N. Korea orders rocket prep after US deploys B-2 stealth bombers over S. Korea

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    US flies B-2 bombers over South Korea

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    US deploys B-2 stealth bombers over South Korea

The U.S. military announced Thursday that two B-2 stealth bombers were sent to South Korea to participate in a training exercise, demonstrating the Pentagon's commitment to defend its ally against threats from North Korea.

The two B-2 Spirit bombers flew more than 6,500 miles from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to South Korea, dropping inert munitions before returning to the U.S., according to a statement released by U.S. Forces Korea.

"The United States is steadfast in its alliance commitment to the defense of the Republic of Korea, to deterring aggression, and to ensuring peace and stability in the region," the statement said.

The B-2 Spirit is capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear weapons. The Pentagon said the mission was part of its ongoing Foal Eagle training exercise series, which began March 1 and ends April 30.

The exercise was announced a day after North Korea said it had shut down a key military hotline usually used to arrange passage for workers and goods through the Demilitarized Zone.

The hotline shutdown follows a torrent of bellicose rhetoric in recent weeks from North Korea, which is angry about annual South Korea-U.S. military drills and U.N. sanctions over its nuclear test last month. North Korea calls the drills rehearsal for an invasion; Seoul and Washington say the training is defensive in nature and that they have no intention of attacking.

North Korea's threats and provocations are seen as efforts to provoke the new government in Seoul, led by President Park Geun-hye, to change its policies toward Pyongyang. North Korea's moves at home to order troops into "combat readiness" are seen as ways to build domestic unity as young leader Kim Jong Un strengthens his military credentials.

North Korea previously cut Red Cross phone and fax hotlines with South Korea, and another communication channel with the U.S.-led U.N. command at the border between the Koreas. Three other telephone hotlines used only to exchange information about air traffic were still operating normally Thursday, according to South Korea's Air Traffic Center.

North Korea said there was no need for communication between the countries in a situation "where a war may break out at any moment."

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters that North Korea's "latest threat to cut off communication links coupled with its provocative rhetoric is not constructive to ensuring peace and stability on the peninsula."

Although North Korea has vowed nuclear strikes on the U.S., analysts outside the country have seen no proof that North Korean scientists have yet mastered the technology needed to build a nuclear warhead small enough to mount on a missile.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Italy orders Amanda Knox to go on trial for 3rd time; saga in murder case far from over

ROME –  It's not over yet for Amanda Knox.

Italy's top criminal court dealt a stunning setback Tuesday to the 25-year-old college student, overturning her acquittal in the grisly murder of her British roommate and ordering her to stand trial again.

"She thought that the nightmare was over," Knox's attorney, Carlo Dalla Vedova, told reporters minutes after conveying the unexpected turn of events to his client, who had stayed up to hear the ruling, which came shortly after 2 a.m. West Coast time. "But she's ready to fight."

Now a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, Knox called the decision by the Rome-based Court of Cassation "painful" but said she was confident that she would be exonerated.

The American left Italy a free woman after her October 2011 acquittal — but only after serving nearly four years of a 26-year prison sentence from a lower court that convicted her of murdering Meredith Kercher. The 21-year-old exchange student's body was found in a pool of blood, her throat slit, in a bedroom of the house the two shared in Perugia, a university town 100 miles north of Rome.

Raffaele Sollecito, Knox's Italian boyfriend at the time, was also convicted of the Nov. 1, 2007, murder, then later acquitted. His acquittal was also thrown out Tuesday and a new trial ordered.

Italian law cannot compel Knox to return for the new trial and Dalla Vedova said she had no plans to do so.

In any case, the judicial saga is likely to continue for years. It will be months before a date is set for the new trial, to be held in Florence instead of Perugia because the small town has only one appellate court, which already acquitted her.

Prosecution and defense teams must also await details of the ruling explaining why the high court concluded there were procedural errors in the trial that acquitted Knox and Sollecito. The court has 90 days to issue its explanation.

Another Knox defender, Luciano Ghirga, said she was gearing up psychologically for her third trial. Ghirga said he told Knox: "You have always been our strength. We rose up again after the first-level convictions. We'll have the same resoluteness, the same energy" in the new trial.

