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Source: AP

WASHINGTON - Authorities say at least two people have been shot at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

D.C. police spokeswoman Traci Hughes says a person walked into the museum with a gun and shot a guard. Hughes says the shooter was also shot.

Hughes says the victims’ conditions were not known. Both were being rushed to a hospital.

U.S. Park Police gave slightly different information, saying three people had been shot.

Fire department spokesman Alan Etter told MSNBC that a third person was hurt after being cut by broken glass.

The museum normally has a heavy security presence with guards positioned both inside and outside the museum. All visitors are required to pass through metal detectors at the entrance, and bags are screened.

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Paul Harvey Aurandt (September 4, 1918 – February 28, 2009), better known as Paul Harvey, was an American radio broadcaster for the ABC Radio Networks. He broadcast News and Comment on weekday mornings and mid-days, and at noon on Saturdays, as well as his famous The Rest of the Story segments. His listening audience was estimated at 22 million people a week. Harvey liked to say he was raised in radio newsrooms.

The most noticeable features of Harvey’s idiosyncratic delivery was his dramatic pauses, quirky intonations and his folksiness. A large part of his success stemmed from the seamlessness with which he segued from his monologue into reading commercial messages. He explained his enthusiastic support of his sponsors as such: “I am fiercely loyal to those willing to put their money where my mouth is.”
Career
Paul Harvey, born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, made radio receivers as a boy. In 1933, at a high school teacher’s suggestion, he started working at KVOO in Tulsa, where he helped clean up and eventually was allowed to fill in on the air, reading commercials and news.

Later, while attending the University of Tulsa, he continued working at KVOO as an announcer, and later as a program director. Harvey spent three years as a station manager for a local station in Salina, Kansas. From there, he moved to a newscasting job at KOMA in Oklahoma City, then moved on to KXOK, in St. Louis, where he was Director of Special Events and also worked as a roving reporter.

In 1940, Harvey moved to Hawaii to cover the United States Navy as it concentrated its fleet in the Pacific. He was returning to the mainland from assignment in Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Harvey served briefly as an enlisted man in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II from December 1943 until March 1944.

After leaving military service, Harvey moved to Chicago, where in June 1944, he began broadcasting from the ABC affiliate WENR. He quickly became the most popular newscaster in Chicago. In 1945, he began hosting the postwar employment program Jobs for G.I. Joe on WENR. Harvey added The Rest of the Story as a tagline to in-depth feature stories in 1946. The spots became their own series in 1976. On April 1, 1951 the ABC Radio Network debuted Paul Harvey News and Comment “Commentary and analysis of Paul Harvey each weekday at 12 Noon”. Paul Harvey was also heard originally on Sundays; the first Sunday program was Harvey’s introduction. Later, the Sunday program would move to Saturdays. The program has continued ever since.

From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, there was a televised, five-minute editorial by Paul Harvey that local stations could insert into their local news programs, or show separately. On May 10, 1976, ABC Radio Networks premiered The Rest of the Story as a separate series which provided endless surprises as Harvey dug into stories behind the stories of famous events and people. Harvey’s son, a concert pianist, created and produced the series. He remains the show’s only writer.

In late 2000, Harvey signed a 10-year, $100 million contract with ABC Radio Networks. A few months later, he was off the air after damaging his vocal cords. He returned in late August 2001.

Harvey’s News and Comment is streamed on the World Wide Web twice a day. Paul Harvey News has been called the “largest one-man network in the world,” as it is carried on 1,200 radio stations, 400 Armed Forces Network stations around the world and 300 newspapers. His broadcasts and newspaper columns have been reprinted in the Congressional Record more than those of any other commentator.

Former Senator Fred Thompson, known for his work on NBC’s Law and Order, substituted for Harvey regularly from 2006 to 2007, prior to his unsuccessful run for President. Thompson left the network to run and did not return, instead joining Westwood One in January 2009. Other substitutes for Harvey have included his son Paul Harvey Jr.,Doug Limerick, Paul W. Smith, Gil Gross, Ron Chapman, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee Scott Shannon, and Tony Snow. After Huckabee’s sub-hosting, ABC offered him a spin-off program, The Huckabee Report, which launched in early 2009.

Harvey did not host the show full-time after April 2008; when he came down with pneumonia. Shortly after his recovery his wife died on May 3rd, causing him to prolong his time away from broadcasting. Prior to his death, he voiced commercials, new episodes of The Rest of the Story and “News & Comments” during middays a few times a week, with his son Paul Jr. handling mornings.

