Evening Edition

Known as the GRAIL mission, or Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, the satellites will launch together on a single Delta II rocket as early as 8:37 am Thursday (1237 GMT), when the launch window opens.

Researchers hope GRAIL will answer some of the mysteries about the far side of the moon, which humans have never explored, and also shed light on how other rocky planets like Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury may have formed.

The shrinking American astronaut corps poses risks to the US investment in human spaceflight and NASA should take steps to boost the size of its space-flying crew, the National Research Council said in its report.

“Viewed as a supply chain, astronaut selection and training is very sensitive to critical shortfalls,” said committee co-chair Frederick Gregory, former commander of three shuttle missions.

New regime forces, meanwhile, were poised to battle loyalist troops still holding out in their remaining strongholds of Bani Walid, southeast of Tripoli, Sabha in the deep south and the coastal city of Sirte, Kadhafi’s hometown.

Kadhafi’s sole remaining media mouthpiece, Mishan al-Juburi, owner of the Syria-based Arrai Oruba television, said the defeated leader was still in Libya, along with his son Seif al-Islam.

“It is the first time I go there since the war, Kadhafi’s troops were inside and I want to know what happened,” said Fadel Ali Mohammed, Libya’s freshly appointed minister for antiquities.

Setting out from the Tripoli hotel that has become his temporary home, the 62-year-old — a doctor in archaeology and Greek philology — begins the drive west to Sabratha, one of Libya’s most treasured archaeological sites.

“The Syrian regime has committed crimes against humanity,” French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said during talks in Moscow with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.

“The way it (the Syrian regime) suppressed the popular protests is unacceptable,” he said, expressing hope that Russia would change its stance and back UN condemnation of the crackdown.

The chief judge at the trial said he has summoned high-profile witnesses including military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi to testify behind closed doors for reasons of “national security.”

Prosecutor Mostafa Suleiman said police captain Mohammed Abdel Hakim was charged with giving “false testimony in favour of the accused” in the case over the killing of hundreds of protesters in Egypt’s January-February revolution.

The device was placed near an entrance gate reception area, where more than 100 people were queueing for passes to the court complex, located in the heart of the Indian capital.

It was the first major attack on Indian soil since triple blasts in Mumbai on July 13 killed 26 people. It has still not been established who carried out those bombings.

Diouf called for “a renewed international effort to assure sufficient fertile and healthy soils today and for future generations”.

He was speaking at the start of a three-day meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to launch a new Global Soil Partnership for Food Security and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation.

Recent stock market swings and rising economic uncertainty have dampened confidence, the Fed said in its latest Beige Book report.

The report, a collection of anecdotal economic data from the bank’s 12 regional districts, was based on comments taken between mid-July through August 26.

“They try to be considerate. They know there’s a 12-and-a-half-hour time difference between India and San Francisco but we still end up getting up early and going to bed late,” Nair, 30, says.

Such hours are becoming increasingly routine for many young Indian professionals as they liaise with counterparts in the United States and other Western countries on high-end “smart work” projects.

“We’re asking every country not to accept him. We want these people for justice,” Fathi Baja, the head of political affairs for the National Transitional Council, told Reuters in Benghazi, saying the ousted strongman may be close to the Niger or Algerian borders, waiting for an opportunity to slip across.

“He’s looking for a chance to leave,” Baja said.

The plan, which has been radically overhauled on several occasions under pressure from the European Central Bank and the European Union, now passes to the Chamber of Deputies, where Berlusconi has a slimmer but still stable majority.

It is expected to be definitively approved in the next few days.

The premier, who turns 75 later this month, is in a corner facing scandal, mass street protests, unruly coalition partners, an increasingly disillusioned business establishment and, worst of all, a hostile bond market.

Having entered politics in 1994 pledging to transform Italy with the business acumen he used to build his vast media empire, he now depends on the European Central Bank to buy Italian bonds to stop a 1.9 trillion euro debt pile sliding out of control.

The Constitutional Court in the southern city of Karlsruhe rejected, as expected, a series of lawsuits aimed at blocking German participation in emergency loan packages. Chancellor Angela Merkel hailed that decision as validation of her much-criticized euro zone policy.

But the court also said her government must get approval from parliament’s budget committee before granting such aid and appeared to rule out more radical solutions floated by Germany’s European partners for solving the crisis, such as joint euro zone bonds.