Still, it was a tough blow for the former exchange student, whose parents mortgaged both their homes to raise funds for her lengthy, expensive defense.

"It was painful to receive the news that the Italian Supreme Court decided to send my case back for revision when the prosecution's theory of my involvement in Meredith's murder has been repeatedly revealed to be completely unfounded and unfair," Knox said in a statement.

She said the matter must now be examined by "an objective investigation and a capable prosecution."

"No matter what happens, my family and I will face this continuing legal battle as we always have, confident in the truth and with our heads held high in the face of wrongful accusations and unreasonable adversity," Knox said.

Prosecutors alleged that Kercher was the victim of a drug-fueled sex game gone awry. Knox, then 20, and Sollecito, then 24, denied wrongdoing and said they weren't even in the apartment that night, although they acknowledged they had smoked marijuana and their memories were clouded.

An Ivory Coast man, Rudy Guede, was convicted of the slaying in a separate trial and is serving a 16-year sentence.

Sollecito, whose 29th birthday was Tuesday, sounded shaken when a reporter reached him by phone.

"Now I can't say anything," said the Italian, who has been studying computer science in the northern city of Verona after finishing up an earlier degree while in prison.

A local Italian news report quoted Sollecito's current girlfriend as saying he and Knox spoke by phone and described him as being psychologically destroyed.

His lawyer, Luca Maori, said neither Sollecito nor Knox ran any danger of being arrested. "It's not as if the lower-court convictions are revived," he said, noting that the high court didn't determine "whether the two were innocent or guilty. "

For those familiar with the U.S. legal principle of "double jeopardy" — which holds that no one acquitted of a crime can be tried again for it — the idea that the Italian justice system allows prosecutors to appeal acquittals is hard to absorb.

Knox attorney Dalla Vedova dismissed the "double jeopardy" concern, maintaining the high court ruling hadn't decided the defendants' guilt or innocence, but merely ordered a fresh appeals trial, which he said was unlikely to start before early 2014.

The appeals court that acquitted Knox and Sollecito had criticized virtually the entire prosecution case, especially the forensic evidence that helped clinch their 2009 convictions. It noted the murder weapon was never found, and said DNA tests were faulty and that prosecutors provided no murder motive.

In arguing for overturning the acquittals, prosecutors said the Perugia appellate court was too dismissive of DNA tests on a knife they maintained could have been used to slash Kercher's throat as well as DNA traces on a bra belonging to the victim and tests done on blood stains in the bedroom and bathroom.

The court on Tuesday also upheld a slander conviction against Knox. During a 14-hour police interrogation, she had accused a local Perugia pub owner of carrying out the killing. The man was held for two weeks, based on her allegations, before being released for lack of evidence.

Her defense lawyers say Knox felt pressured by police to name a suspect so her own interrogation could end.

Because of the time she served in prison before the acquittal, Knox didn't have to serve the three-year sentence for the slander conviction. The court on Tuesday ordered her to pay 4,000 euros ($5,500) to the man, as well as the cost of the lost appeal.

Whether Knox ever returns to Italy to serve more prison time depends on a string of ifs and unknowns.

"Questions of extradition are not in the legal landscape at this point," another Knox attorney, Theodore Simon, said on NBC TV.

If she is convicted by the Florence court, Knox could appeal that verdict to the Cassation Court. Should that appeal fail, Italy could seek her extradition from the United States.

Whether Italy actually requests extradition will be a political decision made by a future Italian government. It would then be up to U.S. officials to decide whether they will send Knox to Italy, and Dalla Vedova said U.S. authorities would carefully study all the case's documentation to decide whether she had received fair trials.

U.S. and Italian authorities could also come to a deal that would keep Knox in the U.S.

For now, Knox has a memoir, "Waiting to Be Heard," coming out April 30, for which publisher HarperCollins reportedly paid her $4 million. She still plans to appear in a prime-time special with Diane Sawyer to promote the book, according to ABC News.

