The student was wearing a mask and pointed the gun at the two students, principal Steve Gilbreth and assistant superintendent Steve Doerr, telling them "not to make me do this," said superintendent Jim Simpson.

The boy then fired a shot into the ceiling, breaking a water pipe, and said again: "Please don't make me do this," Simpson said.

Doerr and Gilbreth were able to persuade the student to leave the building, where he was confronted by two police officers who had their weapons drawn. The student dropped the rifle, an AK-47, and was taken into custody, Simpson said.

"It was a very close call," he said.

Note found in backpack

Curt Farmer of the Joplin police said officers found a note in the student's backpack indicating that he had placed an explosive in the school, which has about 750 students. Students in the school were moved to nearby Joplin Memorial Hall, where parents picked them up.

The school was closed while police Missouri State Highway Patrol officers searched the building with bomb-sniffing dogs.

The student had been planning an attack for a "long time," Simpson said without elaborating. He said authorities did not know whether others were involved.

It wasn't immediately clear how the boy got access to the assault rifle.

Police searched a home in the area and officers were seen leaving the house carrying two rifles, The Joplin Globe reported.

Police roped off a half-block area around the house and would not reveal specifics about the search.

The shooting happened about 7:45 a.m., 10 minutes before the start of classes.

'Waving crazily'

A woman who was dropping her son off at the school said she saw Gilbreth "waving crazily" and police cars pulling up behind her.

"Police were heading into the school with weapons drawn, and the principal was pointing to the east side of the school," Blake Spivak told The Joplin Globe.

Spivak, former advertising director for the newspaper, said she and her son, Cooper, stayed in the car while Gilbreth walked back into the school flanked by armed officers in protective jackets.

She said an officer told her to get down or get her car away from the scene.

Joplin, which has about 40,900 residents, is in southwest Missouri, about 250 kilometres south of Kansas City.

Schools across the country have been on alert since three deadly school shootings in three states in the span of a week, and several schools have been locked down or closed entirely during the past two weeks because of threats.

In Pennsylvania Amish country, church bells tolled across the region on Monday morning in remembrance of the five young girls who were shot to death at their one-room schoolhouse one week earlier.

Bush is expected to offer sympathy at the event, being held in this Maryland suburb, and to encourage people to ask questions at home about whether their schools are prepared for emergencies.

Four weeks before the midterm elections, the event allows Bush to return to the politically safe issue of education and child safety. But the federal role in making schools safer is limited because education remains mainly a local matter. The White House chose to host a national sharing of ideas, hoping to seize a moment when people are focused on preventing violence.

Two Cabinet members, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, are leading panel discussions. First lady Laura Bush is also scheduled to speak.

No new policies are expected; strategies for keeping schools safe are widely known. But experts say schools often don't get serious about safety until shootings make headlines.

On Monday, a 13-year-old student in Joplin, Missouri, carried an AK-47 into his middle school and fired a shot into a ceiling. He left the building and was apprehended by police.

Preventing violence, and coping with tragedy, are the topics of the panel discussions.

Among the speakers will be Craig Scott, who survived the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. Student gunmen killed his sister and 12 others.

Another panelist is Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener. He responded in Bailey, Colorado, on September 27, when a man held several girls hostage in a school before killing one and himself.

Other speakers include educators, school administrators and crime prevention experts.

About 300 people are attending the National 4-H Conference Center in Chevy Chase.

"Bringing people together to talk about what's working -- that can't hurt," said William Lassiter, manager of the Center for the Prevention of School Violence in Raleigh, North Carolina.

"I think schools have gotten back into a comfort zone again," Lassiter said. "I'm not saying we should put barbed wire up around schools or take other drastic measures. What we really need to look at is basic safety steps you would take at your own house."

Lassiter also questioned the Bush's administration attempt to cut $347 million in school-safety grants for states this year. Bush's budget says the program is ineffective.

The White House says that beyond those state grants, the government spends larger amounts on successful school safety programs through its education, justice and health agencies.

Meanwhile, there is no pattern to deadly shootings at schools.

In the 2005-06 school year, 15 people were killed in school-related shootings, said Kenneth Trump, a national school safety expert who tracks violence data. That number of school-shooting deaths has ranged from three to 24 in recent years, Trump's records show.

