Beyond Partisan

RIYADH (Reuters) –
State-run Saudi Arabian Mining Co (Maaden) (1211.SE) and U.S. aluminum giant Alcoa (AA.N) agreed on Sunday to build a $10.8 billion aluminum complex in the world's top oil exporter, targeting the Middle East from 2013.

Under the deal, the companies form a joint venture to set up a 1.8 million ton-per-year refinery, a 740,000 ton-per-year smelter, a bauxite mine with an annual capacity of 4 million tons and a rolling mill with a capacity of up to 460,000 tons.

The firms have yet to raise the financing for the complex mainly planned to be built in Ras Azzour on the kingdom's Gulf Coast close to Maaden's phosphate fertilizer plants.

"We will go for financing during 2010," said Maaden Chief Executive Abdullah al-Dabbagh.

Last December, Rio Tinto Alcan (RIO.L) abandoned its 49 percent stake in a 740,000 ton-per-year smelter project because it was unable to obtain financing due to the global financial crisis. The project was then budgeted at $8 billion.

The smelter and mill are slated to start production in 2013 while the refinery and mine would come online in 2014, Dabbagh told reporters in the Saudi capital Riyadh.

The project aims at "making Saudi Arabia and the Middle East a major hub for aluminum production and its downstream industries," Dabbagh added.

NO FUNDING YET

Alcoa Chief Executive Klaus Kleinfeld told Reuters the costs of $10.8 billion would be split, with the U.S. firm and its partners paying 40 percent while Maaden is to handle 60 percent.

He said a variety of funding options were being considered, when asked whether Alcoa could conduct a capital hike or go for debt.

Plans call for the expansion of the mill to 460,000 tons of aluminum sheets, ends and tabs stocks for the manufacturing of aluminum cans, the firms said.

Development will take place in two phases, starting with the smelter and rolling mill to be followed by the mine and refinery, Dabbagh said during a signing ceremony.

For the alumina refinery, Maaden has received four bids for a $1 billion engineering, procurement and construction management contract, industry sources said earlier this month.

U.S. Fluor Corp (FLR.N) teamed up with Worley Parsons (WOR.AX) and Canada's SNC-Lavalin Group Inc (SNC.TO) joined forces with Hatch to submit proposals. France's Technip (TECF.PA) and U.S. Bechtel bid individually.

Maaden is investing about 60 billion riyals ($16 billion) to develop the kingdom's phosphate, bauxite, gold and industrial minerals and help reduce reliance on oil.

A phosphate and fertilizer joint venture with Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC) (2010.SE) is due online in 2011.

($1=3.750 Saudi riyals)

(Additional reporting by Reem Shamseddine in Khobar; editing by John Stonestreet and Matthew Lewis)

At one time, the use of promotional products was limited to random give-aways and not as a part of an integrated marketing effort. Today, many more promotional products are distributed by businesses and organizations, sometimes with the assistance of a promotional consultant, to specific target markets to generate specific and measurable results.

The industry is made up of supplier companies who manufacture or import the products, inventory them and decorate them on demand. There are approximately 2,000 supplier companies and 18,000 distributors in the United States. Distributors buy from the supplier companies and sell them to the marketers who are termed "end buyers." The industry is made up of many small and entrepreneurial individuals and companies with 95% of distributor companies selling less than $2.5 million per year.