In her statement, Knox took the Perugia prosecutors to task, saying they "must be made to answer" for the discrepancies in the case. She also said "my heart goes out to" Kercher's family.

The Kercher family's attorney, Francesco Maresca, called Tuesday's ruling "what we wanted" and relayed a message from the late woman's sister, Stephanie.

"To understand the truth about what happened that night is all we can do for her now," the family's message said.

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AP writer Colleen Barry in Milan contributed to this report.

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NASA locks out foreigners, orders security review following concerns of Chinese spying

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  A vintage logo for NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.NASA

NASA has locked its facilities to foreigners, disabled online research databases and ordered a complete review of access by foreign nationals to its facilities, as allegations swirled of foreign spies within the space agency.

The reports came to a head this weekend with the arrest of former consultant Bo Jiang as he was leaving the country with a one-way ticket to China -- carrying several data storage devices, including hard drives, flash drives and computers that likely contained sensitive information.

“I’ve ordered a complete review of the access that foreign nationals are granted at NASA facilities.'

- NASA administrator Charles Bolden

In testimony Wednesday before Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the space agency, NASA chief Charles Bolden said associate administrator Robert Lightfoot would head a complete investigation into the issue. External investigations would likely follow.

“We don’t anticipate having a Chinese visitor to a NASA facility any time soon,” he said.

“I’ve ordered a complete review of the access that foreign nationals are granted at NASA facilities,” Bolden said. “Within a week we probably will ask [the National Academy of Public Administration] to do an external review,” he added.

Jiang was far from the only foreign national working in NASA facilities around the country. There are 281 foreign nationals with physical access to the agency’s facilities including 192 Chinese nationals, he said.

The number of U.S. citizens working in Chinese facilities?

“To my knowledge, we have no NASA personnel … who are working in the People’s Republic of China,” Bolden said.

In addition to the security review, Bolden announced that he had closed down a publicly available NASA technical reports database due to the risk of confidential information leaking out. A message on the site indicates that “until further notice, the NTRS system will be unavailable for public access. We ... anticipate that this site will return to service in the near future.”

NASA also instigated a moratorium on access to NASA facilities and data from several foreign countries, including China, Burma, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.

Remote computer access from those countries will be terminated as well, he added.

“This is about national security, not NASA security. And I take that seriously. I will hold myself accountable once the review is completed,” Bolden said.

Prior to Bolden’s testimony, Rep. Chaka Fattah -- the co-chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee -- praised Bolden and NASA for the agency’s many accomplishments, notably the 2012 landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. NASA is well positioned in terms of the president's goal of seeing a human flight to Mars in the not too distant future, he said.

“Late President John Kennedy would have been proud,” Fattah said.

NASA has great big plans, despite the security issues. Bolden said the first test flight of the planned Orion space capsule would come in 2014, a first-ever, year-long stay on the International Space Station was in the works, and the landmark James Webb space telescope would be launched in 2018.

“NASA remains the world’s premier space science organization,” he said.

Perhaps it’s the ambitions of the space agency that make it such a target for espionage. Wolf told Discovery News earlier this week that “the Chinese have the most comprehensive spying program in Washington that has ever been. They make the KGB look like they were the junior varsity or freshman team.”

Citing Robert S. Mueller, the director of the FBI, Wolf said NASA centers are significant targets for this espionage -- a risk that is more substantial today than it was a decade ago.

“NASA and the Congress have to work together to heed his words,” he said.

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Hagel orders review of US defense strategy

Published March 18, 2013

Associated Press

In response to the budget cuts that took effect March 1, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a re-evaluation of the underpinnings of the defense strategy that President Barack Obama announced 14 months ago.

Hagel spokesman George Little said Monday that the new defense chief wants to see the results by May 31.

Hagel's predecessor, Leon Panetta, had said repeatedly that if the forced budget cuts took effect the administration would have to redo its defense strategy. Little said Hagel's review will take that 2011 strategy as the "point of departure," and it will examine whether the assumptions underlying it are valid in light of the budget crisis.

The Pentagon faces the deepest cuts in spending in decades and has fewer protectors of the military in Congress.

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