Harvey’s on-air persona mirrored that of sportscaster Bill Stern. During the 1940s, the famed Stern’s The Colgate Sports Reel and newsreel programs used many of the techniques later used by Harvey, including the style of delivery and the use of phrases such as Reel Two and Reel Three to denote segments of the broadcast — much like Harvey’s Page Two and Page Three. The discovery of many of Stern’s old programs on transcription discs have led many to believe that much of Harvey’s broadcasting style is based on Stern’s work, including most notably the Rest of the Story feature, which is a direct parallel to a technique used weekly by Stern. Stern introduced his version of the feature with a caveat that the stories might not be true; Harvey, however, has asserted that his tales have been authenticated. However, a major urban legend debunking site blames Harvey for the creation of various rumors and urban legends.

Harvey was also known for catch phrases that he uses at the beginning of his programs, like “Hello Americans, I’m Paul Harvey. You know what the news is, in a minute, you’re going to hear … the rest of the story,” and, “Paul Harvey News and Comment, and this is … (day of the week),” and at the end: “Paul Harvey … Good day.” At the end of a report about someone who had done something ridiculous or offensive, Harvey would say “He would want us to mention his name” (silence) then would start the next item.

Awards
He was named Salesman of the Year, Commentator of the Year, Person of the Year, Father of the Year, and American of the Year. He was elected to the National Association of Broadcasters Radio Hall of Fame and Oklahoma Hall of Fame and appeared on the Gallup poll list of America’s most admired men. In addition he received 11 Freedom Foundation Awards as well as the Horatio Alger Award. Paul Harvey was named to the DeMolay Hall of Fame, a Masonic institution, on June 25, 1993.

In 2005, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ most prestigious civilian award, by President George W. Bush.

On May 18, 2007 he received an honorary degree from Washington University in St. Louis.

Family
In 1921, when Harvey was three years old, his father, Harry Harrison Aurandt, was murdered. Aurandt, born in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania in 1873, was 47 years old at the time and a civilian employee of the Tulsa Police Department. He and a friend — a Tulsa police detective — were rabbit hunting while off-duty when approached by four armed men who attempted to rob them. Aurandt was shot and died two days later of his wounds, leaving behind his wife, née Anna Dagmar Christensen, a daughter aged 12, and his son.

The four robbers were identified by the surviving detective, and arrested the day after Aurandt died. A lynch mob of 1,500 people formed at the jail, but all four were smuggled out, tried, convicted, and received life terms.

In 1940, Harvey married Lynne Harvey (née Cooper) of St. Louis. Lynne Harvey was a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Washington University in St. Louis[16] and was a former schoolteacher.[citation needed] Harvey himself was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha at Culver-Stockton College in Missouri. They met when Harvey was working at KXOK and Cooper came to the station for a school news program. Harvey invited her to dinner, proposed to her after a few minutes of conversation and from then on called her “Angel,” even on his radio show. A year later she said yes. The couple moved to Chicago in 1945.

On May 17, 2007, Harvey told his radio audience that Angel had contracted leukemia. Her death, at the age of 92, was announced by ABC radio on May 3, 2008. When she died at their River Forest home, the Chicago Sun-Times described her as, “More than his astute business partner and producer, she also was a pioneer for women in radio and an influential figure in her own right for decades.” According to the founder of the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Bruce DuMont, “She was to Paul Harvey what Colonel Parker was to Elvis Presley. She really put him on track to have the phenomenal career that his career has been.”

Lynne Harvey was the first producer ever inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, and had developed some of her husband’s best-known features, such as “The Rest of the Story.” While working on her husband’s radio show, she established 10 p.m. as the hour in which news is broadcast. She was the first woman to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Chicago chapter of American Women in Radio and Television. She worked in television also, and created a television show called Dilemma which is acknowledged as the prototype of the modern talk show genre. While working at CBS, she was among the first women to produce an entire newscast. In later years, she was best known as a philanthropist.

They had one son, Paul Aurandt, Jr., who goes by the name Paul Harvey, Jr. He assisted his father at News and Comment and The Rest of the Story. Paul, Jr., whose voice announces the bumpers into and out of each News and Comment episode, filled in for his father during broadcasts and duplicated his father’s speaking style to some extent. Paul, Jr. has ended his News and Comment broadcasts with the words, “Now THAT’S NEWS,” and he has been broadcasting the morning editions ever since the passing of his mother. These broadcasts no longer include the day’s headlines, but offer developments in different areas of science, a change of which listeners have approved.