Promotional Items

BEIJING – China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, lauded Sunday the outcome of a historic U.N. climate conference that ended with a nonbinding agreement that urges major polluters to make deeper emissions cuts — but does not require it.
The international climate talks that brought more than 110 leaders together in Copenhagen produced "significant and positive" results, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said.
Disputes between rich and poor countries and between the world's biggest carbon polluters — China and the United States — dominated the two-week conference. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand action to cool an overheating planet.
The meeting ended Saturday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, with delegates accepting a U.S.-brokered compromise. The so-called Copenhagen Accord gives billions of dollars in climate aid to poor nations but does not require the world's major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the much-criticized outcome as a first step that paves the way for action. Merkel was quoted Sunday as telling the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that "Copenhagen is a first step toward a new world climate order — no more, but also no less."
Merkel said that "anyone who just badmouths Copenhagen now is engaging in the business of those who are applying the brakes rather than moving forward."
Yang said the positive outcomes of the conference were that it upheld the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" recognized by the Kyoto Protocol, and made a step forward in promoting binding emissions cuts for developed countries and voluntary mitigating actions by developing countries.
"Developing and developed countries are very different in their historical emissions responsibilities and current emissions levels, and in their basic national characteristics and development stages," Yang said in a statement. "Therefore, they should shoulder different responsibilities and obligations in fighting climate change."
He said the conference also created a consensus on key issues such as long-term global emissions reduction targets, funding and technology support to developing countries, and transparency. He did not go into details.
"The Copenhagen conference is not a destination but a new beginning," Yang said.
China has said it will rein in its greenhouse gas output, pledging to reduce its carbon intensity — its use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output — by 40 to 45 percent.
The Copenhagen Accord emerged principally from President Barack Obama's meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and the leaders of India, Brazil and South Africa. But the agreement was protested by several nations that demanded deeper emissions cuts by the industrialized world.
Its key elements, with no legal obligation, were that richer nations will finance a $10 billion-a-year, three-year program to fund poorer nations' projects to deal with drought and other impacts of climate change, and to develop clean energy.
A goal was also set to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 for the same adaptation and mitigation purposes.
In a U.S. concession to China and other developing nations, text was dropped from the declaration that would have set a goal of reducing global emissions by 50 percent by 2050. Developing nations thought that would hamper efforts to raise their people from poverty.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) –
Taliban militants on Wednesday dynamited two boys' schools in Pakistan's Khyber district, where troops are pressing an offensive against Islamist insurgents, an official said.

The attacks took place in Bara town, about 20 kilometres (13 miles) south of the regional capital Peshawar, with most of the buildings reduced to rubble but no one injured in the blasts in the early hours of the morning.

Pakistan is currently in the grip of a fierce Taliban insurgency, with 68 people killed in bombs across the country in the past three days alone as militants avenge multiple operations against them in the lawless northwest.

"Both main school buildings were completely destroyed," said Shafeerullah Wazir, the top administrative official of Khyber district, adding that only two classrooms remained standing in the adjacent schools.

Wazir said that militants buried large quantities of dynamite around the outer walls of the government-run high school and primary school.

"Both Taliban and Lashkar-e-Islam people are involved in this act," he said.

Pakistani troops launched an offensive in Khyber district -- which straddles Peshawar and Afghanistan -- in September to try and flush out both the Taliban and homegrown militant group Lashkar-e-Islam (Army of Islam).

Bara is close to Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, which has been hit by a series of bombings in recent months, with a suicide blast on October 28 killing 125 people in the worst attack in two years.

Islamist militants opposed to co-education have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in the northwest of the country in recent years.

Nearly 200 schools were destroyed in the Swat valley alone during a two-year Taliban uprising to enforce sharia law in a district once favoured by Western tourists for its ski slopes and bracing mountain air.

Pakistan's military is engaged in offensives against Islamist fighters across much of the northwest including the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, a region branded by Washington as the most dangerous place on earth.

About 30,000 troops poured into South Waziristan in mid October to try and dismantle the strongholds of the Taliban leadership, enraging militants who have responded with a surge in bomb blasts and attacks.

On Monday, blasts in Peshawar and the eastern city of Lahore killed 59 people, then on Tuesday two suicide attackers detonated a car bomb near the offices of Pakistan's main spy agency in eastern Multan, killing nine.

A fierce Islamist insurgency has killed more than 2,670 people in attacks in Pakistan mostly blamed on the Taliban in the last two-and-a-half years.

