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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...

The crash of a Cypriot airliner that killed 121 people near Athens likely occurred after it ran out of fuel while heading towards Athens International Airport, a senior government source said Tuesday. "We surmise that the (Helios Airways) plane was heading towards Athens International Airport and that it ran out of fuel," the government official told AFP on condition of anonymity. All 121 people aboard the aircraft died in the accident, which is believed to have occurred after a disastrous air supply failure almost two hours before it smashed into a mountain near the Greek capital. Earlier on Tuesday officials...

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express has snapped an image of a modest ice lake on the Red Planet. The frozen patch of water ice is tucked away in an unnamed impact crater. The feature is located on Vastitas Borealis, a broad plain that covers much of the far northern latitudes. The crater is 22 miles (35 kilometers) wide and has a maximum depth of roughly 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) beneath the crater rim. The ice patch is present all year round, as the temperature and pressure are not high enough to allow the frozen water to escape into...

Saturn's tiny icy moon Enceladus, which ought to be cold and dead, instead displays evidence for active ice volcanism. NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found a huge cloud of water vapor over the moon's south pole, and warm fractures where evaporating ice probably supplies the vapor cloud. Cassini has also confirmed Enceladus is the major source of Saturn's largest ring, the E-ring. "Enceladus is the smallest body so far found that seems to have active volcanism," said Dr. Torrence Johnson, Cassini imaging-team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Enceladus' localized water vapor atmosphere is reminiscent of comets. 'Warm spots'...

NEW YORK, June 28 (Reuters) - Chinese suppliers and an agent of China's government are poised to take control of Huffy Corp. (HUFCQ.PK: Quote, Profile, Research) , a venerable U.S. brand name, as the bicycle maker restructures under bankruptcy protection, it said on Tuesday. Huffy, making bikes for Americans for more than a century, said it had agreed to a reorganization plan which would allow it to terminate its staff pension plans. The company would turn responsibility for the benefits over to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a unit of the federal government that insures pension plans.

Mars Rover Opportunity Raw Image site.

SOUTH African health officals in Johannesburg have quarantined a sick passenger who arrived by plane from Angola, amid fears the Marburg virus may spread south. The plane was taken out of service and disinfected, and the passenger was taken to hospital for tests after arriving from Angola's capital Luanda. Marburg, a haemorrhagic fever related to Ebola, has killed 239 people in Angola. Most have died in the northern province of Uige, although a few cases have been recorded in other areas, including Luanda, among people who have travelled from Uige. The death toll from the virus continues to climb, but...

Scientists will comb data sent back from Titan by the Huygens probe for the chemical signature of life in a bid to identify the moon's source of methane. Methane is constantly destroyed by UV light so there must be a source within Titan to replenish the atmosphere. Life is a possible - though some think unlikely - source of this hydrocarbon along with geological processes. The surface is too cold for biology, but microbes could survive in an ocean within Titan, a senior scientist says. Methane can also be released from a trapped form called clathrate and produced by...

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has come across an interesting object -- perhaps a meteorite sitting out in the open at Meridiani Planum. Initial data taken by the robot’s Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) is suggestive that the odd-looking “rock” is made of metal. The curious-looking object stands out in the parking-lot like landscape of Meridiani Planum. “We're curious about it too. We have Mini-TES data on it now, and they suggest that it may actually be made of metal,” said Steve Squyres, lead scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover mission from Cornell University. “So we are beginning to suspect that...

Bireuen, Acehkita. Five villages that were hit by the tsunmai in Kecamatan Samalanga Kabupaten Bireun, are going to hold a ritual feast (kenduri) today (6/1). The ceremony will be done as way of marking their return to the sea, one week after the natural disaster. The ceremony will be held at the edge of the shore in Ulee Kareung Village, a place that was swept clean by the tsunami. Several other villages, including Tamboe, Ara, Peuneulet Baroh, Cureh Baroh, dan Cureng Tunong will also participate in the event. Muhammad (30) a resident of Cureh Baroh who was interviewed by acehkita,...

Near-Earth Asteroid 2004 MN4 Don Yeomans, Steve Chesley and Paul Chodas NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office December 24, 2004 2004 MN4 is now being tracked very carefully by many astronmers around the world, and we continue to update our risk analysis (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk) for this object. Today's impact monitoring results indicate that the impact probability for April 13, 2029 has risen to about 1.6%, which for an object of this size corresponds to a rating of 4 on the ten-point Torino Scale. Nevertheless, the odds against impact are still high, about 60 to 1, meaning that there is a better...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A commuter van from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tumbled more than 200 feet off a mountain road Wednesday, killing at least four people, authorities said. The van with 10 people aboard went off Angeles Crest Highway in the Angeles National Forest at about 6:30 a.m. and rolled down the mountainside, Los Angeles County Fire Department inspector John Mancha said. Five people were initially trapped and one person was flung from the vehicle, Mancha said. Later, at least two victims were airlifted to hospitals, Mancha said. Televised reports showed a badly battered white van lying in the...

Terrorists may be planning to smuggle material aboard flights in body cavities placed via insertion or ingestion. This deserves mention as it suggests ways in which this form of smuggling could be countered. The process of recovering bomb or other material (encapsulated in indigestible "pills") may involve the use of laxatives and enemas to expel the material on demand and a capture/filtering process to separate the "pills" from the excreta. The number of trips to the bathroom required would depend on a number of factors, and the terrorist plan might include a high degree of redundancy in case material was...

