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"...The attack at Karma came barely a month after a similar strike at Sargodha Air Base, located west-northwest of Lahore. In that attack, which occurred on 1 November, a suicide bomber killed eight people outside the base perimeter, targeting a bus which was carrying Air Force personnel to a nearby training center. Like the AWC complex at Karma, Sargodha is also closely linked to Pakistan's nuclear program. The base houses two squadrons of F-16 fighters, which have reportedly been modified for a nuclear strike mission. Additionally, as many as 80 solid-fueled, nuclear-capable Hataf/M-11 short-range missiles are believed to be stored...

UCSD CAMPUS NOTICE University of California, San Diego OFFICE OF THE VICE CHANCELLOR - BUSINESS AFFAIRS December 5, 2007 ALL AT UCSD (including UCSD Medical Center) SUBJECT: Evacuation of the School of Medicine There has been an evacuation of the School of Medicine buildings on the west campus and the School of Pharmacy as a precautionary measure for the safety of our campus community. We have been monitoring some threats and investigating a suspicious object that was found in the Leichtag Building. City and county police and other responders are working with us. Please avoid the area and check Blink...

DES MOINES, Iowa - A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the state of Iowa cannot fund an evangelical Christian prison ministry program because doing so advances or endorses religion, violating the Constitutional separation of church and state. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt's June 2006 ruling that a Prison Fellowship Ministries Inc. program at the Newton Correctional Facility was unconstitutional if paid for with taxpayer dollars and should be shut down. Barry Lynn, executive director of the Washington-based advocacy group Americans United For Separation of Church and State, which brought the lawsuit,...

Monday November 26, 8:34 am ET NEW YORK (Reuters) - Citigroup (NYSE:C - News), the No. 1 U.S. bank by assets, is planning major job cuts over the coming months, CNBC television reported on Monday. CNBC said that no exact number had yet been set, though some jobs were already being eliminated. It estimated that the cuts could total anywhere between 17,000 and 45,000. Citigroup officials were not immediately available for comment. (Reporting by Christian Plumb, editing by Dave Zimmerman)

The latest round of the international campaign against Iran’s covert nuclear activities is coming out of Paris, DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report. A statement by President Nicolas Sarkozy Thursday, Sept. 27 that he does not believe Iran’s program is peaceful was followed by a press conference at which the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s chairman, Mehdi Abrishamchi, reported Iran was constructing a new site for a secret military project 5 km south of the Natanz nuclear complex. Sarkozy’s spokesman David Martinon said: “Ahmadinejad claims his country’s nuclear activities are peaceful. Ultimately, we do not believe him. Everyone knows that the...

September 23, 2007, 2:32 PM (GMT+02:00) Iran’s suspect nuclear program is further polarizing the big powers. As American and European officials discussed a third round of UN Security Council sanctions, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, more pugnacious than ever, addressed a military parade Sat. Sept. 22 marking the 27th anniversary of the onset of the Iraq-Iran war of the eighties. “Those (countries) who assume that decaying methods such as psychological war, political propaganda and the so-called economic sanctions would work and prevent Iran’s fast drive towards progress are mistaken.” "The Iranian nation is ready to bring any oppressive power to its...

Tehran, 20 Sept. (AKI) - A research centre run by the office of the president of Iran has released a 15-page document in which they define President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the "Socrates of the Third Millenium". The document has been released just days before Ahmadinejad is due to visit New York. The Iranian president will arrive in the city on Sunday to address the United Nations General Assembly. In the document, various speeches and letters written by the Iranian president are analysed and it concludes that "Ahmadinejad reasons and discusses exactly as Socrates did in ancient Greece, by disarming other...

WASHINGTON - Every effort should be made to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but failing that, the world could live with a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran, a recently retired commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East said Monday. John Abizaid, the retired Army general who headed Central Command for nearly four years, said he was confident that if Iran gained nuclear arms, the United States could deter it from using them. "Iran is not a suicide nation," he said. "I mean, they may have some people in charge that don't appear to be rational, but I doubt that...

BEIJING: China will deploy engineers and a medical unit to Sudan's troubled Darfur region next month as part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission, the military reported... Energy-hungry China buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil output and sells weapons to the Khartoum regime. Critics say Beijing has not used its economic leverage to push Sudan's government more strongly for peace in Darfur, and have attempted to shame China into acting by linking the Darfur crisis to next year's Summer Olympics in the Chinese capital. Xinhua said the unit headed to Darfur has been trained in international law, the United Nations constitution...

NEW YORK — Revelations about the mysterious life of the Democratic fund raiser Norman Hsu have not only sent shockwaves through the mainstream political world, the Chinese are also left to worry about a possible fallout. Still somewhat new to the American political game and trying to figure out how to participate in the democratic process, Chinese here fear that Hsu is going to cast a shadow over every yellow face who donates to political parties and candidates, opening them up to unprecedented scrutiny. Hsu made the front page in almost all Chinese media after the Wall Street Journal’s reporting...