SEOUL (Reuters) –
North Korea is expected to suffer a serious grain shortage this year, well short of what it needs, a U.N. official who recently returned from the impoverished state said on Wednesday.

"We do estimate that the DPRK (North Korea) may have to import a bit over 1 million tonnes to cover the needs," said Daniele Donati, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation's emergency operations chief, who went there on an inspection tour state last week.

The FAO estimates that destitute North Korea needs about 5.1 million tonnes of grain a year for food, animal feed and seed.

The shortfall is about the same as last year's in a country where the United Nations says millions do not have enough to eat.

Donati told Reuters in a telephone call from Bangkok the North Korean food shortage was persistent but more or less stable.

"There is reason for concern," he said. He expects the FAO to release a more detailed assessment early next year.

A North Korean long-range rocket launch, widely seen as a missile test, and a separate nuclear test this year stoked criticism that the country should spend more on its citizens and less on weapons. It also soured the mood for the international food donations that Pyongyang relies on to feed its people.

The North has lost out on about 500,000 tonnes of rice aid and about 300,000 tonnes of fertilizer South Korea used to provide each year due to political wrangling with its neighbor.

Donati said the North's farm sector has been hurt by shortages of fertilizer and that use of fertilizer this year marked lows not seen since about 1990.

There was no indication that flooding the North saw in the middle of the year had caused major harm to the harvest, he said.

Pyongyang has tried to keep its humanitarian needs separate from the sputtering nuclear discussions that received new hope when U.S. President Barack Obama sent his first envoy to the North this week in a bid to revive the talks.

But the North's recent currency revaluation appears to have been met with widespread anger by inflating the price of goods and food for an already impoverished public and slashing the wealth of a burgeoning merchant class.

(Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)

GENERAL SANTOS, Philippines (AFP) – Philippine prosecutors on Tuesday filed 25 counts of murder against a town mayor accused of leading the election-related massacre of 57 people last week, officials said.

Charlie Crist is getting killed by a hug.
The Republican governor is being bombarded with images of him hugging President Barack Obama when he was in Florida to pitch his $787 billion economic stimulus plan earlier this year.
In just the past two weeks, that hug has appeared in an ad by the conservative Club for Growth attacking Crist, in a Democratic National Committee e-mail highlighting his recent assertion that he actually didn’t “endorse” the stimulus bill and in headlines all over Florida, including one Wednesday that read: “Charlie Crist needs to figure out a way to undo a hug.”
It will only get worse.
“These kinds of images can be deadly,” said Republican strategist Mark McKinnon. “Circumstances and context don’t matter. People impose their own meaning and interpretations. And it’s impossible to undo.”
It is one of the oldest and simplest forms of affection. It’s spanned cultures and religions and gone without stigma for generations. In politics, though, it’s never that simple. And as people, and politicians, have become more comfortable with the hug — particularly the “man hug” (always with a handshake in between to keep the chests from touching) — a downside of this friendly gesture has emerged.
Crist, who until recently maintained untouchable approval ratings, is now getting a taste of what a string of politicians over the past decade have learned the hard way: You’ve got to watch whom you hug.
In other words, political PDAs can be career killers.
Sometimes the hug comes and goes (Hillary Clinton and Yasser Arafat’s wife). Other times, it becomes such a fixture in a campaign that it indelibly labels a candidate (John McCain and George W. Bush).
The hug is most dangerous when it reinforces a narrative that’s already resonating with voters.
Take Crist. It’s not only that his Obama hug feeds into the widespread distrust of him among conservative Florida Republicans and allows his U.S. Senate primary opponent, Marco Rubio, to paint him as a liberal. Crist’s bipartisan embrace also comes at a time when there is a mounting effort among some in the GOP to drive out Republican candidates who aren’t seen as conservative enough.
Democratic strategist Chris Lehane called Crist’s bipartisan hug a “twofer.”
“This hurts him,” he said.
Roger Handberg, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, put it more starkly: “What’s Charlie Crist’s hug of Obama going to do for him?” he asked. “Probably get him defeated.”
Handberg predicted that Rubio will “beat him to death with the picture.”
The hug attack is fairly new. That it exists at all indicates a cultural shift. As Lehane noted, it’s hard to imagine John F. Kennedy publicly hugging fellow politicians, as the macho cast of the HBO series “Entourage” does.
Crist has tried to shrug off the hug. “I’m a civil guy,” he explained when the gesture started to creep up as an issue.
But civil translates in civics, not in politics, where spontaneous moments of seemingly innocuous public displays of affection can come back to haunt someone.

