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Bush:
Columbia astronauts fulfilled dream
President
George W. Bush paid tribute here Tuesday to
the seven Columbia space shuttle astronauts
killed as they attempted to return to Earth,
calling them daring and disciplined and saying
they represented the human quest of discovery
and exploration of the heavens.
The seven died
Saturday over Texas when the shuttle broke
apart, scattering debris over a huge area and
bringing a tragic end to an otherwise
successful 16-day scientific mission.
"Today we
remember not only one moment of tragedy, but
seven lives of great purpose and
achievement," Bush said at the outdoor
memorial ceremony. "To leave behind Earth
and air and gravity is an ancient dream of
humanity, and for these seven it was a dream
fulfilled.
"Each of
them knew that great endeavors are inseparable
from great risks. Each of them accepted those
risks willingly, even joyfully, in the cause
of discovery."
The seven dead
astronauts included two women -- India-born
mission specialist Kalpana Chawla and payload
specialist Laurel Clark.
Also killed
were shuttle commander Rick Husband, pilot
William McCool, and specialists Michael
Anderson and Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli
astronaut.
Bush flew to
the Johnson Space Center accompanied by first
lady Laura Bush and former astronauts Neil
Armstrong and John Glenn and their wives.
Members of Congress also attended the
ceremony.
As the first
couple stood under a clear sky, the families
of the deceased astronauts walked up to them
and took places to either side.
A U.S. Navy
chorus sang the hymn, "Our God, Our Help
in Ages Past," the lyrics of which say in
part: "Thy Word commands our flesh to
dust, return, ye sons of men: All nations rose
from Earth at first, and turn to Earth
again."
A U.S. Navy
rabbi opened the ceremony, intoning a prayer
in Hebrew. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe
then took the microphone and told thousands of
mourners -- NASA employees and contractors in
addition to families and guests -- the
agency's "unceasing efforts" in
exploring space would be a tribute to the
fallen.
The agency, he
said, would also leave no stone unturned in
discovering what caused the shuttle to break
up just minutes before it was scheduled to
land in Florida and "make sure this never
happens again."
Twelve children
lost a parent in the disaster. They sat side
by side with their families at the service.
Some looked down at their hands, while others
lay their heads on relatives' shoulders. One
young girl sat holding a white teddy bear with
a red and blue ribbon around its neck.
A group
photograph of the lost crew wearing their
orange space suits was perched on an easel on
the podium. A ship's bell sat at the right of
the podium.
Outside the
Kennedy Space Center in Florida, meanwhile,
mourners streamed along the walls. They left
flowers, notes, cards and other tokens of
sympathy at the entrance. Some, wiping tears
from their eyes, stared blankly at what had
become a massive makeshift memorial.
At the
Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in
Washington, officials and dignitaries watched
the ceremony on a wide-screen TV as they sat
under decades of historical flight
memorabilia.
President and
Mrs. Bush sat in the front row at the ceremony
with their hands folded in their laps. The
president appeared to lean slightly towards
his wife, as if seeking support for what was
obviously an emotional moment for a president
who has had more than his fair share of
national tragedy since taking office.
Navy Capt. Kent
Rominger, chief of the astronauts' office of
NASA, spoke movingly of each of the deceased,
relating humorous stories about them and
highlighting their dedication to exploration.
Bush followed
suit. "The final days of their own lives
were spent looking down upon this Earth, and
now on every continent, in every land they
could see, the names of these astronauts are
known and remembered," Bush said.
"They will
always have an honored place in this country.
And today, I offer the respect and gratitude
of the people of the United States."
Bush noted
their loss would be painful for the families
but said they were not alone in their grief.
America mourned with them.
"The
families here today shared in the courage of
those they loved," he said. "But now
they must face life and grief without them.
The sorrow is lonely; but you are not alone.
In time, you will find comfort and the grace
to see you through. And in God's own time, we
can pray that the day of your reunion will
come."
Shuttle
Columbia was the oldest craft in NASA's fleet
of space vehicles. Investigators are focused
on its left wing where flying debris during
take-off might have caused damage.
NASA has
discovered that the area at the back of the
wing, and a section of the fuselage above the
left wing, were overheating just before
sensors went out and the shuttle disintegrated
at an altitude of more than 200,000 feet and
at a speed of more than 12,000 miles per hour.
Thousands of
those pieces were scattered over Texas and
part of Louisiana.
NASA and Bush
have repeatedly said the space program would
go forward.
The last
fatality for the U.S. space program was in
1986, when seven astronauts died aboard the
Challenger as it exploded on take-off.
The simple but
moving ceremony ended with a reading of Psalm
23, with the rabbi reading first in Hebrew,
and another Navy chaplain then reciting the
English-language version.
NASA astronauts
flew T-38 jet trainers over the complex in the
missing-man formation. And seven peals from a
ship's bell were also sounded -- one for each
of the lost crew.
Bush met
privately for about 40 minutes with the
families following the ceremony in a large
room at the facility. He sat with them, put
his arm around them and kidded a bit with the
children present.
"I'm sorry
we meet under these circumstances," an
official quoted Bush. "God bless you all.
He has blessed you," Bush said.
Saddam
Denies Having Weapons of Mass Destruction
Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein, in remarks broadcast on
Tuesday on the eve of a key Security Council
session on the U.S. case against Iraq, denied
that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction
or links to al Qaeda.
"There is
only one truth, and therefore I tell you as I
have said on many occasions before, that Iraq
has no weapons of mass destruction,"
Saddam said in a rare interview in Baghdad on
Sunday and aired on British television's
Channel Four news on Tuesday.
Saddam said the
United States and Britain were intent on war
to control oil in the Middle East.