Death
Harvey died on February 28, 2009, at the age of 90 after being taken to a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. He died while surrounded by family and friends. His son, Paul Harvey Jr., said “millions have lost a friend” in response to his father’s passing. The cause was not immediately known.

Criticisms and parody
In addition to the aforementioned inquiry into whether Paul Harvey’s “Rest of the Story” tales are true, Paul Harvey’s trademark ability to seamlessly migrate from content to commercial has brought scrutiny. In that context, Salon magazine called him the “finest huckster ever to roam the airwaves.” In the 1984–1985 season of Saturday Night Live, Rich Hall impersonated Harvey and could not restrain himself from inserting references to commercial products or companies (in a discussion of three “great Americans,” Harvey digressed and mused about three other great Americans that came to his mind: Manny, Moe, and Jack, the Pep Boys who sell auto parts). Some[who?] have argued that Harvey’s fawning and lavish product endorsements may be misleading or confusing to his primary audience, senior citizens. Harvey’s endorsed products include EdenPure heaters, Bose radios, and Select Comfort mattresses.

Books
Autumn of Liberty. Garden City, New York: Hanover House, 1954.
The Rest of the Story. Garden City, New York: Hanover House, 1956.
Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor. Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1975.
Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977. ISBN 0-385-12768-5
More of Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story. New York: William Morrow, 1980, ISBN 0-688-03669-4
Destiny: From Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story. New York: William Morrow, 1983, ISBN 0-688-02205-7
Paul Harvey’s For What It’s Worth. New York: Bantam Books, 1991, ISBN 0-553-07720-1.

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer

CLEVELAND – A woman so horribly disfigured she was willing to risk her life to do something about it has undergone the nation’s first near-total face transplant, the Cleveland Clinic announced Tuesday. Reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow and a team of other specialists replaced 80 percent of the woman’s face with that of a female cadaver a couple of weeks ago in a bold and controversial operation certain to stoke the debate over the ethics of such surgery.

The patient’s name and age were not released, and the hospital said her family wanted the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The hospital plans a news conference Wednesday and would not give details until then.

The transplant was the fourth worldwide; two have been done in France, and one was performed in China.

Surgeons not connected to the Cleveland case reacted cautiously since little is known about the circumstances, but generally praised the operation.

“There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a surgeon at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who plans to offer face transplants, too.

Dr. Laurent Lantieri, a plastic surgeon at Henri Mondor-Albert Chenevier Hospital, near Paris, who did a face transplant on a man disfigured by a rare genetic disease, said: “This is very good news for all of us that doctors in the U.S. have done this.”

Unlike operations involving vital organs like hearts and livers, transplants of faces or hands are done to improve quality of life — not extend it. Recipients run the risk of deadly complications and must take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of their lives to prevent organ rejection, raising their odds of cancer and many other problems.

Arthur Caplan, a leading bioethicist who has expressed grave concerns in the past about such surgery, withheld judgment on the Cleveland case but said the woman’s doctors should give her the option of assisted suicide if they wind up making her life worse.

“The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell,” said Caplan, bioethics chief at the University of Pennsylvania. “If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying.”

Siemionow’s long and careful preparation should help prevent such a horrific outcome, those familiar with her said. Siemionow, (pronounced SIM-en-now), 58, a noted hand microsurgeon, has been testing the surgical approach and ways to temper the immune system’s response in experiments for more than a decade.

She has considered dozens of potential candidates over the past four years, ever since the clinic’s internal review board gave permission for her to attempt the operation, and has said she would choose someone severely disfigured as her first case.

“She’s a leader in this field. She’s been investigating this for a long time. She has done the most amount of research in small animals looking at this,” said Dr. Warren Breidenbach, a surgeon at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Ky., who did the nation’s first hand transplant, in 1999. Siemionow trained with him in Louisville.

The world’s first partial face transplant was performed in France in 2005 on a 38-year-old woman who had been mauled by her dog. Isabelle Dinoire received a new nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor. She has done so astoundingly well that surgeons have become more comfortable with a radical operation considered unthinkable a decade ago.

Two others have received partial face transplants since then — a Chinese farmer attacked by a bear and a European man disfigured by a genetic condition. Both are believed to be doing well, though details, especially of the Chinese case, have been scant.