In the past few election cycles, the hug has done its share of damage.

Ned Lamont was a political novice in 2006 when he ran a successful primary challenge against Sen. Joe Lieberman that was essentially based on the image of the veteran Connecticut Democrat being embraced by President George W. Bush after the 2005 State of the Union address. Bush even appeared to give Lieberman a peck on the cheek.

Lieberman’s embrace of the embattled Republican president played into the already-prevailing notion that he was out of touch with his liberal New England constituents.

Lamont supporters distributed a campaign button showing the moment, labeling it “the kiss.” After former President Bill Clinton campaigned in Connecticut for Lieberman, the senator’s camp made a button showing Clinton with his arm around Lieberman, labeling it “the hug.” And Lieberman held on to win as an independent.

But even embracing the wrong politician during a better time can be deadly. And Crist needs to look no further than his home state to see the hazards of a hug.

McCain’s embrace of Bush at a rally in Pensacola, Fla., in 2004 was meant to signal that the two former rivals had buried the hatchet after their bitter 2000 primary. But the moment was so awkward and strained that it seemed less than believable.

Then, in 2008, the Bush-McCain hug was splashed on billboards and in television ads. Just before the Republican National Convention last year, a Democratic Party spokesman said the image was a key part of a plan to “spend every day looking for every opportunity” to draw the connection between McCain and Bush. It certainly didn’t help McCain with independent voters who were down on Bush — and who flocked to Obama in the election.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle tried to leverage a Bush hug to his advantage.

Struggling for reelection in North Dakota, Daschle used the image of Bush embracing him on the Senate floor in 2001 to help him among conservatives. “Daschle: Time to Unite Behind Troops, Bush” read the headline above the image in his television ad. He still lost.

Dick Gephardt’s 2004 presidential campaign was done in by a hug from Bush. The former House majority leader recently told The Wall Street Journal: “The Howard Dean campaign ran multiple TV ads with me hugging George W. Bush, and I never recovered from that with liberal primary voters.”

There are instances when candidates overcome a perilous embrace.

One Bush-hug survivor, Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, was able to fend off a primary challenge even though his opponent played up a photograph of Bush embracing Cuellar while he stood on the Republican side of the aisle during the State of the Union.

New York Republicans hit Hillary Clinton during the 2000 Senate campaign for her hug and kiss of Suha Arafat, the wife of the late Palestinian leader, after Arafat gave a speech in the West Bank attacking Israel. “While Israel sacrifices for peace, Arafat spreads hatred and lies — and Hillary embraces her,” said one ad aimed at turning New York’s sizable Jewish population against Clinton.

But Clinton was able to push past it because she had a long record of supporting Israel. And once the criticism started coming, Clinton became adamantly more pro-Israel — and was elected to the Senate.

So far, Crist’s embrace of Obama appears to be having an impact. Rubio has seen an uptick in fundraising, and Crist is already running campaign ads a year before the election.

The question for the Republican governor is: Can he live it down?

“Charlie’s very vulnerable at this stage,” Handberg said. “You know, a picture’s worth 1,000 words. ... It’s highlighting all of his weaknesses.”

But if there’s one universal truth about the hug, it’s that circumstances change.

If Crist survives the Republican primary, the hug may reappear — in his own ads.

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) –
More than six years after the U.S. invasion left Iraq's main zoo a wasteland of starving animals and deserted cages, the park in central Baghdad is enjoying a vigorous revival and needs to grow.

