Free Internet Press Newsletter - Friday January 12 2007 - (813)

Friday January 12 2007 edition
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U.S. Unit Patrolling Baghdad Sees Flaws In Bush Strategy 2007-01-12 02:15:29 A few hours before another mission into the cauldron of Baghdad, Spec. Daniel Caldwell's wife instant-messaged him Thursday morning. President Bush, Kelly wrote, wanted to send more than 20,000 U.S. troops and extend deployments in Iraq. Eight weeks pregnant, she was worried. Caldwell, a tall, lean 20-year-old from Montesano, Washington, wondered whether he would miss the birth of his child. He walked outside and joined his comrades of Apache Company, 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, Stryker Brigade. They, too, had heard the news. Moments before he stepped into his squad's Stryker - a large, bathtub-shaped vehicle encased in a cage - Caldwell echoed a sentiment shared by many in his squad: "They're kicking a dead horse here. The Iraqi army can't stand up on their own." Read The Full Story Pentagon Drops Rule Limiting Reservists' Duty Time 2007-01-12 02:14:59 For the first time since President Bush mobilized the National Guard and Reserve after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon is abandoning its limit on the time a citizen-soldier can be required to serve on active duty. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Thursday that the change would have been made even if Bush had not ordered an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, further straining the Army and Marine Corps. The Pentagon also announced it is proposing to Congress that the size of the Army be increased by 65,000, to 547,000 and that the Marine Corps, the smallest of the services, grow by 27,000, to 202,000, over the next five years. No cost estimate was provided, but officials said it would be at least several billion dollars. Until now, the Pentagon’s policy on the Guard or Reserve was that members’ cumulative time on active duty for the Iraq or Afghan wars could not exceed 24 months. That cumulative limit is now lifted; the remaining limit is on the length of any single mobilization, which may not exceed 24 consecutive months, said Pace. Read The Full Story Commentary: Guantanamo Bay Is A U.S. Torture Camp 2007-01-12 02:14:22 Intellpuke: Britain's Vikram Dodd writes on the Guardian Unlimited's website for Friday, Jan. 12, 2007, that evidence of prisoner abuse shows the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is a torture camp and it hasn't made anyone safer. Mr. Dodd's column begins here: It would be the ideal spot for a beachside birthday party. Surrounded by a turquoise sea, palm trees and white sand, the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was five years old Thursday. Tony Blair calls it an "anomaly", but the evidence is overwhelming. Camp Delta, which still houses 470 men never convicted of any crime, is a torture camp. That should be the starting point of any debate about what is acceptable in the west's fight with Islamist extremists. More than 750 men have passed through the camp, with nearly half being released. Many prisoners, past and present, have given consistent and repeated testimony of serious abuses and ill treatment. There is also significant evidence from U.S. officials and government documents of widespread abuse at the camp. The British detainees known as the Tipton Three allege they were repeatedly beaten, shackled in painful positions for long periods and subjected to sleep deprivation. They were also subjected to strobe lighting, loud music and extremes of hot and cold - all meant to break them psychologically. Other detainees have suffered beatings, sexual assaults and death threats. At least one man has been "water boarded" - tied to a board and placed under water so that he had the sensation of drowning. According to the Red Cross, the regime at Guantanamo causes psychological suffering that has driven inmates mad, with scores of suicide attempts and three inmates killing themselves last year. Read The Full Story U.S. Troops Went Into Somalia After Raid, No Top Targets Confirmed Dead 2007-01-12 02:13:24 A small team of American military personnel entered southern Somalia to try to determine exactly who was killed in a U.S. airstrike Monday that targeted suspected al-Qaeda figures thought to be hiding in swampy mangrove forests along the Indian Ocean, U.S. sources said Thursday. So far, "no one can confirm a high-value target" among the dead, said one U.S. source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But items recovered at the strike site - a piece of bloody clothing and a document - indicated that Aden Ayrow, head of the military arm of the deposed Islamic Courts movement, had been at the scene. The strike killed eight to 10 people suspected of terrorist links, according to another source, a high-ranking U.S. official in the region who spoke Thursday and declined to be identified. The people were fleeing with remnants of the Courts movement, which was swept from power last month by invading Ethiopian forces who installed in its place the country's U.S.