The White House
dismissed Saddam's comments as more of the
same. "Given the fact that he has
biological and chemical weapons, clearly what
he said today is continual denials of the
truth," spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
Secretary of
State Colin Powell will go to the Security
Council on Wednesday for what will likely be
the United States' best chance to convince
skeptical allies that Iraq has chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons programs.
The United
States is amassing military forces in the Gulf
in preparation for a possible war if Iraq does
not rid itself of suspected biological and
chemical weapons.
Military
officials said the United States was sending
F-117A "Nighthawk" stealth fighters
from New Mexico for use in a possible war with
Iraq, while the aircraft carrier USS Theodore
Roosevelt started sailing toward the Gulf on
Tuesday.
At the United
Nations, chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix warned
Iraq it was "five minutes to
midnight," and said Baghdad urgently
needed to show it was cooperating with
inspectors when he visited there this weekend.
But Blix again
disputed U.S. assertions Iraq was trying to
foil inspectors under their very noses, such
as by moving equipment before his teams
arrived.
N.Korea
Sees 'Evil' as U.S.
North
Korea accused the United States of pursuing a
"policy of evil" on Tuesday, after
U.S. aircraft and warships were put on alert
for possible deployment near the Korean
peninsula and as Washington signaled it was
preparing the ground for direct talks with
Pyongyang.
In Washington,
a South Korean envoy told the Bush
administration it should more actively seek
dialogue with Pyongyang and indicated Seoul
was in no hurry to see a U.N. debate on North
Korea's nuclear programs.
Chyung Dai-chul,
an envoy from South Korean President-elect Roh
Moo-hyun, told reporters he had passed on that
message in talks with Secretary of State Colin
Powell.
"We also
expressed our hope that the United States ...
plays a more proactive role in engaging in
dialogue with North Korea, but also with an
international setting, with a multilateral
approach," Chyung said.
U.S. Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage told the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday
that direct talks would come about once the
United States had established "a strong
international platform" for them.
U.S. officials
said Armitage was referring to Washington's
attempts to work within a consensus including
South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the
European Union.
"Of course
we're going to have direct talks with North
Korea. There's no question about it,"
Armitage said.
The U.N.
nuclear watchdog, booted out of North Korea
last month, took steps on Tuesday to refer the
communist state's nuclear weapons program to
the Security Council.
The flurry of
international attention to the four-month-old
face-off came as Washington prepared to make
its case for war against Iraq. Last year,
President Bush bracketed Iraq with North Korea
and Iran in an "axis of evil" for
their suspected weapons development programs.
Earlier on
Tuesday, North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun
newspaper accused the United States of
pursuing a "policy of evil against the
Korean nation, its reunification and
peace."
The ruling
party daily dismissed U.S. offers of dialogue
on the impasse as "a camouflaged peace
hoax to cover up its nuclear blackmail against
the DPRK (North Korea)."
Yugoslavia
officially abolished
Lawmakers
have formally abolished Yugoslavia, replacing
it with a loose union of its remaining two
republics, Serbia and Montenegro.
The approval by
the two chambers of the Yugoslav parliament on
Tuesday marked the demise of the troubled
Balkan federation and the birth of a new
country called Serbia and Montenegro, as
outlined in a deal brokered by the European
Union.
The accord
preserves the alliance of Serbia and
Montenegro as the last of the six republics
that once made up Yugoslavia. Before the wars
in the 1990s, the federation also included
Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia.
The lower
chamber of the parliament voted 84-31,
confirming an earlier 26-7 vote in the upper
chamber.
Serbia and
Montenegro opted in 1992 to stay together as a
rump Yugoslav federation. But the relations of
the two republics have since soured --
especially under the former federal president
Slobodan Milosevic -- and the EU last year
mediated a deal aiming to prevent new upheaval
in the volatile Balkans.
The agreement
envisages almost complete sovereignty for the
two republics, which will be linked only by a
small joint administration running defense and
foreign affairs. Serbia's capital, Belgrade,
will remain the capital of the whole country.
"It is in
the interest of both Serbia and Montenegro to
stay together," said Serbia's
vice-premier Miodrag Isakov, acknowledging
that the republics "could go either way
from here... creating a truly functional union
or going completely separate ways."
The deal allows
Serbia and Montenegro to hold referendums on
full independence in three years.
The arrangement
is meant to appease a strong independence
movement in Montenegro, the smaller republic.
Montenegro's leadership began boycotting
federal institutions in 1998, prompting some
Serbs, too, to demand a separation.
Nationalist
parties in both Serbia and Montenegro have
opposed the reform, citing the need to
preserve deep historical ties between the
republics. Others, demanding outright
separation, criticized the plan for not going
far enough.
"What you
are doing here is a coup," Serbia's ultra
nationalist leader Vojislav Seselj said to
other lawmakers, describing the reform as a
de-facto dissolution of the country.
"We are
burying Yugoslavia today," said lawmaker
Aleksandar Simic of Milosevic's Socialist
party. "I think it was a good country and
I don't know why so many remain keen to
destroy it."
But Dragisa
Pesic, the departing prime minister of
Yugoslavia, praised the new arrangement as
"beneficial for both Serbia and
Montenegro that puts an end to the
disintegration in the region."
Yugoslavia was
first founded in 1918 as the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes. The former kingdom became
a Communist-run, six-republic, federation
after World War II.
The state
reform leaves Yugoslav president Vojislav
Kostunica -- who ousted Milosevic at an
election in 2000 -- without an official
position.
"We now
look forward to the early... establishment of
the new institutions," said Britain's
Foreign Office Minister Denis MacShane in a
statement, praising Tuesdays' development as a
"significant step forward by which Serbia
and Montenegro towards closer integration with
Europe."
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