Few Iraqis ventured into Baghdad Zoo during the violence that surged after the 2003 invasion. But as the bombings and shootings receded, families started to return in droves -- so many, in fact, that officials are now desperate to expand the park which is home for the zoo to make space for them all.

The zoo has replaced the hundreds of animals that escaped, were stolen, died of thirst or hunger or were shot by U.S. troops and now has 1,070 animals, said the director general of parks and gardens, Salah Abu al-Lail.

"In the coming days we will receive an elephant and a giraffe. Their arrival will complete our collection of animals living in the zoo," he said.

The Al-Zawraa park containing the zoo -- once the largest in the Middle East -- now teems with families on Fridays.

A sharp fall in overall violence in Iraq over the past 18 months and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from city centers in June has restored a tentative normality to the daily lives of many Iraqis. Attacks by insurgents, including massive suicide bombings in which dozens die, remain common, however.

"When security improved, we started to live our normal lives again after a dark period of violence," said teacher Basima Abbas, visiting the zoo with her children. "We want to live normal lives like everyone else in the world."

The Zawraa Park is guarded inside by special police units assigned to government facilities. Visitors are frisked for weapons while bags and picnic baskets are checked for explosives. During holidays, all roads leading to the park are closed.

FEELING SAFE

The measures have persuaded people that the park is safe.

In 2005, around 200,000 people visited the park over the three or four-day Muslim festival of Eid. But this year, 3 million Iraqis from all over the country swarmed into its 400 acres during the holiday at the start of October, said Abu al-Lail.

"I expect the number of visitors to the park by the end of the year will number 8 million, from all Iraqi cities," he said. The numbers could not be verified.

Visitors to the zoo pay a small fee, equivalent to around 40 U.S. cents. The animals -- which include lions, tigers, monkeys and ostriches -- are kept in new cages and appear well-fed. A small train carries families around the park.

The surging popularity of the zoo and park have prompted park officials to ask the government to return 350 acres of land that had been swallowed up by the Green Zone, a district of government offices and embassies once controlled by U.S. forces.

That section of the park contained a theater, a cinema and an aircraft museum, behind the Crossed Swords monument where Saddam Hussein's military forces used to parade. They should be returned to public use, said Abu al-Lail.

(Editing by Michael Christie; editing by David Stamp)

Human Hair Wigs

Among women in the French court of Versailles in the mid-to-late 18th century, large, elaborate and often themed (such as the stereotypical "boat wigs") were in vogue for women. These wigs were often very heavy, weighted down with pomades, powders, and other ornamentation. In the late 18th century these wigs (along with many other indulgences in court life) became symbolic of the decadence of the French nobility, which only helped to fuel the French Revolution.

Common hair-pieces found in the work place are none more so seen than on the barnet of a certain Mikey Picking. His "nouveau cuisine" style as it is called is reminiscent of Celtic managers of the 80's -namely Gordon Strachan. This style can only really work on head shapes that are over sized and smaller ear types.

Details of a mousepad designed by Armando M. Fernandez were published in the Xerox Disclosure Journal in 1979 with the description:

Companies often give away mousepads for promotional reasons, and computer manufacturers often include a mousepad with their logo on it, usually with technical support information. Many artists have published work on mousepads.

Mouse Pads

WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
The Obama administration has decided to transfer overseas a Kuwaiti held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and will not appeal a court decision freeing him, the Justice Department said on Monday.

In September, a U.S. district judge ordered the release of Fouad al Rabiah, a Kuwaiti Airways engineer, and harshly criticized the U.S. government for using coerced confessions to justify detaining him indefinitely.

Held at Guantanamo for almost eight years, al Rabiah was accused of providing money to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden during a trip to Afghanistan in July 2001 and of helping Taliban fighters in the mountainous Tora Bora region during a subsequent trip in October.

