Police: Cocaine in Goa death girl’s body

  PANAJI, India (AP) — Police say a British teenager who was allegedly raped and murdered on a beach in southern India had cocaine, morphine and alcohol in her system.

Scarlett Keeling ’s partially clothed body was found on a beach in Goa.

Scarlett Keeling’s bruised and partially clothed body was found February 18 on Anjuna beach in Goa, a tiny state whose coastline is crowded with tourist resorts.

Goa Police Chief Kishen Kumar has told reporters that a post-mortem examination showed that she tested positive for drugs.” Now the narcotic drugs and alcohol form a part of the chain of events that included rape and drowning of a girl who could not defend herself,” Kumar says.

Two men have been arrested in connection with her death and Kumar said police are nearing the end of their investigation. The suspects were allegedly seen drinking at a bar with Keeling the night she died.

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First extra-solar organic molecule discovered

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the first organic molecule on a planet that’s not in our solar system. According to NASA, this breakthrough could be a major step toward discovering life on other planets. Scientists believe that the organic compound detected, methane, can be an integral part in the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it.

The discovery was made on a planet called HD 189733b, which is 63 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula. Hubble also confirmed the existence of water molecules in the planet’s atmosphere–a discovery made by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in 2007.

The planet is called a “hot Jupiter” because it is about the size of the giant planet in our solar system but is closer to its sun than planet Mercury is to ours. It takes the planet just two days to orbit its sun. Its temperature is about 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, considered to be too hot for life as we know it. But this discovery means that methane and other compounds can probably be identified on other, more Earth-like, planets somewhere in the galaxy.

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Daughter Dying, Dad Can’t Leave Prison

Ten-year-old Jayci Yaeger is dying of brain cancer, and has one final wish — to have her father spend some time at her bedside before she dies.

She’s in a Lincoln, Neb. hospice.

However, her father, Jason Yaeger, is in a federal minimum security prison in South Dakota, serving five-and-a-half years for a drug conviction. He has less than a year left in his sentence, and is set to be released to a halfway house in four months.

Jason and the Yaeger family have appealed many times to the warden for a 30-day supervised release, which could be allowed under “extraordinary circumstances.” However, the family says these appeals have been denied, and the prison tells them the circumstances are not “extraordinary.”

“She’s very scared,” Jayci’s mother, Vonda Yaeger says, “and I think she’s holding on for her father. She didn’t do anything wrong. He was there for her when she was born. He should be there for her when she goes.”

Jason, she says, was always a very good father to Jayci.

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Astronauts Gear Up for 4th Spacewalk

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The astronauts on the orbiting shuttle-station complex geared up Thursday for the fourth spacewalk of their mission, a high-profile test of a repair technique they hope they never have to use.

Two of the crew members were to float outside Thursday night to squirt salmon-colored goo into the crevices of extra space shuttle thermal tiles that were deliberately damaged for the test. NASA wants to see how well the caulking gun and patching material work, in case they’re ever needed for a real repair.

The tools were developed in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster. The shuttle was destroyed and all seven astronauts were killed during re-entry because of a hole in the wing.

“Having this in our bag of tricks is really going to be helpful,” astronaut Robert Behnken said Wednesday night.

Behnken and Michael Foreman will work on sample tiles that were carried up in Endeavour’s payload bay.

The experiment was supposed to be conducted during a shuttle flight last fall but was scrapped because of urgent repairs needed for a ripped solar wing at the international space station.

NASA would like the test results before Atlantis blasts off at the end of August on one last repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. The astronauts on that mission will not be able to use the space station as a refuge if their shuttle is damaged during launch; they won’t be in the same orbit.

Another space shuttle will be on the launch pad ready to fly to the rescue if necessary. Nonetheless, NASA wants the Hubble crew to have as many shuttle repair methods available as possible.

A fifth spacewalk is planned for Saturday night, two days before Endeavour undocks from the orbiting complex following a nearly two-week visit.

The shuttle astronauts spent the first half of their mission putting together the space station’s new Canadian robot, Dextre, and installing a Japanese storage compartment that will be followed by Japan’s enormous Kibo lab in May.

Japan’s prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, called with congratulations Wednesday night and was treated to a televised tour of the space station’s new Japanese compartment, courtesy of Japanese astronaut Takao Doi.

Garret Reisman, the space station’s newest resident, said he was amazed by the size of the space station when he arrived last week. He noted that when the shuttle was approaching the station, many on the crew were reminded of the 1968 science-fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“All we needed was `The Blue Danube’ playing in the background and it would have been just like the movie,” Reisman said in a series of broadcast interviews.

Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey,” died Wednesday in Sri Lanka.

