13 Killed in Car Bomb Attack Outside Baghdad Prison

 A yellow taxi loaded with explosives blew up at the crowded front gates of a prison north of Baghdad on Monday morning, killing at least 13 people, many of them security guards or civilians waiting to visit jailed family members.

It was the third attack in less than a week and the latest in a deadly streakthat has killed about 50 Iraqis and further highlighted fears of increased insurgent attacks as the United States continues its military withdrawal from Iraq by the end of next month.

No group claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday, but the tactics used and the target involved — a suicide bombing in a crowd at a large government compound — suggested the work of the Al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq.
The American ambassador, James F. Jeffrey, told reporters on Sunday that there was a “good possibility” that the affiliate, Al Qaeda in Iraq, had been responsible for a bombing in the southern city of Basra on Thursday and for deadly explosions in Baghdad on Saturday. Military defeats inflicted by Iraqi and American forces have hobbled the Sunni insurgent group, but it still carries out about 30 attacks across the country every week, military officials have said.

“The Al Qaeda in Iraq organization is still active, particularly in the north, but they strike throughout the country,” Mr. Jeffrey said, although he added that security had improved in Iraq over all.

The taxi involved in the attack on Monday pulled up to a security post at the entrance to the Al-Hout prison in Taji, about 10 miles north of the capital, about 8 a.m. The entrance was crowded with visitors and security guards heading to work.

“Everything was on fire,” said Kadim Mohammed, a security guard who was wounded in the blast. “I saw two dead children.”

Security officials said four civilians, four prison employees and five people who had not been identified were killed. At least 28 people were wounded, including several religious pilgrims whose bus, bound for the shrine of Samarra, had been stuck in traffic near the prison entrance.

The explosion did not appear to be intended to breach the walls of the prison, which is set back from the roadside gates.

Separately, two civilians were killed by a bomb attached to their car in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour.

A spokesman for the Kurdistani Alliance political bloc was also wounded when a mortar round hit a parking lot near Parliament inside the heavily secured Green Zone, government officials said. The fortified area houses the American Embassy and a number of Iraqi ministries and politicians’ residences and is frequently that target of rockets and mortars fired by Shiite militia groups.more information...

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com

NASA launches $2.5 billion rover to Red Planet

NASA has launched its next Mars rover, kicking off a long-awaited mission to investigate whether the Red Planet could ever have hosted microbial life.

The car-size Curiosity rover blasted off atop its Atlas 5 rocket at 10:02 a.m. ET Saturday, streaking into a cloudy sky above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here. The huge robot's next stop is Mars, though the 354-million-mile (570-million-kilometer) journey will take eight and a half months.

Joy Crisp a deputy project scientist for the rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., called the liftoff "spectacular."

"This feels great," she said as she watched the rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral.

Pamela Conrad, deputy principal investigator for the mission at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said, "Every milestone feels like such a relief. It's a beautiful day. The sun's out, and all these people came out to watch."

The work Curiosity does when it finally arrives should revolutionize our understanding of the Red Planet and pave the way for future efforts to hunt for potential Martian life, researchers said.

"It is absolutely a feat of engineering, and it will bring science like nobody's ever expected," Doug McCuistion, head of NASA's Mars exploration program, said of Curiosity. "I can't even imagine the discoveries that we're going to come up with."

Long road to launch Curiosity's cruise to Mars may be less challenging than its long and bumpy trek to the launch pad, which took nearly a decade.

NASA began planning Curiosity's mission — which is officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory, or MSL — back in 2003. The rover was originally scheduled to blast off in 2009, but it wasn't ready in time.

Launch windows for Mars-bound spacecraft are based on favorable alignments between Earth and the Red Planet, and they open up just once every two years. So the MSL team had to wait until 2011.

That two-year slip helped boost the mission's overall cost by 56 percent, to its current $2.5 billion. But Saturday's successful launch likely chased away a lot of the bad feelings still lingering after the delay and the cost overruns.

"I think you could visibly see the team morale improve — the team grinned more, the team smiled more — as the rover and the vehicle came closer, and more and more together here when we were at Kennedy [Space Center]" preparing for liftoff, MSL project manager Pete Theisinger of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said a few days before launch.

A rover behemoth Curiosity is a beast of a rover. Weighing in at 1 ton, it's five times more massive than either of the last two rovers NASA sent to Mars, the golf-cart-size twins Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004 to search for signs of past water activity.

While Spirit and Opportunity each carried five science instruments, Curiosity sports 10, including a rock-zapping laser and equipment designed to identify organic compounds — carbon-based molecules that are the building blocks of life as we know it.

Some of these instruments sit at the end of Curiosity's five-jointed, 7-foot-long (2.1-meter) robotic arm, which by itself is nearly half as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity.

The arm also wields a 2-inch (5-centimeter) drill, allowing Curiosity to take samples from deep inside Martian rocks. No previous Red Planet rover has been able to do this, researchers say.

"We have an incredible rover," said MSL deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of JPL. "It's the biggest and most capable scientific explorer we've ever sent to the surface of another planet."

Learn more about Curiosity's mission (800kb PDF)

Curiosity is due to arrive at Mars in early August 2012, touching down in a 100-mile-wide (160-km) crater called Gale.

While the rover's launch was dramatic, its landing will be one for the record books, if all goes well. A rocket-powered sky crane will lower the huge robot down on cables — a maneuver never tried before in the history of planetary exploration. 

A giant mound of sediment rises 3 miles (5 kilometers) into the Martian air from Gale Crater's center. The layers in this mountain appear to preserve about 1 billion years of Martian history. Curiosity will study these different layers, gaining an in-depth understanding of past and present Martian environments and their potential to harbor life.

Life as we know it depends on liquid water. So the rover will likely spend a lot of time poking around near the mound's base, where Mars-orbiting spacecraft have spotted minerals that form in the presence of water, such as clays and sulfates.

"Going layer by layer, we can do the main goal of this mission, which is to search for habitable environments, " Vasavada said. "Were any of those time periods in early Mars history time periods that could have supported microbial life?"

If Curiosity climbs higher, its observations could shed light on Mars' shift from relatively warm and wet long ago to cold, dry and dusty today, researchers said.
more information...

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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com

Pakistan's FM makes phone call to Clinton conveying anger over NATO raid

 Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar spoke to the U.S. Secretary of State and conveyed the deep sense of rage felt across Pakistan at the senseless loss of 24 soldiers due to the NATO/ISAF attack on the Pakistani post in Mohmand Agency tribal region, said the Pakistani Foreign Ministry on Sunday.

According to a statement released by the Foreign Ministry, Foreign Minister Khar rang up Clinton in the early hours of Sunday to inform the U.S. government of the decisions made by the Defence Coordination Committee, which met in Islamabad on Saturday evening and asked the U.S. to vacate a Pakistani air base. The meeting also decided to block supplies for the NATO troops in Afghanistan via Pakistan.

"The Foreign Minister conveyed to the Secretary of State, stressed that such attacks are totally unacceptable," said the statement, adding that "They demonstrate complete disregard for international law and human life, and are in stark violation of Pakistani sovereignty".

Khar added that this negates the progress made by the two countries on improving relations and forces Pakistan to revisit the terms of engagement.

She informed Secretary Clinton about DCC decisions to stop NATO supply routes and that the U.S. should vacate the Shamsi airbase within 15 days, the statement said.

Secretary of State Clinton condoled with the Foreign Minister about the loss of life. She said that she was deeply saddened by the event, the statement said.

"She conveyed the U.S. government's desire to work with Pakistan to resolve this issue," it said.more information...

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Source: http://news.xinhuanet.com