astronauts.

Another crew would actually land; it would be the first lunar touchdown by astronauts in more than a half-century. That’s not likely to occur before 2027, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

All 12 moonwalkers during NASA’s Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s were U.S. citizens. The space agency’s new moon exploration program is named Artemis after Apollo’s mythological twin sister.

NASA has long stressed the need for global cooperation in space, establishing the Artemis Accords along with the U.S. State Department in 2020 to promote responsible behavior not just at the moon but everywhere in space. Representatives from all 33 countries that have signed the accords so far were expected at the space council’s meeting in Washington.

Notably missing from the accords: Russia and China, the only countries besides the U.S. to launch their own citizens into orbit. — The Associated Press