The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America?s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

The resignation letter from John Brady Kiesling to Colin Powell. Requires registration with the NY Times.

U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation - nytimes.com

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.

Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer - New Scientist

"We all felt like we needed to put on 'hard hats'! The sky was absolutely full of meteors," recalls astronomer Jim Young of JPL's Table Mountain Observatory. Earth had just plunged into a debris stream trailing comet Tempel-Tuttle; the resulting meteor storm, the 1966 Leonids, was literally dazzling.

This weekend it could happen again.

On March 1, 2003, around 2154 universal time (UT), our planet will encounter a stream of dusty comet debris "only 12,000 km from Earth. That's as close as the Leonid debris stream was in 1966," says Bill Cooke of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's Space Environments Team.

Earth is approaching a cometary debris stream that might trigger an unusual Antarctic meteor shower this weekend | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

Decius wrote:
] ] A Russian space capsule now docked at the international
] ] space station will be used to bring the space station
] ] crew back to Earth now that the U.S. shuttle fleet is
] ] grounded, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said today.

And so it begins -

It would seem that next two expedition crews are currently undergoing Soyuz training now, and have been trimmed from 3 to 2 crewmembers. The worst part of this is that it means that ISS science is going to slow to the barest minimum since Exp1. Just maintaining the ISS is a full-time job for two crewmembers. These potentially exciting research expeditions have been relegated to skeleton crew status.

Honestly, I think they should have taken up the current expedition's offer to leave them up there for an extended mission to study long duration spaceflight. At least then, there would be a scientific silver lining in this dense cloud layer.

RE: HoustonChronicle.com - Russian craft to bring space station crew home

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Read carefully... Great idea.

BuBL Space

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Five12 : Numerology

"White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told Reuters the White House had offered a representative to counter what he said would be propaganda, lies and "irresponsible statements" by Saddam in the rare interview.

He said CBS replied it was interested only if President Bush made the response himself -- which he said the White House rejected on the grounds that it could imply a "moral equivalence" between the two leaders."

Yahoo! News - CBS, White House Clash Over Saddam Interview

crankymessiah wrote:

] ] What was apparently the spacecraft's last signal was
] ] received January 22 by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's
] ] Deep Space Network. At the time, Pioneer 10 was 7.6
] ] billion miles from Earth; the signal, traveling at the
] ] speed of light, took 11 hours and 20 minutes to arrive.

The most signifigant LOS in history, if you look at the long view. One day, we will travel further than this and still be gathering data... Plus, it's a good lesson in relativity - Ask yourself how hold you will be in 31 years, and then consider the times and distances listed above...

RE: CNN.com - Pioneer 10 falls silent after nearly 31 years - Feb. 25, 2003

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senior Bush administration adviser Glenn Hubbard abruptly resigned on Wednesday as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, rounding out a shake-up of President Bush's economic team.

The White House quickly nominated Harvard University's Gregory Mankiw, a veteran of the Reagan administration, to replace him."

(Emphasis Mine) - Oh goody. Just what we need. MORE Reagan!

Yahoo! News - Bush Economic Aide Hubbard Resigns

Of course, after the shocking headlines and buried at the very end of the story is ...

"In response to Dittemore's request for the e-mails, Robert C. Doremus, a NASA employee at Johnson, on Feb. 11 summarized the earlier exchanges and concluded that Daugherty and three other engineers, on the afternoon before the breakup, agreed "we were doing a 'what-if' discussion and that we all expected a safe entry."

The emails themselves are fascinating, and much more informative than the media, not to mention without precedent. Most stories in the news we are fed lines preceded by "Sources report... " or "We have learned..."

In this case one can download the PDFs and read the actual sources for yourself.

HoustonChronicle.com - NASA foresaw tragedy, but gave no warning