WASHINGTON — The Senate took a first step Tuesday toward opening the presidency to foreign-born citizens, including a particular Austrian-born actor who’s running the nation’s most populous state.

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, held a two-hour hearing on his proposal, one of several in Congress to amend the Constitution by removing the requirement that only people born in the United States can be president.

The image, mostly unstated, that was hanging over the hearing and the whole nascent congressional movement was the well-sculpted one of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s been a U.S. citizen since 1983, conveniently fulfilling the 20-year requirement Hatch is proposing.

• Mount St. Helens sends more signals

MOUNT ST. HELENS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Wash. — Mount St. Helens exhaled a spectacular roiling cloud of steam and ash Tuesday, sprinkling grit on a small town 25 miles away.

The volcano has been venting steam and small amounts of ash daily since Friday, but Tuesday morning’s burst was the largest.

For days, scientists have been warning the volcano could blow at any moment with enough force to endanger lives and property. But geologists said Tuesday a more likely scenario was weeks or months of smaller-scale venting, with the possibility lava could enlarge the dome within the mountain’s gaping crater.

• Grieving mother dies after son’s death in Iraq

TUCSON, Ariz. — A 45-year-old woman collapsed and died days after learning her son had been killed in Iraq and just hours after seeing his body.

Results of an autopsy were not immediately released, but friends of Karen Unruh-Wahrer said she couldn’t stop crying over losing her 25-year-old son, Army Spc. Robert Oliver Unruh, who was killed by enemy fire near Baghdad on Sept. 25.

“Her grief was so intense — it seemed it could have harmed her, could have caused a heart attack. Her husband described it as a broken heart,” said Cheryl Hamilton, manager of respiratory care services at University Medical Center, where Unruh-Wahrer worked as a respiratory therapist.

• Three Americans win Nobel Prize in physics

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Americans David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their explanation of the force that binds particles inside the atomic nucleus.

Their work has helped science get closer to “a theory for everything,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in awarding the physics prize.

It was a 1973 breakthrough by the trio — researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — that explained how the so-called “strong force” works. The force keeps quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, tightly bound to one another even though the positive electromagnetic charge of protons in the nucleus would break them apart.

From Wire Reports