But shortly after U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan, Princeton Lyman, spoke to reporters in Khartoum, Sudanese state media reported new fighting in Blue Nile where 50,000 have fled clashes, according to the United Nations.

The Sudanese army fought with armed groups near Bau south of the state capital Damazin and inflicted “heavy losses” on them, an army spokesman told state news agency SUNA. Several soldiers had been killed and injured.

The price tag of the proposed package, to be announced by Obama in a nationally televised speech to Congress on Thursday, would be offset by other cuts that the president would outline, CNN reported, citing Democratic sources.

Bloomberg News said the plan would inject more than $300 billion into the economy next year through tax cuts, spending on infrastructure, and aid to state and local governments.

The choice of venue — the Republican-controlled House of Representatives — is aimed at sending a clear message to voters that if his plan to reduce high unemployment is blocked by Congress, it is Republicans and not the White House standing in the way of job growth.

With unemployment stubbornly high and most Americans unhappy with his handling of the economy, Obama’s speech is part of a 2012 election strategy to shift some of the blame for the struggling economy onto Congress and to portray it as obstructionist.

“If the president really cares about jobs, he will send up the agreements immediately,” Senator Rob Portman told reporters, referring to deals with South Korea, Panama and Colombia signed more than four years ago.

With Obama set to outline his ideas for reducing high U.S. unemployment in a speech on Thursday night, Senator Mike Johanns urged the president to announce that he will send the pacts to Congress this week.

Obama will promote in a speech on Thursday more robust investment in road and bridge construction as part of a comprehensive agenda to upgrade infrastructure and revive a stalled economy defined by 9.1 percent unemployment.

While he won a 2009 economic stimulus package that included $30 billion for roads and $8 billon for rail, his $50 billion plan for highway, bridge, rail projects went nowhere in 2010 when Congress was controlled by his fellow Democrats.

The study’s bottom line would depend on some major policy shifts by President Barack Obama and Congress, and comes ahead of a key speech by Obama on his plan to boost U.S. employment as the country struggles to regain its economic footing.

The study was conducted by consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, and paid for by the American Petroleum Institute, and the findings were released on Wednesday. The consultants found that 1.4 million new jobs could be created through more oil and natural gas development.

It is trying to hold actual people, not just companies, responsible for their roles in the global financial crisis.

The 18 lawsuits by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, including 17 filed last week and one in July, signal a change from prior federal efforts to punish banks and bankers for their roles in the financial crisis.

The Harrisburg Parking Authority plans to refinance its debt in the next week, freeing up money to make an advance lease payment to the city, which Harrisburg would use to make the debt payment as well as to pay city employees, Corky Goldstein, an authority board member said.

Meanwhile, the state legislature is taking steps to set up a receivership to solve the city’s long-term fiscal crisis.

In particular, Yahoo Inc’s decision to fire Chief Executive Carol Bartz — by phone, no less — pointed out how few women had made it to the top of companies tracked in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

That roster dropped to 17, a little more than 3 percent of the total, after Bartz’s exit. The news came late on Tuesday, the same day that Bank of America Corp removed Sallie Krawcheck as head of its global wealth and investment management business.

By mandating tests for people who are not suspected of drug use, the law violates the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, ACLU representatives and a 35-year-old Navy veteran who refused to take the test said in a conference call with journalists.

“The new law assumes that everyone who needs a little help has a drug problem,” said Luis Lebron, a University of Central Florida accounting student who is the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit. “It’s wrong and unfair. It judges a whole group of people on their temporary economic situation.”

In 2010, 5.4 percent, or 6.4 million households, had “very low food security,” defined as a reduction of food intake by at least one household member and a disruption of eating patterns because the household lacked resources for food.

The data was announced in the USDA report, “Household Food Security in the United States in 2010.”

Stroke patients in a large study who were treated with drugs and a brain stent had more than twice the rate of strokes and death in the month after surgery compared with those treated with drugs alone, researchers said.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked to see if adding Stryker Corp’s Wingspan stenting system to medication management improved survival in high-risk patients but found that it did not.

As many as half of patients who aren’t admitted to the hospital leave without a psychiatric checkup, and an equal proportion of them don’t get follow-up therapy in the next month, researchers found.

