Cape Canaveral, Fla. – NASA began the countdown Sunday night for the launch of Endeavour after completing one final test to make sure the space shuttle’s crew cabin was airtight.
“The team is ready. Endeavour is ready,” said NASA test director Stephen Payne.
Last week, NASA replaced a leaky valve in Endeavour’s cabin with one taken from the shuttle Atlantis. Engineers discovered that air had been escaping from the removed valve because of a small piece of debris on its seal, Payne said. The valve itself turned out to be fine.
Because of the extra work to replace and test the new valve, NASA delayed the flight by one day, to Wednesday.
Meteorologists are predicting a 70 percent chance of good weather for the early-evening launch.
Endeavour’s trip to the international space station for construction work features NASA’s first educator-astronaut, Barbara Morgan. She was the backup for Christa McAuliffe, who died aboard Challenger in 1986.
WASHINGTON
Newsweek: FBI hunts for source of leak
FBI agents searched the home of former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm last week in an effort to determine who leaked details of the warrantless-eavesdropping program to the news media, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday, citing two anonymous legal sources.
The agents took Tamm’s desktop computer, two laptops belonging to his children and some of Tamm’s personal files, Newsweek said.
Tamm left the department last year. He had worked in the department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, a secretive unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets, according to Newsweek.
In December 2005, The New York Times published a story exposing the Bush administration’s warrantless-wiretapping program to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants.
The eavesdropping was conducted without public knowledge and without any court approval until last January, when the program was put under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
CAIRO
American in al-Qaeda issues new threats
An American member of al-Qaeda threatened foreign diplomats and embassies across the Islamic world in a new video Sunday, saying they would be targeted as “spy dens.”
The 1-hour, 17-minute video also featured a computer-animated recreation of a March 2006 suicide attack that killed U.S. diplomat David Foy in Karachi, Pakistan, and testimony from a man who claimed to be the bomber.
“We shall continue to target you, at home and abroad, just as you target us, at home and abroad, and these spy dens and military command and control centers from which you plotted your aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq,” said Adam Ga dahn, a Californian also known as Azzan al-Amriki.
Gadahn was charged with treason in the United States last fall and has been wanted since 2004 by the FBI.
LOS ANGELES
“Bourne” has biggest August opening ever
Superspy Jason Bourne topped box-office charts and delivered the biggest August opening of a film ever.
“The Bourne Ultimatum” took in $70.2 million over the weekend, far surpassing the openings of both of the earlier Bourne films based on novels by Robert Ludlum.
The opening also pushed last week’s top film, “The Simpsons Movie,” to second place, with $25.6 million. The big-screen version of the animated TV show has topped $315 million worldwide for distributor 20th Century Fox.
TOKYO
Premier apologizes for ex-aide’s opinion
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized Sunday for the first time over his former defense minister’s suggestion that the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan were justified.
Abe also promised in a private meeting with survivors in Hiroshima to expand medical support for those still suffering the effects of the 1945 blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, officials and media reports said. The government has been criticized for strict eligibility standards that have limited medical care for many survivors.
Hiroshima today marks the anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attack.
Then-Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma said in a June speech that although the attacks caused great suffering, Japan would have otherwise kept fighting and ended up losing a greater part of its northern territory to the Soviet Union, which invaded Manchuria on the day Nagasaki was bombed.
“I understand that the bombings ended the war, and I think that it couldn’t be helped,” he said.
Kyuma’s statement, similar to the widely held U.S. belief that the bombings hastened the war’s end and thus saved lives, triggered fury in Japan, where many consider the attacks an unjustified slaughter of civilians.
HAVANA
Cuban boxers back home after vanishing
Two boxers were back in Cuba on Sunday after they disappeared during the Pan American Games in Brazil last month. They were found at a resort, where officials said they partied and ran up an exorbitant bill.
In a newspaper article, Cuban leader Fidel Castro promised not to harshly punish them.
Guillermo Rigondeaux, Cuba’s top boxer and a two-time Olympic bantamweight champion, and Erislandy Lara, an amateur welterweight world champion, arrived in Cuba on Sunday after being deported. The boxers had failed to show up for their scheduled bouts during the Pan American Games last month. Brazilian police arrested them Thursday for overstaying their visas.