In the Cleveland case, “it is very important what kind of recipient they selected,” and how great the need was, Pomahac (POE-ma-hawk) said. “Hopefully it will open the door both to the public and to other centers” wanting to do these operations.

Details of the Cleveland surgery are not known, but surgeons generally transplant skin, facial nerves and muscle, and often other deep tissue. That is done so the new face will actually function and not just be a mask.

In an interview at the Cleveland Clinic in 2005, Siemionow spoke of the terrible need she saw in people horribly disfigured, and how badly it scarred their social and emotional lives, not just their bodies.

“There are no really good alternative therapies for the severely burned or patients with a facial injury or damage,” she said.

Her task now is to prevent organ rejection while managing the risk of infection from taking strong immune-suppressing drugs.

Rejection is a possibility whenever someone receives an organ or cells from someone else because the body regards this as foreign tissue. Two types of problems can result.

The first is graft-versus-host disease, which could happen if the new facial tissue were to attack the recipient’s body. The second is if the patient’s body were to attack the transplanted face, causing inflammation and other problems at the site of the new tissue.

Either of these can be life-threatening. They can come on suddenly, within days or weeks of the operation, or set in slowly.

___

AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

LOS ANGELES – (NASA) Recent satellite observations have revealed the largest breach yet seen in the magnetic field that protects Earth from most of the sun’s violent blasts, researchers reported Tuesday. The discovery was made last summer by Themis, a fleet of five small NASA satellites.

Scientists have long known that the Earth’s magnetic field, which guards against severe space weather, is similar to a drafty old house that sometimes lets in violent eruptions of charged particles from the sun. Such a breach can cause brilliant auroras or disrupt satellite and ground communications.

Observations from Themis show the Earth’s magnetic field occasionally develops two cracks, allowing solar wind — a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun at 1 million mph — to penetrate the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Last summer, Themis calculated a layer of solar particles to be at least 4,000 miles thick in the outermost part of the Earth’s magnetosphere, the largest tear of the protective shield found so far.

“It was growing rather fast,” Themis scientist Marit Oieroset of the University of California, Berkeley told an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Such breaches are temporary, and the one observed last year lasted about an hour, Oieroset said.

Solar flares are a potential danger to astronauts in orbit but generally are not a risk to people on the surface of the Earth.

The research was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Scientists initially believed the greatest solar breach occured when the Earth’s and sun’s magnetic fields are pointed in opposite directions. But data from Themis found the opposite to be true. Twenty times more solar wind passed into the Earth’s protective shield when the magnetic fields were aligned, Oieroset said.

The Themis results could have bearing on how scientists predict the severity of solar storms and their effects on power grids, airline and military communications and satellite signals.

The Themis satellites were launched to find the source of brief powerful geomagnetic disturbances in the Earth’s atmosphere.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Microsoft will release an emergency patch on Wednesday to fix a perilous software flaw allowing hackers to hijack Internet Explorer browsers and take over computers.

The US software giant said on Tuesday that in response to “the threat to customers” it immediately mobilized security engineering teams worldwide to deliver a software cure “in the unprecedented time of eight days.”

According to researchers at software security firm Trend Micro, attacks based on the vulnerability in the world’s most popular Web browser are spreading “like wildfire” with millions of computers already compromised.

Microsoft typically releases patches for its software on the second Tuesday of each month and rushing this fix to computer users out-of-cycle is testimony to the severe danger of the threat, according to Trend Micro.

“When the patch is released people should run, not walk, to get it installed,” said Trend Micro advanced threat researcher Paul Ferguson.

“This vulnerability is being actively exploited by cyber-criminals and getting worse every day.”

Trend Micro has identified about 10,000 websites that have been infected with malicious software that can be surreptitiously slipped into visitors’ unprotected IE browsers to take advantage of the flaw.

A major Internet portal in Taiwan is among the legitimate websites unknowingly tainted with malicious software aimed at IE’s weak spot, according to Ferguson.

Hackers can take control of infected computers, steal data, redirect browsers to dubious websites, and use machines for devious activities such as attacks on other networks, according to security specialists.

“What makes this so insidious is it takes advantage of a big gaping hole of IE, which has the largest install base of any browser on the market,” Ferguson said.

IE is used on nearly three-quarters of the world’s computers, according to industry statistics from November.

“At this time, we are aware only of attacks that attempt to use this vulnerability against Windows Internet Explorer 7,” said Microsoft security response communications head Christopher Budd.

