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On the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington D.C. and the Twin Towers in New York, the Israeli military has announced that al-Qaeda recently tried to hijack a Saudi F-15E fighter and crash it into a major office tower in Israel.

Because of this, Israel is trying to get the U.S. to convince the Saudis to remove their fleet of 50 F-15Es from the King Faisal Air Base in nearby Tabuk. They were flown there in March, 2003 and Saudi Arabia has refused to return them to their bases in other parts of the country. This gives rise to the speculation that they may be planning to cooperate with al-Qaeda on a strike against Israel. The planes were sold to the Saudis by the U.S.
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Most of us cringe every time we turn on the news, fearing that we’ll hear about the death of another soldier in Iraq. But they aren’t just dying from stealth attacks and car bombs, they’re contracting mysterious illnesses as well. Suicide is another cause of death–while only a few of these have been reported in the media, we have a personal contact in Iraq who says there have been many more, which are listed as "noncombatant deaths."
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With Mars closer to Earth than it has been since prehistoric times, scientists hope to learn if there is (or ever was) life on Mars. They once assumed that the hostile environment of Venus meant there was never life on that planet, but now they’ve changed their minds. Since finding life in incredibly harsh places here on Earth, they now think we’ll eventually find signs of life on Venus as well. If life turns out to be fairly common, there’s a much greater chance we’ll meet another highly-developed form of it one day.
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Can two plants living 100 miles apart find romance? They can if they have a gardener who’s handy with a turkey baster. A rare female cycad plant, which only produces seeds every few years, is currently ready for fertilization in a British botanical garden, but has no mate. A male plant producing pollen was found in another garden in the U.K., so horticulturist Wesley Shaw is playing the role of cupid.

Shaw says, “Pollinating these cycads is quite a tricky business but we are confident it will work.” Most plants solve the problem by being bisexual, but ancient plants like cycads, which were around 206 million years ago, are still either male or female. Cycads can live for hundreds of years, and the male plant is about 80 years old?but he’s not too old to be a dad.
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