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The answer is yes?but not for about a hundred years: on May 4, 2102 to be exact, when the asteroid known as 2004 VD17 is scheduled to come close to earth. By then, NASA may be able to fight it off by firing a spacecraft into it to deflect it from crashing into the earth. Despite the fact that an asteroid impact wiped out an entire species (the dinosaurs) around 65 million years ago, the odds are that something else, like global warming, will get us first.

Small asteroids hit the Earth every few hundred years, but their effects can be deadly, as happened in the case of the dinosaurs. An asteroid that hit Siberia in 1908 had the force of 1,000 atomic bombs. The area it hit was unpopulated.
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People all over the world are questioning whether or not the US should be in Iraq. Here in the US, we are questioning the extent to which the government is spying on ordinary citizens by monitoring our phone calls, library withdrawals and email transmissions. Now it turns out they?re even using NASA satellites to spy on us.
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A 7.5 earthquake occurred off the coast of New Zealand at3:39 this morning. This is the third strong earthquakeworldwide in the past month. There was a magnitude 7.6 quake onthe Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia on April 20, then a 7.9quake off the island of Tonga on May 3. Last night’s greatquake was centered in the Kermadec Islands 500 miles NE ofAuckland, New Zealand. It did not generate tsunami warnings,but is lilkely to cause tidal and short term sea levelchanges.
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We have just heard from a reader who programs the computers that our soldiers take with them to Iraq. These soldiers have to program in the web sites they want to use while stationed in Baghdad ahead of time, since they can’t surf the web from there, and unknowncountry.com is one of the web sites that is requested most often.

I’m old enough to remember Vietnam, and the Iraq war reminds me a great deal of that conflict. In the 1960’s, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a strange war, fought by what seemed to be civilians, and most of us couldn’t figure out exactly why our soldiers were there. Those of us who lived through those times fervently hoped we would never have to live through another such war but now it seems as if we are.
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