-backed transitional government. Read The Full Story Nine Feared Dead As North Sea Storms With 90 MPH Winds Cause Chaos 2007-01-12 02:12:34 Gales of up to 90 mph caused chaos Thursday, with up to nine people believed killed - seven of them fishermen lost at sea - and thousands of homes without electricity. Travel across Britain was severely disrupted as trees crashed on to roads and rail lines, while more than 170 areas were on alert for floods as a low pressure from the Atlantic brought heavy rains and high winds. There was a dramatic race against time last night as coastguards rushed to evacuate 30 gas workers from a North Sea platform lying in the path of a stricken cargo ship that had broken down in mountainous seas. The 4,500-ton vessel narrowly missed the rig, but was lurching perilously close to others early Friday morning. A Met (Meteorological) Office forecaster said severe weather warnings had been in place up and down the U.K.  "There have been strong gusts quite widely. Pretty much all of Scotland has had, or currently has, warnings," she said. A man was killed at the village of Britty Common, near Taunton, Somerset, when a tree crashed onto his car. A search was also under way for a woman steward believed to have fallen overboard from a Russian cargo vessel, Vera Maretskaya, seven miles south of Falmouth, Cornwall. Read The Full Story Japan Awaits Bird Flu Tests, Indonesian Woman Dies Of Bird Flu 2007-01-12 02:11:56 Japan said on Friday that it could be afflicted by its first outbreak of the lethal H5N1 bird flu strain in three years, as the disease killed an Indonesian woman and spread closer to Vietnam's largest city. An official at a Jakarta hospital said on Friday that a woman had died of bird flu and four other people were being treated for bird flu symptoms. The past week has seen a flare-up of infections, echoing past winters, the season when the virus appears to thrive. Read The Full Story DREAD: New Infantry Weapon Has Dreadful Killing Power 2007-01-11 17:49:57 Intellpuke: The following article was written by David Crane for the defensereview.com website which posted it back on June 28, 2006. I had saved it then, but didn't want to let it fall through the cracks without  posting it here at Free Internet Press. The article describes a new infantry weapon being developed for the U.S. military that can fire either .50 caliber or .308 caliber ammunition at rates of 5,000 to 120,000 rounds per minute. The new weapon is called, appropriately,  DREAD. Mr. Crane's article follows: Imagine a gun with no recoil, no sound, no heat, no gunpowder, no visible firing signature (muzzle flash), and no stoppages or jams of any kind. Now imagine that this gun could fire .308 caliber and .50 caliber metal projectiles accurately at up to 8,000 fps (feet-per-second), featured an infinitely variable/programmable cyclic rate-of-fire (as high as 120,000 rounds-per-minute), and were capable of laying down a 360-degree field of fire. What if you could mount this weapon on any military Humvee (HMMWV), any helicopter/gunship, any armored personnel carrier (APC), and any other vehicle for which the technology were applicable? That would really be something, wouldn't it? Some of you might be wondering, "how big would it be", or "how much would it weigh"? Others might want to know what it's ammunition capacity would be. These are all good questions, assuming of course that a weapon like this were actually possible. According to its inventor, not only is it possible, it’s already happened. An updated version of the weapon will be available soon. It will arrive in the form of a tactically-configured pre-production anti-personnel weapon firing .308 caliber projectiles (accurately) at 2,500-3000 fps, at a variable/programmable cyclic rate of 5,000-120,000 rpm (rounds-per-minute). The weapon's designer/inventor has informed DefRev that future versions of the weapon will be capable of achieving projectile velocities in the 5,000-8,000 fps range with no difficulty. The technology already exists. Read The Full Story Rice, Gates Face Grilling On Iraq Plan At Congressional Hearings 2007-01-11 17:15:50 Top Bush administration officials, pushing the president's case for sending thousands of additional troops to Iraq, faced tough grilling on Capitol Hill Thursday as both Republican and Democratic lawmakers demanded specific answers on how the new plan will lead to victory in Iraq. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace held a morning news conference before Rice faced senators in a sometimes contentious hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Gates and Pace then testified in the afternoon before the House Armed Services Committee and Rice went before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. At every venue, their message was similar - that failure in Iraq is unacceptable and that success hinges on the commitment and capability of the Iraqi government, who they said is committed to the plan, although it has made mistakes in the past. Read The Full Story NATO, Afghan Forces Kill At Least 80 Insurgents In Afghanistan 2007-01-11 17:15:10 NATO and Afghan military forces killed between 80 and 150 insurgents in a series of battles near the Pakistan  border Wednesday night after the fighters crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistan, NATO and Afghan