Bomb explodes in Bulgaria, no injuries reported

A bomb was detonated late on Tuesday near the building where Bulgarian regional police chiefs were holding their annual meeting in Plovdiv, the country’s second-largest city, local Sofia News Agency reported Wednesday.

Bulgarian Interior Minister Rumen Petkov and Chief Prosecutor Boris Velchev were also at the meeting, authorities said.

The explosive device was detonated to destroy a lawyer’s office, situated in a newly constructed residential building. Fortunately, the blast did not claim any victims but caused serious damage to the whole building.

The area has been cordoned off by police while officers make a second analysis of the scene. An investigation into the incident is underway

National Guard (In Federal Status) and Reserve Mobilized as of March 19, 2008

This week, the Army, Navy and Marine Corps announced a decrease, while the Air Force announced an increase. The Coast Guard number remained the same. The net collective result is 131 fewer reservists mobilized than last week.
At any given time, services may mobilize some units and individuals while demobilizing others, making it possible for these figures to either increase or decrease. The total number currently on active duty in support of the partial mobilization of the Army National Guard and Army Reserve is 74,156; Navy Reserve, 5,510; Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve, 7,299; Marine Corps Reserve, 8,648; and the Coast Guard Reserve, 344. This brings the total National Guard and Reserve personnel who have been mobilized to 95,957, including both units and individual augmentees.

A cumulative roster of all National Guard and Reserve personnel who are currently mobilized can be found at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2008/d20080319ngr.pdf .

Five years on, Bush vows victory in Iraq

WASHINGTON—US President George W. Bush on Wednesday defended his decision to go to war against Iraq five years ago, vowing no retreat as he promised the battle against extremists would end in victory.

“Five years into this battle, there’s an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting, whether the fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it. The answers are clear to me,” Bush said at the Pentagon.

“Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight America can and must win,” he maintained, referring to the late Iraqi dictator.

As he spoke scores of protestors gathered just a few blocks away in Washington calling for an end to the war in which nearly 4,000 US soldiers have died along with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Bush launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom” at 21:30 pm on March 19, 2003 in the United States, when it was already 5:30 am in Baghdad on March 20, with a bombing blitz dubbed “shock and awe” by the American military.

Five years on, Iraqis and US forces still face daily attacks from insurgent gangs and Islamist militants, and the fighting between armed factions from both sides of Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide rages on.

“The men and women who crossed into Iraq five years ago removed a tyrant, liberated a country, and rescued millions from unspeakable horrors,” Bush said.

And he signalled there would be no swift end to his policy of keeping troops in Iraq for the time being, with about 158,000 US forces fighting a bloody insurgency in what has become America’s second longest war after Vietnam.

“We have learned through hard experience what happens when we pull our forces back too fast. The terrorists and extremists step in,” the president warned.

“They fill vacuums, establish safe havens, and use them to spread chaos and carnage,” he said.

The US commander-in-chief now leaves office in January, bequeathing to his successor an intractable military and political stalemate.

By the most conservative tally, the war in Iraq has already cost the United States more than $400 billion and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has argued the total bill could surpass $3 trillion.

In his speech, Bush acknowledged the war has “come at a high cost in lives and treasure.”

“There’s still hard work to be done in Iraq. The gains we’ve made are fragile and reversible, but on this anniversary, the American people should know that since the surge began, the level of violence is significantly down, civilian deaths are down, sectarian killings are down,” Bush said.

And he vowed, “the battle in Iraq will end in victory.”

Vice President Dick Cheney marked the anniversary with a two-day surprise visit to Iraq this week, during which he repeatedly denounced calls from the White House’s Democratic critics to draw down US forces.

In an interview Wednesday, Cheney, one of the key architects of the war, said US strategy in Iraq must not be “blown off course.”

Queried on ABC television about polls showing that about two-thirds of Americans believe that the war was not worth fighting, Cheney’s first response was “So?”

Asked whether he cared what the US public thought, Cheney replied: “No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

The war has been one of the top issues on the campaign trail as Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fight to be the party’s nominee in the November elections to stand against Republican John McCain.

Five years on the war remains deeply unpopular here, even though many Americans are increasingly more preoccupied with the state of the nation’s ailing economy than the conflict.

Both Obama and Clinton have pledged to end the war, against McCain’s steadfast support of the Bush administration. And Bush’s popularity ratings have sunk to record lows.

Anti-war rallies were planned in Washington, New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco on Wednesday.

In the US capital, some 33 people were arrested in front of entrances to the Internal Revenue Service, organizers and media reported, as demonstrators sought to focus attention on taxpayers’ money that bankrolls the war.

“This war needs to end and it needs to end now,” Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, told AFP. “I think people are looking for new ways to express their opposition.”