Free Republic

Chinese Scientists Refute US Claims on Rocket Data Transfer Chinese aerospace scientists said they had independently developed the country's Long March series of carrier rockets and they did not need not to covet the sensitive space technology of the United States. Chinese aerospace scientists voiced their complaints here Thursday after the Boeing Company's Satellite Systems and the Hughes Electronics Corp. agreed on March 5 to pay a 32-million-US-dollar civil penalty levied by the US State Department for charges of illegally sharing sensitive space technology with Beijing. The penalty involved two failed launches of the commercial communications satellites -- the Long...

NEW YORK (Variety) - Calling the proposed combination of ABC News and CNN "a two-headed monster," Fox Entertainment and News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch dismissed the news channel competition and waxed confidently to shareholders and the press Thursday about his two companies' prospects for the coming year. "A CNN-ABC merger would be great" Murdoch told a press conference after the Fox shareholder annual meeting in New York on Thursday. The confident chief ventured that a complicated combination of CNN and ABC News would weaken both. "It would be very difficult to execute without losing their identify. It commoditizes their product...