In the period from 1992 to 2002, 462 students and adults died at school by homicide or suicide, according to the latest government figures. Most of those killed were children.

In the last two weeks, a gunman killed himself and five girls at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, and a 15-year-old Wisconsin student shot and killed his principal.

Local police said the baby was critically injured but in stable condition Monday at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh. He suffered a fractured skull and some bleeding in the brain.

A Pennsylvania prosecutor said he has "never, never, never" seen anything remotely like the allegations -- a tiny infant was used as a weapon in a domestic dispute.

The 27-year-old woman, Chytoria Graham, is charged with aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and simple assault. She was held Monday in the Erie County Jail in lieu of 75,000-dollar bail.

Four other children have been removed from the woman's home and placed in the custody of welfare workers, according to the police.

Of particular concern to Republican leaders will be the finding that even some Republican groups are split over which party can better tackle corruption.

In the early part of last month, Mike Simpson, the Republican Congressman from Idaho, told the AP that he was confident his party will retain both the House and the Senate. But, following the revelations about Mr Foley and his pursuit of teenage Capitol Hill interns, or pages, he was no longer "confident" Republicans will retain the House, where they currently hold a 15-seat advantage. "From Thursday it went from fairly confident we were going to keep the majority to a real toss-up," he said.

The Foley scandal has the potential to be especially damaging to the Republicans not simply because it relates to the taboo of sexual behaviour with young people, but because it raises serious questions about the failure of the party's leadership in the House to address the issue.

The House Speaker, Dennis Hastert, under intense pressure, has insisted he only learned of the e-mails after Mr Foley resigned, but a number of other Congressmen and their aides have said they informed the Speaker's office of their concerns months before.

One Republican who is going to switch his vote for the first time this election as a result of the scandal is Lawrence Nuccio, a 78-year-old from Glen Cove, New York. "I'm a registered Republican, but when I turn around and see them trying to cover-up - and that's what they're doing - and try to pass the buck to the Democrats, that's not right," he said.

He added: "You have elected officials who are running the country and you assume are doing the right thing, but they're not."

But the school board, battling against criticism from the New York Times and others, has continued to defend itself, claiming that the row over nude sculpture told only part of the story.

Ms McGee took 89 students aged nine and 10 from Fisher elementary school and 12 parents around the Dallas Museum of Art in April.

Following the complaint, she was sent a formal letter from the headteacher that said: "During a study trip that you planned for fifth graders, students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations."

Ms McGee has insisted she was picked upon on the grounds of prudery. "We have a lot of sporting things in Frisco, with the soccer and the baseball. But not a lot of those kids go to the museum," she said.

But the Frisco school board claims that she has whipped up a flurry of media coverage which is far from the truth.

"The district is disappointed and concerned that Ms McGee continues to mislead the public and, more importantly, that the major media networks in America continue to ignore the facts that they have gathered," a spokesman said.

He added: "We have been taking students to the Dallas Museum of Art for years and will continue to do so. No teacher has ever been fired for taking a field trip to the museum."

The school alludes to other complaints against Ms McGee, but says it cannot go into details because of confidentiality agreements. It has only suggested that the teacher wore flip-flops to work and did not plan the field trip sufficiently.

The teacher disputes all these claims. Ms McGee's lawyer, Rogge Dunn, told the Guardian: "If the museum trip had nothing to do with it, why did the principal give Ms McGee a dressing down about it the day after the trip and why did they put it in writing a couple of weeks later?"

The plot has thickened further after the Dallas Morning News revealed that eight years ago the teacher accepted an $8,300 (£4,446) settlement to leave a teaching job in a neighbouring school district. The cause of the settlement is not known.

The disclosure led the newspaper to ask: "Was a Frisco art teacher pushed out of a job over a flap about nude art, or is the national media spotlight shining in the wrong place?"

Though there have been some reports bringing attention to this (Media Matters in particular has been good at cataloguing Buchanan's ceaseless white nationalism), but so far, little has made its way into the mainstream press.

On the contrary: Buchanan's many friends in the media have instead been conferring the mantle of respectability and normalcy on these views, promoting them on their TV programs and helping boost his book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, onto the bestseller lists.

