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As the Spirit and Opportunity rovers continue their extended studies of Mars, NASA's Mars program appears headed for change. The shift will be driven by a variety of factors including technical and budget issues, as well as a "rebalancing" of science objectives. NASA has been engaged since last year in what the agency calls a road-mapping effort to flesh out the details of a Mars master plan that would lead to an expeditionary crew landing on that remote world. One scenario that has been under active discussion is slipping the mission of the mobile, nuclear-powered Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) from...

Thirty years ago Saigon fell. I was a company commander in the 2 nd Battalion, 508 th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82 nd Airborne Division. When our Vietnam veterans cursed the war, I remembered one of the greatest speeches I ever heard - the day the Vietnam peace was announced to my Winter Ranger class in ’73. The senior Ranger Sergeant cursed everything about the Vietnam War and everyone involved, friend or foe, in a poetic rant of imaginative, sincere, foul-mouthed hatred. He swore most passionately about the waste of his buddies’ lives. He blamed everyone and everything he knew to...

NEW IPSWICH - In the latest twist of his public battle against illegal immigrants, Police Chief Garrett Chamberlain has taken what may be a unique legal approach: He has charged a man from Mexico with criminal trespass because he was in town without legal documents. As defined in state law (RSA 635:2), a person is guilty of criminal trespass “if, knowing that he is not licensed or privileged to do so, he enters or remains in any place.” “If we’re going to have immigration, it needs to be controlled and we need to know what’s happening on our borders. Nobody...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Little by little. Evil advances in most of our lives (and in the life of the world) little by little. There is a reason for this. The devil knows that his face and that of all evil he seeks to promote in the world is repulsive and that most people will attempt to cooperate with the graces won for us by the shedding of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross on Mount Calvary to resist it and to flee from it. Far easier, the devil knows, is the slow, steady, incremental advance of little,...

Terror mastermind lived in flat under Heathrow approach By Daniel Foggo and Massoud Ansari (Filed: 08/08/2004) An al-Qaeda "communications chief" who is believed to have been co-ordinating a plot to bomb Heathrow spent three weeks living near the airport late last year, the Telegraph can reveal. Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, 25, who is under arrest in Pakistan, lived in a ground floor flat in Reading, Berkshire. The address, on Wensley Road near the centre of town, lies below a western approach flight path to the airport. Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan: reconnaissance He lived there with his grandmother, Batool Begum, and...