“Microsoft encourages customers to test and deploy this update as soon as possible. Microsoft’s teams worked around the clock.”

Ferguson said the flaw is being taken advantage of in “multiple versions” of IE not just the most current.

Trend Micro urges IE users to heed precautionary advice from Microsoft, or avoid using the browsers, until the patches are applied.

“There is a working flaw circulating in the criminal underground,” Ferguson said. “It opens the window of opportunity that much wider to take advantage and there has not been real protection against it.”

The “exploit” is similar to one used recently to steal user names, passwords and other information from people playing online games in China, according to Trend Micro.

A Chinese computer security firm that had discovered attacks taking advantage of the IE flaw released details last week after evidently thinking Microsoft had fixed the problem with routinely released software patches.

“It spread like wildfire from there,” Ferguson said. “I guess they were trying to be responsible and share what they knew about what was going on, but they were mistaken about it being patched.”

PALERMO (Reuters) – A suspected Mafia boss arrested Tuesday in a high-profile police swoop has hung himself in his prison cell, police sources said Wednesday.

Gaetano Lo Presti, who was already convicted of mob-related crimes prior to his latest arrest, was found dead late last night in Pagliarelli prison in the Sicilian capital of Palermo.

He was one of the 99 people apprehended Tuesday suspected of trying to rebuild the top ranks of the Sicilian Mafia, which has been weakened by the arrests of powerful mob leaders.

It was the latest blow to the Cosa Nostra, whose “boss of bosses” Bernardo Provenzano was arrested in 2006. Provenzano’s heir apparent, Salvatore Lo Piccolo, was apprehended in 2007.

Some 1,200 police, backed by helicopters and anti-drug units, carried out the latest round of arrests. Lo Presti and the other suspects were accused of crimes including extortion, trafficking of arms and drugs and having mafia links.

(Writing by Phil Stewart)

Yahoo News 

BERKELEY, Calif. - Gunther Stent, who helped pioneer the field of molecular biology as one of the first scientists to confirm the structure of DNA, has died. He was 84.

Stent died June 12 of pneumonia at his home in Haverford, Pa., according to the University of California, Berkeley, where he served on the faculty for nearly 40 years.

The push to unlock the mysteries of human genetics in the years after World War II was led by the “phage group,” a small collection of scientists that included Stent, James Watson and Francis Crick.

Watson and Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953. As a biochemist at UC Berkeley, Stent performed experiments with bacterial viruses that confirmed Watson and Crick’s results a year later.

“Gunther was part of the intellectual glue that kept this small band of pioneers together,” said Michael Botchan, co-chairman of UC Berkeley’s department of molecular and cell biology, which Stent helped found in 1987.

Stent also led the formation of the campus’ department of virology in 1957 and the department of molecular biology in 1964.

His 1963 book “Molecular Biology of Bacterial Viruses” became a key text in the study of genetics.

In later years, Stent’s interests turned to neurobiology and the relationship between the brain and mental experience. His research on the nervous systems of leeches helped establish the leech as a signature organism in the study of the connections between neural physiology and behavior.

Stent was born Gunter Siegmund Stensch in Berlin in 1924. He escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 and joined his sister in Chicago.

He received a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1948 and worked alongside Watson at the California Institute of Technology before arriving at UC Berkeley in 1952.

Stent was also known as a scholar of the history and philosophy of biology. He published books on the biology of morality and the nature of consciousness, along with several books about molecular genetics.

His 2002 book “Paradoxes of Free Will” won the 2002 John F. Lewis Award from the American Philosophical Society

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The world’s population will reach 7 billion in 2012, even as the global community struggles to satisfy its appetite for natural resources, according to a new government projection.

There are 6.7 billion people in the world today. The United States ranks third, with 304 million, behind China and India, according to projections released Thursday by the Census Bureau.

The world’s population surpassed 6 billion in 1999, meaning it will take only 13 years to add a billion people.

By comparison, the number of people didn’t reach 1 billion until 1800, said Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau. It didn’t reach 2 billion until 130 years later.

“You can easily see the effect of rapid population growth in developing countries,” Haub said.

Haub said that medical and nutritional advances in developing countries led to a population explosion following World War II. Cultural changes are slowly catching up, with more women in developing countries going to school and joining the work force.

That is slowing the growth rate, though it is still high in many countries.

The global population is growing by about 1.2 percent per year. The Census Bureau projects the growth rate will decline to 0.5 percent by 2050.

By then, India will have surpassed China as the most populous country.