One of the most respected top managers of the Apollo program, Joseph P. Gavin, who led development of the NASA/Grumman Apollo lunar module, is airing sharp opposition to the Bush Administration/NASA goal of returning humans to the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars. In a letter to Aviation Week & Space Technology, Gavin, former director of the lunar module development at Grumman, says he believes the near term Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle lunar plan and Moon base goal should be scrapped in favor of even more emphasis on Mars—especially robotic Mars exploration. “I have been somewhat surprised to see...

AS A FORMER NASA astronaut training manager responsible for crew training for shuttle missions, I was not entirely surprised by the initial reports of the sad, bizarre case of Lisa Marie Nowak. This isn't the first case of astronauts having difficulties in their personal lives. Usually, the straying astronaut simply resigns or retires, and everything is hushed up. But being charged with assault, attempted kidnapping and attempted murder is far greater than anything I ever observed or imagined could occur. Perhaps this tragedy will bring some of the agency's long-ignored problems into the open. First is the tremendous and unnecessary...

Iran to rally the people for nuclear celebrations (Reuters) Updated: 2007-02-09 21:50 TEHRAN - Iran will seek to show a nation united behind its nuclear program on Sunday but pressure from the West and voices counselling caution at home have dampened prospects for a grand announcement about atomic progress. Iranian artists perform as they hold up samples of enriched uranium in Mashad, east of Tehran, April 11, 2006. Iran will seek to show a nation united behind its nuclear program on Sunday but pressure from the West and voices counselling caution at home have dampened prospects for a grand announcement...

VIENNA (Reuters) - Iran's chief nuclear negotiator canceled on Friday a trip to a conference in Germany where U.N. officials had hoped talks with European policy makers would secure a "time out" in a row over Tehran's nuclear ambitions. "We have heard that Mr (Ali) Larijani will not be coming to the conference due to illness," Horst Teltschik, chief organizer of the Munich Security Conference, told Reuters. Earlier, the U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei urged Iran and the West to avoid "an uncontrolled chain reaction" toward conflict and said he hoped a solution would be found at Munich talks.

For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens. In the past decade or so, as scientists came to agree that the number of objects in orbit had surpassed a critical mass - or, in their terms, the critical spatial density, the point at which a chain reaction becomes inevitable - they grew more anxious. Early this year, after a half- century of growth, the...

PRESS RELEASE Date Released: Wednesday, January 31, 2007< Source: Rep. Dave Weldon If Enacted, Would Be Worst Cuts to Space Exploration Since 1993 Urges Senate to Reverse Irresponsible Choice by House Dems In a fiscal year 2007 budget released today, the new Democrat majority proposed sweeping cuts to NASA's budget that could jeopardized the future of space exploration. U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon, M.D. (R-FL), who represents many workers from NASA and Kennedy Space Center, called the cuts draconian, saying the Democrat leadership is using NASA and our nation's space program as a piggy bank for other liberal spending priorities. "The...

LONDON, January 31 (IranMania) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is set to visit Belarus to discuss energy cooperation, the former Soviet republic’s Foreign Ministry said. Recent moves by Russia to raise the price Belarus pays for its oil and gas have prompted Minsk to seek alternative sources of energy, RIA-Novosti reported. Vladimir Semashko, the first deputy prime minister, said Minsk is considering joint oil production ventures with Iran. During his visit to Tehran on January 21-22, Belarusian Defense Minister Leonid Maltsev signed with his Iranian counterpart, Mostafa Mohammad Najar, a memorandum of understanding on defense cooperation. The parties agreed on...

Trouble on the International Space Station could mean changes for the next space shuttle mission. Astronauts aboard Discovery could find themselves on a repair mission, WESH 2 News reported. That's because part of the space station's maneuvering system is not working. Mission Controllers shut down one of the station's four stabilizers. They keep the station correctly oriented in space. So on Discovery's scheduled December mission, astronauts may have to toss out their assembly plans and make repairs instead.

LOS ANGELES (AP)—A NASA spacecraft built to explore two of the solar system's largest asteroids won't launch this year because the space agency is dealing with cost overruns and technical issues in the project. The planned summer launch of the Dawn spacecraft has been indefinitely postponed, said Andrew Dantzler, director of NASA's solar system division. Mission managers had been ordered to halt work on Dawn last fall while the project was assessed by an independent review team, which is expected to present its findings to NASA on Jan. 27. Even if NASA gives Dawn the green light, it would take...

The New Orleans police chief says 15-thousand people are trapped in the city's convention center. And he says some are being raped and beaten. Chief Eddie Compass says displaced tourists are "walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon." Compass said he sent eight eleven-man teams into the convention center. But as soon as the first team arrived, he said, "they were beaten back within 30 feet of the entrance." Earlier, the city's mayor issued a "desperate SOS" on behalf of the thousands who are stranded at the convention center. He also gave the go-ahead for them to...