Yet those people have higher rates of suicide and are especially vulnerable soon after a self-harm incident, according to researchers led by Dr. Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York.

Kids with the extra nutrients, including iron, zinc and vitamin A, were about 30 percent less likely to be anemic and 50 percent less likely to be iron deficient, researchers found.

Their work sums up data from past studies of anemia and iron deficiency in babies and toddlers who received the vitamin boost compared with those who didn’t.

Attempts by organizers to clear the backlog of matches from Tuesday’s washout were thwarted when New York’s fickle weather turned foul and play was suspended after just 16 minutes because of light rain and mist that made the Flushing Meadows courts slippery.

U.S. Tennis Association (USTA) officials hoped to push ahead with the matches but leading players, including defending men’s champion Nadal, joined forces to tell them they would only go back on when the courts were completely safe.

The comments are the latest in a series of conflicting statements on the most pressing question still haunting the North African nation – where is Gadhafi?

The ousted leader, who ruled Libya for nearly 42 years, hasn’t been seen in public for months, and has released only audio messages trying to rally his supporters and lash out at his opponents. He went into hiding after opposition fighters swept into Tripoli on Aug. 21. The former rebels are still battling regime loyalists in three Gadhafi strongholds – Bani Walid, Sabha and Sirte.

U.S. officials in Iraq and in Washington said the matter is still under discussion and no decisions have been made.

Two U.S. officials said Wednesday the administration is proposing a residual military force of about 3,000 to continue training Iraqi security forces after Dec. 31, the deadline for all U.S. troops to leave under a security agreement negotiated in 2008. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations; one said the residual force could be as big as 5,000.

His new proposals, like spending more for transportation projects and cutting taxes for companies that hire the unemployed, probably wouldn’t add many jobs, they say. Not soon, anyway.

“These are not bold, new, big programs,” says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist with IHS Global Insight. “You put everything together, it’s going to be pretty small.”

The comments by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid came amid increasing concern that the government’s main disaster aid account is running dangerously low and could run dry before the Sept. 30 end of the budget year. On Tuesday, White House budget director Jacob Lew informed lawmakers that the administration will soon up its request for disaster aid for next year to $6.6 billion and is considering asking for even more money via emergency funding legislation to make sure the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster account doesn’t run out this month.

The welter of disaster-related activity also included action by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday to approve $6 billion for FEMA’s disaster fund and another $1 billion for Army Corps of Engineers projects in the wake of massive flooding along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul is calling Texas Gov. Rick Perry “Al Gore’s Texas cheerleader” for once working to help elect the Democrat. Perry’s team, in turn, is branding Paul a turncoat for once leaving the GOP.

The back-and-forth between two Texans, who never have been particularly close, could spill over into Wednesday’s debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., a memorial to the conservative who counseled fellow Republicans not to speak ill about one another.

Perry’s move surprised some political experts and appeared to violate a cardinal rule of disaster politics for chief executives. Democrats immediately questioned his judgment. “If Perry stayed at home to work on the fires I don’t think there would be any room for criticism. But this opens it up for his opponents to hit him on this issue,” said Matt Angle, director of the Texas Democratic Trust, which supports Democratic candidates statewide.

But after two-plus days monitoring the firefighting effort and talking to residents evacuated from some of the hardest-hit areas, Perry said he could safely return to the campaign trail. He was scheduled to participate in a televised debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Wednesday night, then remain in the West for two days of fundraisers in San Diego, Los Angeles, Fresno and other cities.

Gov. Rick Perry, meanwhile, resumed his presidential campaign after rushing home over the weekend to deal with the crisis, traveling to California to meet his Republican rivals Wednesday night in his first nationally televised debate.

The blaze has left at least two people dead – their bodies were found on Tuesday – blackened about 45 square miles around Bastrop and cast a haze over Austin, 25 miles to the east, where the air smelled strongly of pine and cedar.

Speaking at an industry conference in Philadelphia, Chesapeake Energy Corp. CEO Aubrey McClendon said that gas drilling has been done safely for decades using a process called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

Environmental activists say that fracking and the drilling boom it’s created has led to polluted air and tainted groundwater and has made people sick. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying the issue.