The Census Bureau updates projections each year on a variety of global demographic trends, including fertility and mortality rates and life expectancy. U.S. life expectancy has surpassed 78 years for the first time, the National Center for Health Statistics announced last week.

The new Census report comes amid record high oil and gasoline prices, fueled in part by growing demand from expanding economies in China and India.

There is no consensus on how many people the Earth can sustain, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. He said it depends on how well people manage the Earth’s resources.

Today, industrialized nations use a disproportionate share of oil and other resources, while developing countries are fueling population growth.

There are countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East where the average woman has more than six children in her lifetime. In Mali and Niger, two African nations, women average more than seven children.

“There’s still a long way to go in the developing world,” Frey said. “A lot of it does have to do with the education of women and the movement of women into the labor force.”

In the U.S., women have an average of about two children, which essentially replaces the population. Much of the U.S. population growth comes from immigration.

by Aresu Eqbali

TEHRAN (AFP) - Tehran Friday warned its arch-enemy Israel of a “strong blow” if it takes forceful measures, after the US media reported military exercises by the Jewish state were a possible practice for a strike against Iran.

“If enemies especially Israelis and their supporters in the United States would want to use a language of force, they should rest assured that they will receive a strong blow in the mouth,” senior cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said in his Friday prayers sermon.

Khatami, whose speech was broadcast live on state radio, stressed that the Iranian nation’s mentality was “to fight foreigners.”

“Given this mentality, if you make a hostile look at the Islamic Iran, you will witness such a united roar by our nation that it will definitely make you regret any vicious move forever,” the conservative cleric added.

A Friday report by the New York Times cited US officials as saying that a major military exercise carried out by Israel earlier this month seemed to be a practice for any potential strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A Pentagon official briefed on the exercise said a goal of the practice was to send a message that the Jewish state was prepared to act militarily if diplomatic efforts failed to halt Tehran’s production of bomb-grade uranium.

Last month the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s atomic watchdog, expressed “serious concern” that Iran is still hiding information about alleged studies into making nuclear warheads and defying UN demands to suspend uranium enrichment.

World powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — offered Tehran a new package of technological and economic incentives on Saturday in exchange for suspending uranium enrichment activities.

The West fears Iran could use uranium enrichment to make an atomic bomb although Tehran insists it wants only to generate nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Iran has given no signal that it would comply with the key demand.

“The nuclear issue has ended from our point of view,” said Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday.

“Recently they have started a new game — by testing us — but this will result in no achievement for them except humiliation,” he said without pointing to the offer.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who presented the new proposal to the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has called on Iran for a quick response.

Mottaki however said on Thursday that the offer was under consideration and the response will be given “at an appropriate time.”

“Solana came with some of the EU representatives and brought the package. We have two points here,” Khatami said in his Friday prayers sermon.

“We have been pro negotiation since the beginning, but a logical one that is after a solution.

“Not a type of negotiation that aims for mischievous actions,” he said.

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
CHICAGO - Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s campaign announced Friday that he will campaign with former rival Hillary Rodham Clinton next week, a step toward unifying a fractured Democratic Party after a bruising primary fight.

Obama’s campaign said in a brief e-mail that said the two senators and former opponents will campaign together for the first time on Friday, June 27, and more details would be forthcoming.

A day earlier, Obama and Clinton also plan to meet in Washington with some of her top contributors in an effort to calm donors who remain frustrated with Obama’s presidential campaign. The former first lady will introduce Obama to her financial backers.

Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, suspended her campaign for the Democratic nomination earlier this month after Obama, an Illinois senator, secured enough delegates to clinch the nomination.

Obama’s campaign disclosed the joint appearance — but offered few details — one day after announcing that he would reverse an earlier position and reject some $85 million in public financing for the general election. That announcement opened him up to a flood of criticism and dominated the news cycle.

Thus, Obama’s campaign sought to redirect attention by putting word out a full seven days in advance that Obama and Clinton would campaign together.

Clinton ended her campaign on June 7, four days after Obama got enough delegates to clinch the nomination. “I endorse him and throw my full support behind him,” she said at the time.

The two met privately on June 5 after ditching reporters to make sure there would be no photos or coverage of the first post-race meeting. Obama was asked Wednesday whether they were talking.

“I have not had conversations with Senator Clinton because she has been getting a well-deserved vacation,” he said at the time. “We will be speaking I think in the next few days or certainly the next week and will be having an ongoing conversation.”