World/Nation

• Nose gear fails, forces emergency landing in Philly

PHILADELPHIA - A Florida-bound plane's nose gear collapsed during takeoff at Philadelphia International Airport Thursday, prompting an emergency evacuation of passengers from the runway.

Airline officials said US Airways Flight 1702 was heading to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., when the pilot was forced to abort takeoff shortly after 6 p.m. when a tire on the plane's front landing gear blew out.

The Airbus A320 jet was carrying 149 passengers and five crew members, airport spokeswoman Victoria Lupica said. All were rescheduled on departing flights Thursday night, she said.

Two passengers requested medical attention after the crash but no serious injuries were reported, she said.

A passenger on the plane, Dennis Fee, told WPVI-TV that it was "very windy and when the plane took off, the nose of the plane went back down, hitting the runway."

• Malaysia plane search extends to the west

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - A Malaysia Airlines plane sent signals to a satellite for four hours after the aircraft went missing, an indication that it was still flying for hundreds of miles or more, a U.S. official briefed on the search said Thursday.

Six days after the plane with 239 people aboard disappeared, Malaysian authorities expanded their search westward toward India, saying the aircraft may have flown for several hours after its last contact with the ground shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.

A string of previous clues about Flight MH370 have led nowhere.

"MH370 went completely silent over the open ocean," said Malaysia's acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein. "This is a crisis situation. It is a very complex operation, and it is not obviously easy. We are devoting all our energies to the task at hand."

The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the situation by name, said the Boeing 777-200 wasn't transmitting data to the satellite, but was instead sending out a signal to establish contact.

• Russian troops start war games near Ukraine

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine- Russia conducted new military maneuvers near its border with Ukraine on Thursday, and President Vladimir Putin said the world shouldn't blame his country for what he called Ukraine's "internal crisis."

In Crimea, where the public will vote on Sunday whether to break away from Ukraine and become part of Russia, jittery residents lined up at their banks to withdraw cash from their accounts amid uncertainty over the future of the peninsula, which Russian troops now control. Violence engulfed the eastern Donetsk region, where violent clashes between pro-Russia demonstrators and supporters of the Ukrainian government left at least one person dead.

"These people are afraid their bank will collapse and no one wants to lose their money," said resident Tatiana Sivukhina. "Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov plan to meet in London on Friday in a last-ditch bid to end the international standoff over the Crimean referendum, which Ukraine and the West have rejected as illegitimate.

In Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel sharply criticized Russia, saying the territorial integrity of Ukraine cannot be compromised.

• Nuclear missile launch crew woes pile up

WASHINGTON - Failings exposed last spring at a U.S. nuclear missile base, reflecting what one officer called "rot" in the ranks, were worse than originally reported, according to Air Force documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Airmen responsible for missile operations at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., would have failed their portion of a major inspection in March 2013 but managed a "marginal" rating because their poor marks were blended with the better performance of support staff - like cooks and facilities managers - and they got a boost from the base's highly rated training program. The "marginal" rating, the equivalent of a "D'' in school, was reported previously. Now revealed are details of the low performance by the launch officers, or missileers, entrusted with the keys to missiles.

"Missileer technical proficiency substandard," one briefing slide says. "Remainder (of missile operations team) raised grade to marginal."

The documents also hint at an exam-cheating problem in the making among launch crews at Minot, almost a full year before allegations of widespread cheating erupted this January at a companion nuclear base in Montana.

An official inquiry into the troubled inspection of the 91st Missile Wing at Minot in March 2013 concluded that one root cause was poor use of routine testing and other means of measuring the proficiency of launch crews in their assigned tasks. For example, commanders at Minot did not ensure that monthly written tests were supervised. The analysis also said Minot senior leaders failed to foster a "culture of accountability."

• CIA-Senate dispute raises murky issues

WASHINGTON - A fight between the Senate and the CIA over whether crimes were committed in the handling of sensitive classified material appears unlikely to be resolved in the courts, legal experts say.

The simmering dispute erupted in public this week when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accused the CIA of improperly searching and removing documents from a computer network used by Senate investigators to compile a report on the George W. Bush-era interrogation program for suspected terrorists. CIA Director John Brennan has denied that the CIA hacked into the computers but says an audit was necessary to determine whether Senate staffers had improperly obtained sensitive CIA documents.

The matter has landed in the lap of the Justice Department, which has been asked to investigate whether laws were broken.

But legal experts say prosecutors will likely be hesitant to wade into a separation-of-powers dispute between two branches of government that involves a muddled area of the law and raises as many policy questions as it does legal ones. The Justice Department receives far more requests to open criminal probes than it chooses to pursue. Federal courts, too, are reluctant to referee power disputes between the two other branches of government.

- The Associated Press