Blueberries found in Gusev crater? Stay tuned.

WASHINGTON, April 12 — Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology around the world, has told his interrogators that during a trip to North Korea five years ago he was taken to a secret underground nuclear plant and shown what he described as three nuclear devices, according to Asian and American officials who have been briefed by the Pakistanis. If Dr. Khan's report is true, it would be the first time that any foreigner has reported inspecting an actual North Korean nuclear weapon. Past C.I.A. assessments of North Korea's nuclear capacity have been based on estimates of...

(Adds confirmation) Tehran, Feb 28, IRNA -- Iran`s state radio has quoted an informed source as saying that Osama bin Laden had been captured in a tribal region in Pakistan. The radio`s external service, broadcast in Pushtun, said US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld`s trip to Pakistan on Thursday had been made in connection with the capture. The radio said, "The capture of the al-Qaeda leader has been made sometime before, but (US President George W.) Bush is intending to announce it when the American presidential election is held." Contacted by IRNA, an IRIB announcer at the Pusthtun service, confirmed...

Press conference set to begin 9 AM PST. Will the Opportunity science group make an appearence today?Links to NASA TV and Audio

Mars Exploration Rover Mission Status February 5, 2004 NASA's Opportunity rover drove about 3.5 meters (11 feet) early Thursday toward a rock outcrop in the wall of a small crater on Mars, and mission controllers plan to send it the rest of the way to the outcrop late Thursday. Opportunity's twin, Spirit, successfully reformatted its flash memory on Wednesday. Flash is a type of rewritable memory used in many electronic devices, such as digital cameras, to retain information even while power is off. Problems with the flash memory interfered with Spirit's operations from Jan. 22 until this week. Engineers prescribed...

Below are before and after micrographs of a patch of martian surface as seen by the rover Opportunity. Notice the effect that an applied pressure had on some of the particles. Post your comments and theories here.

NASA's Spirit rover on Mars has resumed taking pictures as engineers continue work on restoring its health. Meanwhile, Spirit's twin, Opportunity, extended its rear wheels backward to driving position last night as part of preparations to roll off its lander, possibly as early as overnight Saturday-to-Sunday.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit took and returned this image on January 28, 2004, the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image from the rover's front hazard identification camera shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack. As it had been instructed a week earlier, the Moessbauer spectrometer, an instrument for identifying the minerals in rocks and soils, is still placed against the rock. Engineers are working to restore Spirit to working order so that the rover can resume the scientific exploration of its landing area.

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov NEWS RELEASE: 2004-027 January 21, 2004 4 p.m. PST MARS EXPLORATION ROVER MISSION STATUS Ground controllers were able to send commands to the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit early Wednesday and received a simple signal acknowledging that the rover heard them, but they did not receive expected scientific and engineering data during scheduled communication passes during the rest of that martian day. Project managers have not yet determined the cause, but similar events occurred several times during the Mars...

"...NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said yesterday that, as he understood it, there is no immediate hazard to the crew, but that conditions could deteriorate in the next six months and force the crew to abandon ship..."

BEIJING, Oct. 15 (Xinhuanet) -- The annual enlistment of servicemen will start later this month in Beijing, with the age of male candidates being lowered to 17 for the first time. Meanwhile, the physical requirements are also to be adjusted, with the height of male candidates increasing from 1.6 to 1.62 meters and that of females up 0.02 meters to 1.6 meters. The proportion of on-campus college students will also increase. Beijing Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau is working with other departments to change the payment of allowances to families of volunteers. It is the first change in the regulations on...

KUWAIT, Oct. 2 — Kuwaiti authorities have seized archaeological artefacts and ''other items'' smuggled from Iraq into Kuwait, Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Sabah said in remarks published on Thursday.

Mardin, TURKEY, March 31, 2003 - U.S. forces began yesterday to take their military vehicles and equipment out of the Mardin Organized Industrial Region (OSB). Equipment and vehicles in four vacant Mardin factories that had been turned into logistical support centers by the Americans two months ago have been transported by 37 trucks and four minibuses arriving from Mersin and Hatay. While the trucks loaded with generators, machines and Humvees were said to be going to Incirlik Air Base in Adana, the convoy was stoned by a group on the outskirts of Sanliurfa, reportedly breaking two of the trucks' windows....

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - American warplanes bombed military communications sites in southern Iraq today after the Iraqis fired anti-aircraft guns at U.S. planes, U.S. Central Command said.</p> <p>Around 2:45 p.m. EST, the U.S. planes bombed six cable relay sites between Al Kut, about 95 miles southeast of Baghdad, and Basra, about 245 miles southeast of Baghdad, Central Command said in a statement.</p>

OSLO, Feb 7 (Reuters) - An Islamic militant suspected by Washington of ties to both Baghdad and al Qaeda is becoming a hero to some in the Norwegian capital Oslo where he lives with his family as a refugee. Reviled by the United States but free because NATO-member Norway has been unable to find legal grounds to jail him, Mullah Krekar is sometimes cheered by well-wishers or stopped by autograph hunters in Oslo. His lawyer says he feels like the manager of a rock star. "I feel safe here in Norway," said Krekar, the founder of the Ansar al-Islam (Supporters...