His lawyers said it was a case of mistaken identity and that al Rabiah was in Afghanistan in October coordinating deliveries of aid supplies from Iran to refugees. Last month they asked the judge to enforce the order to release him.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted al Rabiah's release after finding that he had received only two weeks of military training, which was required in Kuwait, and that he had a record of charity work with no ties to terrorism.

"The government has determined not to appeal the case involving al Rabiah and is working toward completing the administrative and diplomatic processes necessary to effectuate (his) transfer expeditiously," said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department's national security division.

Congress has required the Obama administration to tell lawmakers when they plan to move detainees from the prison camp and then wait 15 days before sending them overseas.

"If in fact that is the case, it doesn't surprise me at all that the government is not appealing because they don't have a viable appeal," David Cynamon, one of al Rabiah's lawyers, told Reuters.

"Second, it's outrageous that they've just stalled and delayed for now close to two months and forced us to file a motion for contempt so an innocent man could go home." He said he would pursue that motion if the Obama administration tries to put conditions on his release.

Last month another Kuwaiti held at Guantanamo was sent home and agreed to enter a rehabilitation center that provided him access to education, medical care and other services.

Cynamon has also asked Attorney General Eric Holder and inspectors general at the Defense Department and Justice Department, among others, to investigate the harsh interrogations of al Rabiah at Guantanamo.

There are 215 detainees still at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison, which President Barack Obama has pledged to close by January 22. However, political and legal hurdles are making it difficult for his administration to meet that goal.

The Obama administration is set to decide by mid-November which of the remaining prisoners at Guantanamo will face military commissions or charges in U.S. criminal courts. Some of the 215 detainees are expected to be released.

(Editing by Chris Wilson)

Kites may be flown for recreation, art or other practical uses. Sport kites can be flown in aerial ballet, sometimes as part of a competition. Power kites are multi-line steerable kites designed to generate large forces which can be used to power activities such as kite surfing, kite landboarding or kite buggying. Kites towed behind boats can lift passengers which has had useful military applications in the past.

Some kite fighters pass their strings through a mixture of ground glass powder and glue. The resulting strings are very abrasive and can sever the competitor's strings more easily. The abrasive strings can also injure people. During the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, kite flying was banned, among various other recreations.

Kites

HELSINKI (Reuters) –
The world's top cellphone maker Nokia Oyj on Thursday charged Apple with infringing Nokia patents in its iPhone.

Nokia dominates the global handset market but it has lost some ground to new smartphone entrants like Apple which entered the market with its iPhone in mid-2007.

The 10 patents in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. state of Delaware, relate to technologies fundamental for devices using GSM, UMTS and/or local area network (LAN) standards, Nokia said.

"Nokia's enormous patent portfolio doesn't make this a big surprise but it could have severe repercussions for Apple and its component supplier," said CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber. "Once again intellectual property has become the secondary battleground in a highly competitive mobile phone market."

Last year, Nokia ended a more than three-year legal battle with U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm which spanned three continents and involved more than a dozen separate cases. "It's too early to tell, but it's likely to be a drawn out battle. We have a hard time seeing a material risk to either company," said Avian Securities analyst Matthew Thornton.

"They're both big companies, they have lots of cash and they can fight it and in the end I don't really see a dramatic impact to Apple's financial profile."

Legal battles over as many as 10 technology patents can easily take several years.

The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Nokia said.

Nokia said 40 main handset vendors have licensed its technologies, but it has not reached agreement with Apple.

"By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia's intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation," Ilkka Rahnasto, Vice President for Legal & Intellectual Property at Nokia, said in a statement.

Apple Inc shares trading in the U.S. dipped on the news and were 0.34 percent lower at $204.21 by 1715 GMT (1:15 p.m. EDT). Nokia shares closed in Helsinki 0.3 percent lower at 8.82 euros.

Apple was not immediately available for comment.