officials said Thursday. The confrontation in Paktika province, described as the largest battle in Afghanistan since September, came as American and U.N. officials put new pressure on both Pakistani and Afghan leaders to stop their public bickering and do more to gain control of their respective border areas where Islamic insurgents have been operating for months. NATO officials said their forces had observed two large groups of insurgents infiltrating from Pakistan, tracked them and then attacked them by ground and air. By NATO's count as many as 150 had died, but Afghan defense officials said they believed about 80 insurgents had been killed. No Afghan or NATO casualties were reported. Read The Full Story Jury Awards $2.5 Million In Punitive Damages In State Farm Katrina Case 2007-01-11 17:13:55 A jury on Thursday awarded $2.5 million in punitive damages to a couple who sued State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. for denying their claim after Hurricane Katrina, a decision that could benefit hundreds of other homeowners challenging insurers for refusing to cover billion of dollars in storm damage. A federal judge only hours earlier had taken part of the case out of jurors' hands before they awarded punitive damages to State Farm policyholders Norman and Genevieve Broussard. U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter, Jr., ruled Thursday morning that State Farm is liable for $223,292 in damage Hurricane Katrina caused to the Broussard's home. Senter left it to a jury to decide whether to award punitive damages. Senter's decision to make a directed verdict rather than let the jury decide the entire case appeared to surprise everyone in the courtroom. After he explained his ruling, Senter ordered a recess to give attorneys time "to get over the shock". Read The Full Story Soldiers Doubt Influx Of U.S. Troops Will Benefit Iraqi Army 2007-01-11 01:03:36 It was supposed to be a reconciliation meeting, a get-together to introduce the Sunni Muslim mayor and police chief of this city north of Baghdad to the mostly Shiite Muslim Iraqi soldiers who'd been assigned to protect their town. But as the mayor and police chief approached the entrance to the Iraqi army base here last month, Iraqi troops seized their bodyguards and tossed them to the ground. Then the soldiers put their boots on the bodyguards' backs, a literal reminder that the Sunni officials were under the boot of the Shiite military. For the Americans assigned to train Iraqi troops here, the incident was another in a long string of problems that's persuaded many of them that it will be years before Iraq's army can stand on its own. On Wednesday night, President Bush announced that he's sending thousands more American soldiers to Iraq as part of a new plan to overcome the country's widening sectarian violence. But many of the U.S. soldiers who already are struggling to prepare Iraqi troops in Diyala province say that more Americans won't solve Iraq's problems. Read The Full Story Violence Claims 99 Iraqis, 3 U.S. Troops 2007-01-11 01:02:41 Suicide bombers, roadside explosions and mortar rounds killed at least 99 Iraqis and wounded 26 across the country Wednesday. The U.S. military said three American troops had been killed in Al Anbar province Tuesday. In downtown Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi troops continued to search for suspected guerrillas in the largely Sunni Arab Haifa Street neighborhood, making 15 arrests in the second day of an offensive, Iraqi officials said. The assault was launched Monday on fighters who had taken control of the three-mile stretch near the heavily fortified Green Zone, home to the Iraqi government complex and the U.S. Embassy. A Ministry of Defense official said raids and searches had concluded Wednesday afternoon. Iraqi troops found four bodies in rubble, apparent casualties of Tuesday's fighting in which at least 51 suspected militants were reported killed. Read The Full Story Venezuela's Chavez Would Abolish Presidential Term Limits 2007-01-11 01:02:00 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, sworn in to another six-year term on Wednesday, said he would seek a constitutional amendment that could extend his tenure as he hastens his country's transformation into what he calls "21st-century socialism." In a three-hour discourse in the National Assembly that received widespread news coverage across Latin America, Chavez promised that "we are going to radicalize this process of ours, we are going to deepen this revolution". Invoking the mantra once issued by his mentor and ally, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Chavez said the choice for Venezuela is clear: "Fatherland, socialism or death." The ceremony was full of symbolism. Chavez wore the tricolored presidential sash on his left side, switching it from his right, a nod to his leftist leanings. And he frequently alluded to Simon Bolivar, the 19th-century independence hero he reveres, God and Jesus Christ, whom Chavez called "the greatest socialist of the people". Read The Full Story Analysis: Bush Inviting A Battle On Capitol Hill 2007-01-11 01:01:04 By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki. In so doing, Bush is taking a calculated gamble