This is acutely illsutrated by Alexander Zaitchik's report for the SPLC about Buchanan's book and the media response:

In fact, the book reflects racial views that have now veered to the extreme. White America is changing color, Buchanan argues -- "one of the greatest tragedies in human history." The Mexican government is involved in a plot to take over the Southwestern United States, and parts of this country already look like the "Third World." The segregated South wasn't all bad "culturally" -- blacks and whites were united, after all. America, despite what its founders wrote, was a nation formed not on the basis of creed but rather a homogenous ethnic culture. To put it plainly, State of Emergency is a white nationalist tract. The thesis is that America must retain a white majority to survive as a nation. It is rooted in a blood-and-soil nationalism more blood than soil. The echoes of Nazi ideology are clear and chilling. As Buchanan helpfully explained to John King, who was interviewing him in one of his several CNN appearances: "We gotta get into race and ethnic questions."

State of Emergency unapologetically reflects Buchanan's insistence on the centrality of race to the United States and its culture. "This idea of America as a creedal nation bound together not by 'blood or birth or soil' but by 'ideals' that must be taught and learned ... is demonstrably false," Buchanan writes in the book.

Simply put, America is not a nation of ideas. It is a nation of people -- white people. Buchanan is especially overt in making this case when he endorses the view of his late mentor and editor Sam Francis, that American and European civilizations could never have been created without the "genetic endowments" of whites. He goes on to describe discussions of race as "the Great Taboo"; to ignore the role of race, he adds, is "like not telling one's doctor of a recurring pain that could kill you."

Foremost among Buchanan's media boosters has been CNN's Lou Dobbs, whose proclivity for pushing extremist nonsense into the mainstream has beem previously noted:

"Congratulations on the response to your book," said Lou Dobbs, the CNN anchorman who has made a profession of attacking illegal immigration in story after story after story, as he introduced his old CNN colleague. Dobbs then offered up his own view that President Bush was carrying on an "outright war" against middle-class Americans by allowing illegal immigration. Wrapping up the interview, Dobbs concluded: "The book is State of Emergency. It's No. 3 on the best-selling list. ... I'm going to repeat it one more time. The book is State of Emergency. Pat Buchanan, always good to talk to you. ... [Y]ou've got a lot of readers, so keep it rolling."

Particularly telling is Buchanan's sourcing:

Once again, to make his case in State of Emergency, Buchanan relies on a trove of extreme-right sources. His urgent call for thwarting the "invasion" of non-European immigrants leans heavily on material written by hate group members or postings on hate sites, with citations to nearly every sector of the hate movement, from neo-Nazis to neo-Confederates. He cites the work of white supremacist James Lubinskas; Edward Rubinstein, of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute; Clyde Wilson, a board member of the racist and secessionist League of the South; and Wayne Lutton, a veteran immigrant- and gay-hater. Buchanan also quotes Lutton's anti-immigrant hate journal The Social Contract.

There's more, including Buchanan's lionization of Samuel Francis. Yes, that Samuel Francis.

Young says the thieves broke in to steal snakes, iguanas, geckos and bearded dragons. Then the thieves opened the cages of more than 100 animals -- and as some of those animals ran free, the thieves killed them.

"I think as an afterthought, they decided it would be fun to let out all the animals and then they stomped on a bunch of the small animals and dumped out all the cages and opened all the bird cages and let all the cats out," Young said.

Animal Talk in Seattle's University District is both a pet store and a shelter. They take in stray and unwanted cats and try to adopt them out.

Some of the cats were badly injured in the melee, and it might be a while before they are healthy enough to go to new homes.

"It hurts. It really does hurt and it scares me that someone could do this," said volunteer Elspeth Gotz.

Volunteers who help out in the rescue center were stunned when they got the news that the store had been robbed and vandalized.

"I actually suspected it might be some misguided animal rights person, but it sounds like it was just your garden variety dirt bag," said volunteer Mary Woodring.

The store's owner told us she lost thousands in the robbery between what was stolen and all the damage. But she added it's much harder to put a price tag on the emotional side of it.

The store decided to cancel adoptions Sunday so it can make sure all the animals are OK.