(Additional reporting by Gabriel Madway in San Francisco; editing by Elaine Hardcastle and Karen Foster)

WASHINGTON – NASA needs to make a major detour on its grand plans to return astronauts to the moon, a special independent panel told the White House Thursday.
Under current plans, NASA has picked the wrong destination with the wrong rocket, the panel's chairman said. A test-flight version of the rocket, the new Ares I, is on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, awaiting liftoff later this month for its first experimental flight.
Instead, NASA should be concentrating on bigger rockets and new places to explore, the panel members said, as they issued their final 155-page report. The committee, created by the White House in May to look at NASA's troubled exploration, shuttle and space station programs, issued a summary of their findings last month, mostly urging more spending on space.
On Thursday in a news conference, panel Chairman Norman Augustine focused on fresh destinations for NASA, saying that it makes more sense to put astronauts on a nearby asteroid or one of the moons of Mars. He said that could be done sooner than returning to the moon in 15 years as NASA has outlined.
The exploration plans now under fire were pushed by then-President George W. Bush after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster. The moon-Mars plan lacks enough money, thanks to budget diversions, the panel said in a 155-page report. Starting in 2014, NASA needs an extra $3 billion a year if astronauts are going to travel beyond Earth's orbit, the panel said.
The Augustine commission wants NASA to extend the life of the space shuttle program and the International Space Station. Space shuttles are due to retire Oct. 1, 2010, but should keep flying until sometime in 2011 because they won't get all their flights to the space station done by that date. And the space station itself — only now nearing completion — should operate until at least 2020, allowing for more scientific experiments, part of its reason for existence. NASA's timetable calls for plunging it into the ocean in 2015.
However, the overall focus of the panel's report is on where U.S. space exploration should be headed.
The White House will review the panel's analysis "and then ultimately the president will be making the final decision," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said in an e-mail comment.
The committee outlines eight options. Three of those involve a "flexible path" to explore someplace other than the moon, eventually heading to a Mars landing far in the future. The flexible path suggests no-landing flights around the moon and Mars.
Landing on the moon and then launching back to Earth would require a lot of fuel because of the moon's gravity. Hauling fuel from Earth to the moon and then back costs money.
It would take less fuel to land and return from asteroids or comets that swing by Earth or even the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, Augustine said.
Eventually, Augustine said NASA could return to the moon, but as a training stepping stone, not a major destination, as the Bush plan envisioned.
Panel member Ed Crawley, a professor at MIT, said NASA should explore the inner solar system "to interest the American public in new destinations."
He noted that so many new asteroids and comets are being discovered each year that the potential first landing spot "is probably one we don't know about yet."
Augustine said landing astronauts on such a near-Earth object could occur in the early 2020s.
In a news conference to discuss their report, Crawley and Augustine said the current NASA plans were well conceived at the time, in 2005. But when money got diverted and launch dates delayed, NASA's new Ares I rocket began to look like it lost one of its major purposes: ferrying astronauts to the space station.
Crawley said the panel liked the idea of a commercially operated, more basic rocket-taxi to get astronauts into the low-Earth orbit of the space station. If NASA spent about $5 billion to help kick-start the embryonic commercial space business to do the people-carrying, then the space agency could concentrate on heavier rockets that do the real far-off exploring, he said.
Those commercial rockets should be ready in about six years, Crawley said.

NASA is slowly delaying some parts of the old moon program. It's rethinking its future annual $10 million spending on a still-unbuilt lunar lander as it awaits Obama's decision on the Augustine panel recommendations, said NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma.

George Washington University space scholar John Logsdon praised the report as "more comprehensive" than NASA's current program.

Syracuse University public policy professor Henry Lambright said he worries about changes that will cause a loss in momentum in NASA's exploration plans. "You've got to make a decision and you've got to stick to it if you are ever going to get to Mars."

Senator Richard Shelby, R-Ala., criticized the idea of using unproven commercial carriers instead of the Ares, which was designed in his state. He said the report was "unsatisfactory and disappointing."

