Satellite shootout: $60 million cost with fingers crossed

Nation: Guess how much it will cost to attempt to shoot that spy satellite out of the sky. According to a report by CNN, a mere $40-$60 million. Target date (pun intended)? “No attempt will be made to shoot down the satellite until after the U.S. space shuttle lands next Wednesday.”
     If the efforts fail, the satellite is expected to re-enter the atmosphere around March 6, The Guardian reports. It says Christina Rocca, the U.S. ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, told members that “At present, we cannot predict the entry impact area, which could occur in any region on the Earth’s surface between 58.5 degrees north and 58.5 degrees south latitudes.” Uh… that’d be most of the inhabited world.

Election 2008: A blogger with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer weighs in on the faintings that follow Obama’s campaign trail. (Guess what, conspiracy theorists… it happens on Hillary’s stops, too.)

Tech: The next digital viral pest could show up on your cell phone, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. It says a poll by security firm McAfee showed “the more developed the mobile market is, with high use of the Internet and downloads, the more likely people were to be hit by bugs.”

World: Reuters reports that more, not fewer, U.S. troops will be in Iraq by summer.

Journalism: Employees at the Honolulu Advertiser will vote Sunday whether to strike, station KHON2 reports. Under parent company Gannett Corporation’s “21 month contract offer, wages for Advertiser employees would be frozen for the 9 months of the deal with a one time 1.5 percent bonus. In the final 12 months of the contract, set to begin in June 2008, workers would get a 1 percent pay raise.” Some deal… and you wonder why they might strike? KHON2 adds Gannett has “$8 billion in operating revenues” that publish 84 daily newspapers across the country “and holds Internet and television assets in the U.S. and United Kingdom.”

O P I N I O N

A headline from The Guardian may just sum up how the world is assessing the front-runners for U.S. president: “Too inexperienced or too old — candidates face dilemmas as they battle to capture centre ground.”

1 off the radar

As of 4 p.m. Eastern Time, the spy satellite tracking Web page, http://www.n2yo.com/?s=29651 is not working. Hmmm. Is a missile launch in progress?
Update: It’s back; altitude is now 160 miles.

Here come old flat, top floor

Entertainment: Need a flat in London? If you have £1.75 million, you could buy a “three-bedroom top floor property in Green Street, Mayfair,” where the Beatles lived in the fall of 1963, the BBC reports.

World:  The Guardian reports a complicated case in which Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who was accused of accepting £1 billion in bribes from arms company BAE, threatened to hold back information on terrorists if the corruption investigation of him and others was not halted. Secret court files disclosed yesterday said that investigators were told “they faced ‘another 7/7′ and the loss of ‘British lives on British streets’ if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.”

Election 2008: In a couple of switcheroos, Sen. Barack Obama will be picking up the superdelegate vote of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s supporter, Rep. John Lewis, the New York Times reports, and Mitt Romney has endorsed his arch-rival, Sen. John McCain, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Business:  IBM workers are lodging a protest — online — over planned wage cuts, Computerworld reports. More than 1,200 people have signed an online petition.

Health: Researchers studying the blood of Alaskan hunters who have handled wild fowl in the past two years, the Anchorage Daily News reports. The purpose of the study is to see if there is any pattern of infection. Dr. Michael Bruce of the Centers for Disease Control told the newspaper that “Some of the birds that fly through Asia fly through Alaska, so we theorized that if anyone is at risk in Alaska, it would be the hunters.”

♣ Nation/world news tally in my local paper today: 1 3/8 pages