Scott Neuman

Update at 4:20 p.m. ET:

The BBC reports that one of the two suspects, Chiheb Esseghaier, told the court that the case against him was "made based on acts and words which are only appearances."

He declined representation. Raed Jaser made no statement in court. Neither suspect entered a plea on Tuesday.

According to the BBC:

The arraignment of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by federal prosecutors in his hospital room is just the beginning of a long and complicated legal path.

As NPR's Carrie Johnson reports, under the charge of using weapons of mass destruction, which is the core of Monday's indictment against Tsarnaev, he is eligible for the death penalty.

Authorities have identified four more sets of remains of first responders who battled last week's fire and explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. Wednesday's blast killed at least 14 people and injured more than 200, according to officials cited by The Associated Press.

The Federal Aviation Administration has approved changes to the design of the Boeing 787's battery system — the first step toward returning the grounded aircraft to service.

The approximately 50 787 "Dreamliners" delivered to airlines worldwide were grounded in January after incidents involving overheating problems in lithium-ion batteries.

U.S. hospitals have been urged to be on the lookout for symptoms of bird flu among patients who have recently traveled to China, where a new strain of the virus has killed 17 people and infected more than 70.

Members of a French family held for weeks by Boko Haram militants in Cameroon have been freed and are in good health, Al-Jazeera reports, citing Cameroonian and French officials.

Cameroon's President Paul Biya, in a statement read on national radio, said the couple and their four children, aged 5 to 12, had been "handed over last night to Cameroonian authorities."

NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered three new "habitable zone" planets that are close to Earth's size, even if they're not all that close to Earth.

NPR's Joe Palca reports, the trio of worlds is about 1,200 light years away and are thought to lie in the so-called "Goldilocks zone" — where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water.

North Korea on Thursday says it is ready to resume talks with the U.S. and South Korea if they end joint military exercises and the United Nations drops sanctions.

The official KCNA news agency carried the statement from North Korea's National Defense Commission calling for a resumption of dialogue.

"The first step will be withdrawing the U.N. Security Council resolutions cooked up on ridiculous grounds," the statement said.

Former Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf's bodyguards spirited him out of an Islamabad courtroom Thursday to avoid his arrest on treason charges after a judge revoked bail.

Police in the courtroom made no attempt to detain Musharraf, 69, who was whisked away by his security detail to his residence in a suburb of the capital.

The BBC's Orla Guerin described the scene at the courthouse as "a moment of high drama and farce."

A bipartisan compromise that would have expanded federal background checks for firearms purchases has been rejected by the Senate.

The defeat of the measure by a 54-46 vote — six votes shy of the number needed to clear the Senate — marks a major setback for gun-control advocates, many of whom had hoped that Congress would act to curb gun violence in the wake of December's Newtown elementary school massacre, where 20 students and six adults were killed.

Scientists have unraveled the genome of the coelacanth, a rare and primitive fish once thought to be extinct, shedding light on how closely it's related to the first creatures to emerge from the sea.

The coelacanth, a fish that can reach up to 5 feet long and lives in deep ocean caves, had only been seen in fossils and was thought to have gone extinct some 70 million years ago. That was until 1938, when fishermen from the Comoros islands off the coast of Africa captured one in a net. A second coelacanth species was discovered off the Indonesian island of Sulewesi in 1997.

Update at 6:21 p.m. ET. Launch Delayed:

Space.com reports that the Antares rocket launch has been delayed for two days, "after an unexpected glitch."

Space.com reports:

American Airlines has promised passengers that Wednesday's flight schedule will be nothing like the day before, when thousands were stranded due to a glitch in the reservations system that forced hundreds of flights to be canceled or delayed.

American Airlines and American Eagle scuttled 970 flights and delayed more than 1,000 others Tuesday, The Associated Press said, citing flight-tracking service FlightAware.com.

A computer glitch in the reservations system at American Airlines caused all of the carrier's flights to be grounded for at least two hours on Tuesday.

"American's reservation and booking tool, Sabre is offline," American Airlines spokeswoman Mary Frances Fagan told Reuters in an email. "We're working to resolve the issue as quickly as we can. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience."

NPR's Wade Goodwyn reports that the outage was announced about 2:30 p.m. Eastern time.