___

Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/index.html

WASHINGTON – The White House on Thursday forcefully rejected criticism from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republicans that President Barack Obama's Afghanistan decision is taking too long.
"What Vice President Cheney calls dithering, President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "I think we've all seen what happens when somebody doesn't take that responsibility seriously."
Obama is nearing a decision on whether to significantly expand the U.S. war posture in Afghanistan by honoring a military request for thousands of additional forces. The decision had been expected as early as mid-August, when Obama's new war commander prepared a harsh assessment of deteriorating conditions in the 8-year-old conflict, and now is expected in what Gibbs calls "the coming weeks."
Obama is also weighing with his national security team whether to focus more narrowly on al-Qaida terrorists believed to be hiding in Pakistan.
Top commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal's still-secret troop request outlines three options — from as many as 80,000 more troops to as few as 10,000 — but favors a compromise of 40,000 more forces, officials have told The Associated Press. There now are 67,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and 1,000 more are headed there by the end of December.
The previous top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, submitted a request for more troops that went unfulfilled by former President George W. Bush. Obama partly granted that request in March when he ordered an additional 21,000 U.S. troops to go to Afghanistan this year.
Cheney said in a speech Wednesday night that Obama needs to "do what it takes to win" and that "signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries."
Taking a similar tack on Thursday, former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich criticized the administration during a speech in Fort Worth, Texas, suggesting Obama has projected confusion onto the Afghanistan conflict in his public statements.
Gibbs said such comments were curious "given the fact that an increase in troops sat on desks in this White House, including the vice president's, for more than eight months, a resource request filled by President Obama in March."
Other Democrats chimed in to defend the president, despite opposition among congressional Democrats to a major expansion of the U.S. war effort.
"Republicans have developed a troubling pattern of blaming President Obama for trying to fix all the problems that they created," said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., also defended Obama, when asked about Cheney's criticism. "I think President Obama is entitled to take sufficient time to decide what our long-term role ought to be in Afghanistan," he said on MSNBC. "I want him to take the time to get it right."
Cheney had also taken issue with statements out of the White House that the Obama administration had to start from scratch to develop a strategy for a conflict begun in 2001, the first year of the Bush presidency.
The Bush administration presented to Obama's transition team the review of the Afghanistan war that it undertook just before leaving office and was asked to keep it under wraps, Cheney said. A White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, later disputed that characterization and said the report was not kept under wraps.
Meanwhile, Obama worked Thursday on a strategy to prevent fraud from occurring in Afghanistan in its runoff presidential election set for Nov. 7.
In an hourlong videoconference from the White House Situation Room, Obama and other top advisers heard a briefing and recommendations from the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry. Gibbs would not specify what steps the U.S. is taking with Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission to avoid the problems that marred the original election on Aug. 20.
President Hamid Karzai faces his main challenger, ex-Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, in the runoff.
Obama is not necessarily going to put off his decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan until after the run-off election, as some — including Democratic Sen. John Kerry — have strongly suggested he do.

"It could be before the runoff. It might be after the runoff," Gibbs said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday he will prod NATO allies this week for more economic and security aid to Afghanistan while trying to sidestep the debate over more troops.

NATO nations have supplied 36,000 troops, and NATO officials have signaled they won't ask their nations to send more until Obama makes a move.

Gates said there are enough other topics to discuss with NATO allies during a defense chiefs' gathering in Bratislava, Slovakia, this week.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the allies must do more to enable Afghan forces to eventually assume responsibility for security in their country.

NATO currently has 59 training teams working with the Afghan army. Alliance officials say they need the allies to come up with nine more to fulfill present plans that call for an expansion of the Afghan forces from the present 94,000 to 134,000. But if a future expansion plan boosting the Afghan army to 400,000 troops is approved, NATO will need a total of 103 training teams on the ground.

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Associated Press Writer Lara Jakes contributed to this report from Bratislava, Slovakia.