People filled a public hearing room in Red Wing for a meeting Tuesday night that lasted nearly three hours and included public comments from 20 people in support of the moratorium. No one spoke in opposition to the temporary ban, which Goodhue County Commissioner Jim Bryant said will give officials time to assemble an advisory board to study the impact.

“Is this really a good fit for us here?” Bryant said. “Maybe for some. Maybe in some areas but maybe not in other areas.”

In announcing the study, DEC Commissioner Joe Martens said the agency will propose regulations for high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” of gas wells in early October. Environmental groups have urged the agency to enact regulations, rather than permitting guidelines, to give the rules the force of law.

The study proposes guidelines to protect the environment, human health and communities from potential harm related to gas production using fracking, which injects wells with millions of gallons of chemically-treated water and sand a mile underground to fracture the shale and release trapped gas.

The board has that power through a state constitutional amendment that created the panel, Robin Gibson argued to a three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal. Graham led a citizen initiative that put the amendment on the 2002 ballot.

The Graham group is appealing a circuit judge’s ruling that says the amendment left tuition and fee authority with the Legislature.

The women, who are now in their 50s, say William H. Leininger Jr. repeatedly raped or molested them under the pretense of demonstrating first-aid techniques in the Explorer Scouts program when they were between the ages of 11 and 15.

“They were raped by their scout leader ostensibly when he was supposed to be helping them with their merit badges,” plaintiffs’ attorney Gilion Dumas said in a news conference announcing the lawsuit.

They remember going over an eight-paragraph story so it would be perfect when they read it to the president on Sept. 11, 2001. They remember how Bush’s face suddenly clouded as his chief of staff, Andrew Card, bent down and whispered to him that the U.S. had been attacked. They remember how Bush pressed on with the reading as best he could before sharing the devastating news with the nation.

“It was like a blank stare. Like he knew something was going on but he didn’t want to make it too bad for us to notice by looking different,” said Lenard Rivers, now a 17-year-old football player at Sarasota High.

But attending Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany – the biggest beer festival in the world (this year Sept. 17-Oct. 3) – also involves distance, time and expense.

Fortunately for those whose budgets and schedules preclude the trip, there is plenty to do – and drink – in the U.S. during the fall beer festival season. Think of it as Oktoberfest in America. The festivals can be rambunctious parties, where you have to shout to be heard. Or they can be quieter affairs, with the hum of mingling and a focus on the task at hand: drinking beer.

Fortunately, a market has sprung up to solve this problem: physical keyboards that work with the iPad, either on their own or as part of iPad cases. I tested four of them, and I wrote this review using one.

These devices all had several things going for them. All were easy to connect with the iPad, either wirelessly via Bluetooth or, in the case of Apple’s physical keyboard, a dock connector. They all had a row of buttons to do such things as control music playback or switch to the home screen.

That was then. Now, the characters have been revitalized and given a modern flair more amenable to readers who’ve spent the better part of 10 years exposed to real stories about fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s part of DC Comics’ relaunch that this month sees 52 new series focusing on familiar – but decidedly different – characters ranging from Superman to Jonah Hex. Dubbed “The New 52,” the relaunch is part of the 76-year-old publisher’s efforts to stoke new readership.

While neither side would say if progress is being made, the frequency of the discussions seems a good sign. They met only twice in the first two months of the lockout that began July 1.

But they went for about six hours last Wednesday, and decided they would go multiple days this week. Both sides said they could even carry over the discussions into a third consecutive day if things go well during Thursday’s session.

Rain washed out some matches for the second straight day at the U.S. Open, creating a logjam in the schedule and a bigger mess in the locker room, where the big-name players questioned the wisdom of putting them out on courts that were still damp thanks to a fine mist that was falling in the morning.

Shortly after they started, play was called, then late in the afternoon, the players were sent home – their fourth-round matches now scheduled to be completed Thursday.

Hotels will be full. Schools will close early. Coolers will be stocked and grills will be sizzling as a presidential speech goes largely ignored. As Kid Rock warms up for a pregame concert, there will be no doubt that a bigger-than-big game is hitting the NFL’s smallest market.

Rodgers and Brees are the last two Super Bowl MVPs, leading the last two Super Bowl winners into Thursday night’s opener. For the league, it’s a chance to finally put away any lingering resentment from an offseason filled with ugly and tense – and ultimately successful – labor negotiations. For the Saints and Packers, it’s a chance to send an early message that they intend to contend again.