NASA delays launch of Aura satellite\nLOS ANGELES -- NASA officials Saturday ordered a 48-hour delay in the launch of an atmospheric studies satellite after engineers discovered that a shield was not aligned properly.\nThe Aura satellite was to have been launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 3:01 a.m. PDT Sunday aboard a two-stage Boeing Delta II rocket.\nLiftoff was rescheduled for Tuesday, said NASA launch director Chuck Dovale.\nAn inspector spotted an apparent problem with the satellite's fairing during a standard walkdown Friday, Dovale said.\nThe fairing is a shield that surrounds the satellite during liftoff. Four seconds after ignition of the second stage, detonators are supposed to separate the fairing to let it fall away.\nThe misalignment would have prevented mating the connectors to the detonation blocks, work that is done close to launch for safety reasons, Dovale said. The fairing alignment work is done by Boeing engineers, he said.\nAura, which cost $785 million to develop, carries instruments to study the composition of Earth's atmosphere.\nThe mission's goal is to answer questions about whether the depleted stratospheric ozone layer is recovering, what processes control air quality, and how climate is changing.
Sept. 11 panel nears completion of report\nWASHINGTON -- Working in secret, the Sept. 11 commission is finishing a final report that several members believe will be done by week's end and have unanimous support.\nThe endorsement of all 10 commissioners is important if the findings and recommendations for improvements -- most notably in intelligence-gathering -- are to avoid charges of partisanship in a presidential election year.\n"They are all taking their broader responsibility seriously," said Norm Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. "They know this is not about scoring political points in the heart of a campaign but about making sure the attacks don't happen again."\nA report without any dissenters would be an accomplishment given the charges of partisanship that surfaced during public hearings featuring officials such as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke.\nAs recently as last month, former Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., and several other commissioners on the panel of five Republicans and five Democrats said unanimity might not be possible.\nThe meetings since then have changed his mind.\n"We've had a good personal relationship in our internal deliberations, with no traces of partisanship," Gorton said.\nAdded Democratic commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration: "We have a lot of consensus."\nThe commission was established by Congress in 2002 to investigate government mistakes before the attacks and recommend ways to better protect the country against terrorists. Commissioners and their staff have interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, including President Bush, and reviewed more than 2 million documents.\nThe final report is due July 26. The commission hopes to have the report finished this week and wants to release the 500-plus-page document on July 22 to avoid competing with the Democratic National Convention, which begins on July 26.
U.N. bars Congo from diamond trade\nKINSHASA, Congo -- A U.N.-backed body barred the Republic of Congo from the legitimate world diamond trade, accusing it of blatantly sending millions of dollars in smuggled gems onto the global market.\nSuspending the west African country was "necessary to safeguard the credibility and integrity" of international efforts to block black-market conflict diamonds from the $60 billion annual diamond business, said the group.\nThe suspension was imposed after a May 31-June 4 mission to Republic of Congo that concluded the country had smuggled in from surrounding nations virtually all of the reported 5.2 million carats Republic of Congo had been putting into the market each year through Europe and the Middle East.\nRepublic of Congo's officials trafficked the gems through the lesser diamond centers of Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates to evade more rigorous controls at the world's diamond hub, Antwerp, Belgium, investigators said, in confidential findings first reported Friday by The Associated Press.\nThe Canada-based Kimberley Process Certification Scheme announced the ban in a statement released on its Web site late Friday in Ottawa.\n"The findings of the review mission are clear. The Republic of Congo cannot account for the origin of large quantities of rough diamonds that it is officially exporting," Tim Martin, the Kimberley Process chairman, said in the statement.\nKimberley Process dealers "must have complete confidence that conflict diamonds are not entering the legitimate trade," Martin said.\nThe Kimberley Process was established with diamond industry backing in late 2002. The effort came in response to growing world concern about "blood diamonds" that fueled and funded 1990s insurgencies that killed millions of people in Angola, Congo, Sierra Leone and Liberia.\nThe process is meant to track diamonds from mines to jewelry display cases, certifying their origins so as to keep conflict diamonds out of the system.\nForty-five countries have signed on to the process, representing 98 percent of the world diamond trade, Kimberley officials say.
