United States space tourist Garriott blasts off in Russian rocket

US video game magnate Richard Garriott blasted off into space aboard a Russian rocket on Sunday watched by his father, a NASA astronaut who went into space at the height of the Cold War.

The Russian Soyuz TMA13 spacecraft lifted off in clear weather from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppes just after 1.00 pm.

A video game developer from Texas, Garriott paid $35 million to fly into space alongside US astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov.

Garriott’s father, Owen, watched the blast off through binoculars on an observation platform and Garriott’s girlfriend, Kelly Miller, burst into tears.

“I am very happy for him. It is one of the things he really wanted to do,” Miller said as others opened Champagne to celebrate the successful launch. “I can see he is really enjoying it like a little kid in the candy shop,” Miller said.

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Blast-hit UPA wakes up to tougher law, faster courts

The UPA Government, under attack for seeming ineffective in the face of terror, for the first time has acknowledged the need for new counter-terrorism initiatives, including strengthening the existing law and introducing fast-track courts.

Before a two-hour emergency Cabinet meeting late tonight that discussed such measures, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, speaking at the conference of Governors at Rashtrapati Bhavan today, had set the tone.

In an apparent rebuttal of the BJP charge that vote bank politics was the reason Congress was soft on terror, Singh said: “The public debate on the issue of terrorism has, unfortunately, tended to get driven by politics, and has centered on certain laws enacted or repealed by Governments of different political persuasions...Our Government has no fixed, inflexible or ideological view in this regard.”

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Strikes fit terror pattern: Mandir on Tuesday, Masjid on Friday 1

Be it the attack in New Delhi that came before Id-Diwali, the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi or the blasts at the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad or the explosion today at the Hanuman Mandir in Jaipur, there's a chilling pattem to these acts of terror: target places of worship or "religious" occasions that draw the maximum people.

The intention is not only to cause maximum loss of human lives but also to inflame communal passions and hope it escalates to a bloody show down between communities.

Targets and dates have been carefully chosen. A close look at recent attacks reveals the sinister design: Hindu temples have been targeted on Tuesdays, an auspicious day for the devotees of Hanuman, while Muslims and their mosques have been attacked on Fridays.

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