that no matter how much hue and cry his new strategy may provoke, in the end the American people will give him more time to turn around the war in Iraq and Congress will not have the political nerve to thwart him by cutting off money for the war. The plan, outlined by the president in stark, simple tones in a 20-minute speech from the White House library, is vintage George Bush - in the eyes of admirers, resolute and principled; in the eyes of critics, bull-headed, even delusional, about the prospects for success in Iraq. It is the latest evidence that the president is convinced that he is right and that history will vindicate him, even if that vindication comes long after he is gone from the Oval Office. Read The Full Story	CDC Links Cold Medicines To Infant Deaths 2007-01-12 02:15:12 After investigating the deaths of three infants between 1 and 6 months old linked to cough and cold medication use, officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are emphasizing that these drugs should be used only after talking with a physician. Between 2004 and 2005, about 1,500 children younger than 2 years old were treated in emergency rooms for adverse events associated with cough and cold medications, Dr. A. Srinivasan and colleagues at the CDC note in Friday's issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. For each of the three dead infants, a medical examiner or coroner determined that the cough and cold medications were the underlying causes of death. Blood levels of the decongestant pseudoephedrine at autopsy were far above what's normally expected after therapeutic dosing in children between 2 to 12. Read The Full Story Group: U.S. Has Lost Credibility On Human Rights 2007-01-12 02:14:35 The advocacy group Human Rights Watch said Thursday that Washington's once-powerful role as a prime defender of human rights had effectively ended because of arbitrary detentions and reports of torture since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the group urged the European Union to step up as a leader of the cause. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, released the group's World Report 2007, an assessment of last year's global human rights practices, by saying that the counterterrorism record of the United States over the past five years has tarnished its credibility as an influential moral voice. He listed several practices he said were being used by the Bush administration in its fight against terrorism, including torture, arbitrary detentions, allowing CIA interrogators to use coercive techniques and the unsupervised handling of so-called enemy combatants held in other countries. Read The Full Story Britain Asks 48 Nations To Help Test For Polonium 2007-01-12 02:13:46 British authorities are working with officials from 48 countries to evaluate about 450 people who were in London around Nov. 1 and fear they might have been exposed to the radioactive polonium-210 that killed former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. Britain's Health Protection Agency declined to identify the countries, but the United States is among them, according to U.S. health officials. People who think they might have been exposed are invited to submit urine samples and consult with doctors; for most, the exposure appears to have been harmlessly small. Litvinenko died Nov. 23 at a London hospital of polonium-210 poisoning. Police have since found traces of polonium at 17 locations in London, most prominently the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel and the Itsu sushi restaurant in central London, both of which Litvinenko visited Nov. 1. The two locations remain closed to the public. Read The Full Story Congressmen Have Little Confidence Iraq Leaders Can Deliver On Bush Plan 2007-01-12 02:13:03 President Bush's proposal to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq encountered strong bipartisan opposition on Capitol Hill Thursday, and his top national security advisers, dispatched to defend the strategy, were greeted with a skepticism not seen from Congress over the past six years. Lawmakers said they have little confidence that the Iraqi government has the capacity to deliver on promises to take the lead in cracking down on violent militias and providing security in Baghdad, as the president's plan contemplates. Democrats and Republicans alike said they are concerned that Bush's plan, announced Wednesday night in a nationally televised prime-time address, is too little and too late and does not appear very different from previous efforts to secure the capital. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates sought to assure lawmakers that the plan can work if given time. Gates said he detected a much greater determination from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to go after "all lawbreakers" with "no exceptions." He suggested that the prime minister will confront the militias fueling sectarian violence, including insurgents controlled by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Read The Full Story Black Hole Triplets Spotted 2007-01-12 02:12:20 The discovery of three distant supermassive black holes in proximity to one another is giving astronomers a glimpse into the chaotic early years of the universe. Known as quasars, these incredibly bright objects are thought to be powered by gas falling into enormous black holes situated in the centers of galaxies. Although smaller than our solar system, a single quasar can outshine an entire galaxy of a hundred billion stars. Roughly 100,000 quasars have been observed in recent years, some of them double quasars, but this is the first time that three quasars have been found so near one another. The three quasars are separated by about 100,000 to 150,000 light years - about the width of our Milky Way. Read The Full Story Attackers Fire Rocket At U.S. Embassy In Athens, Greece 2007-01-12 02:11:35 Attackers fired a rocket at the U.S. embassy in Athens on Friday but no one was hurt, said police and the U.S. embassy. Greek anti-terrorist officers were on the scene. "This was a rocket attack launched from a building across the street. It landed inside a toilet on the third floor of the embassy," a senior police official told Reuters. "There are no injuries from the blast," said a U.S. embassy spokesman. Read The Full Story Report: U.S. Troops Raid Iranian Consulate In Iraq, Seize 5 2007-01-11 17:16:03 U.S. troops raided an Iranian consulate in northern Iraq late Wednesday night and detained several people, Iran's  main news agency reported Thursday, prompting protests from Tehran just hours after President Bush pledged to crack down on the Islamic Republic's role in Iraqi violence. Iran released news of the raid through its Islamic Republic News Agency in a dispatch that was broadly critical of Bush's plan to deploy about 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. The IRNA report said that U.S. forces entered the Iranian consulate in Irbil, in Iraq's Kurdish-dominated north, and seized computers, documents and other items. The report said five staff members were taken into custody. The Iranian Foreign Ministry appealed to the Iraqi government to obtain the release of its personnel. Read The Full Story Poll: Most American Oppose Bush's Iraq Plan 2007-01-11 17:15:35 A majority of Americans oppose sending additional troops to Iraq as outlined by President Bush in his nationally televised address Wednesday night, and just one-in-three Americans said the plan for more troops and a stepped up combat efforts by Iraqi forces make victory there more likely, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. The findings of the survey, conducted after Bush's primetime speech, represent an initial rebuke to the White House goal of generating additional public support for the mission in Iraq. The poll found that 61 percent of Americans oppose sending more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, with 52 percent saying they strongly oppose the plan. Just 36 percent said they back the president's new proposal. Bush fared better among the 42 percent of Americans who actually watched the speech. Among that group, 47 percent support sending more troops, while 51 percent oppose. But the President's supporters were disproportionately represented among the audience. Read The Full Story Negroponte: Sectarian Divisions In Iraq Are Widening 2007-01-11 17:14:39 Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte told Congress today that sectarian divisions in Iraq are widening and that national reconciliation that is necessary for a political settlement between the Sunni, Shiite and Kurds "is still at its initial stages". "The various parties have not yet shown the ability to compromise effectively on the thorny issues," Negroponte told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a prepared statement. The comments, which are part of an annual report to the Congress about the threat of terrorism, frankly described the situation in Iraq one day after President Bush unveiled his new proposal for sending additional troops and financial aid to the Baghdad government. Negroponte said, "Provision of essential public services is inadequate, oil output remains below pre-war levels; hours of electrical power available have declined and remain far below demand; and inflationary pressure have grown since last year." As a result, he added, "with political reconciliation stalled, Iraqis increasingly resort to violence". Read The Full Story U.N. Chief Calls For Guantanamo Bay Prison To Be Shut Down 2007-01-11 17:13:06 New U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon believes the U.S. prison at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay should be shut down, he said on Thursday. "Like my predecessor, I believe that the prison at Guantanamo should be closed," Ban told a news conference. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who stepped down on December 31, had also called for the facility to be closed. President Bush has himself said he would like to close the facility, Ban reminded journalists, but the U.S. leader has yet to do so. Thursday marked the fifth anniversary of the camp's opening. Read The Full Story Commentary: Nuclear Power Not Clean, Green Or Safe 2007-01-11 01:03:15 Intellpuke: The following column is written by Sherwood Ross, a Miami, Florida-based journalist. In his column -  written for truthout.org and posted on that website Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007 - Mr. Ross writes that few statements are as misleading as those recently made by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on nuclear power. His column follows: In all the annals of spin, few statements are as misleading as Vice President Cheney's that the nuclear industry operates "efficiently, safely, and with no discharge of greenhouse gases or emissions," or President Bush's claim that America's 103 nuclear plants operate "without producing a single pound of air pollution or greenhouse gases." Even as it refuses to concede global warming is really happening, the White House touts nuclear power as the answer, as if it were an arm of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industry's trade group. NEI's advertisements declare, "Kids today are part of the most energy-intensive generation in history. They demand lots of electricity. And they deserve clean air." In reality, not only are vast amounts of fossil fuels burned to mine and refine the uranium for nuclear power reactors, polluting the atmosphere, but those plants are allowed "to emit hundreds of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year," Dr. Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear authority, points out in her book "Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer" (The New Press). What's more, the thousands of tons of solid radioactive waste accumulating in the cooling pools next to those plants contain "extremely toxic elements that will inevitably pollute the environment and human food chains, a legacy that will lead to epidemics of cancer, leukemia, and genetic disease in populations living near nuclear power plants or radioactive waste facilities for many generations to come," she writes. Countless Americans are already dead or dying as a result of those nuclear plants, and that story is not being effectively told. Read The Full Story Somalia Awash In Anger at Ethiopia, U.S., Interim Leaders 2007-01-11 01:02:20 A messy, low-level battle for control of the battered streets of Mogadishu continued Wednesday, as a fighter shot a rocket-propelled grenade at a convoy of Ethiopian trucks passing through the combustible Somali capital. The situation is so confused and the city so fractured and armed that the attacks, recounted by witnesses, could have come from any number of groups frustrated with the presence of Ethiopian troops, who last month swept a popular Islamic movement from power on behalf of the weak, U.S.-backed transitional government that is now struggling to assert control. Former fighters loyal to the ousted Islamic Courts movement are hiding in the city's byzantine tin-patch neighborhoods. Sub-clans and sub-sub-clans are angry with Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who they say is favoring his own people as he doles out power and who has announced intentions to forcibly disarm an insecure city fortified with guns. Many Somalis are enraged over the U.S. airstrike in the southern tip of the country early Monday, which was aimed at suspects in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania who are thought to be among the ousted Islamic leaders on the run along the marshy coast near the Kenyan border. Read The Full Story NASA Schedules Flight To Upgrade Hubble 2007-01-11 01:01:34 The Hubble Space Telescope has a new, resonant date with destiny. NASA has set Sept. 11, 2008, as the target date for launching a mission intended to revitalize the telescope and keep it spaceworthy into the next decade, according to a planning document made public by nasawatch.com, an independent Web site. Three years ago, Sean O'Keefe, then the NASA administrator, decided to forgo Hubble telescope maintenance in the wake of the shuttle Columbia disaster, prompting a nationwide debate about the risks of shuttle flights and the value of the telescope. Michael D. Griffin, the current NASA administrator, reversed O'Keefe's decision. In a series of spacewalks, astronauts from the shuttle Atlantis will replace vital gyroscopes and batteries and install a new camera and a new spectrograph, extending the telescope's capabilities into new realms of the electromagnetic spectrum, Dr. Griffin announced in October. Read The Full Story Democrats To Fight Troop Expansion 2007-01-11 01:00:44 The new Democratic leaders of Congress on Wednesday accused President Bush of ignoring strong American sentiment against the war in Iraw and said they would build a bipartisan campaign against his proposed military expansion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of California, said House Democrats intended to turn the precise words from  Bush’s speech into a symbolic resolution, compelling Republicans to support or reject the idea of sending more troops to Iraq. The Senate was developing a similar nonbinding resolution to be considered as early as next week. “The president’s response to the challenge of Iraq is to send more American soldiers into the crossfire of a civil war,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, responding for his party immediately after Bush spoke. “The escalation of this war is not the change the American people called for in the last election.” Read The Full Story
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