Four days before the election, as Republican candidates battle to save their seats in Congress amid a backlash over the war in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC News the administration is going “full speed ahead” with its policy.

“We’ve got the basic strategy right,” Cheney told George Stephanopoulos in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on “This Week.”

October was one of the deadliest months in Iraq for U.S. troops. Cheney said that while the administration’s policy may not be popular, “This is the right thing for us to be doing.”

In the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 57 percent of Americans said that the war was not worth fighting. The poll also showed President Bush’s job approval rating dropped to 37 percent, the second-lowest mark of his presidency.

Cheney said that even with pollsters predicting that Democrats would likely make gains in both houses of Congress Tuesday, voter sentiment would not influence Bush’s Iraq policy.

“It may not be popular with the public — it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Cheney said. “We’re not running for office. We’re doing what we think is right.”

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Saturday that Moscow wanted the draft resolution for sanctions against Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment to include “a time limit”.
The resolution should be written so “the measures have a strict time limit” and should clearly specify “the mechanisms for ending the sanctions”, Lavrov told the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS.

“We would like the resolution to reflect the agreement between the six (powers) and not close any doors for negotiations,” he added. (more…)

Nearly 100 unidentified bodies are buried every week at this cemetery in Karbala, a city holy to Shiites that is about 70 miles south of Baghdad.

BAGHDAD — John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, met here with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on Friday, the second high-level visit by an American official in a week.

The American military, meanwhile, announced the deaths of seven more American troops. All were killed Thursday, three in a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad and four in the roiling western province of Anbar in sniper and bomb attacks. (more…)

Steven Jones had a theory about what really happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

So the Brigham Young University physics professor wrote a paper about it and posted it on the school’s Web site.

The World Trade Center towers, he suggested, collapsed from the heat of explosive devices possibly placed by the U.S. government, and that the horrific plane crashes were orchestrated as a diversion.

In September the university where he had worked since 1985 placed him on paid leave. He retired last month during a professional review.

Now, the theory that has been condemned by scholars and other critics as groundless has found a new audience at Sonoma State University. (more…)

NEW YORK — Scientists at a U.S. weapons lab complained more than two weeks ago that captured Iraqi documents containing sensitive nuclear information were available on the Web site that the government shut down on Thursday, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

A senior federal official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Times that scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory protested some of the weapons papers on the site to the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy, in October. But the objections “never perked up to senior management,” the Times quoted the official as saying. “They stayed at the mid-levels.” (more…)

A fierce new pre-election row over Iraq raged Friday, after the US government shut down a website on which intelligence officials reportedly posted a blueprint for a nuclear bomb.

Democrats pounced on the disclosure and fears the Saddam Hussein-era documents could have helped terrorists or Iran ahead of Tuesday’s mid-term polls expected to deal President George W. Bush’s Republicans heavy losses.

Intelligence officials hurriedly pulled down the federal website displaying reams of Iraqi government papers Thursday night, following a report they included details of Baghdad’s secret nuclear research prior to 1991.

Was this really an accident? The results of the Administration’s policies suggests a strategy to accelerate nuclear proliferation around the world. How badly does this Administration want a nuke to be detonated in an American city? (more…)

A plan to fingerprint elementary school students when they buy lunch has some parents worrying that Big Brother has come to the cafeteria.

The Hope Elementary School District around Santa Barbara has notified parents that beginning this month, students at Monte Vista, Vieja Valley and Hope elementary schools will press an index finger to a scanner before buying cafeteria food.

The scan will call up the student’s name and student ID, teacher’s name and how much the student owes, since some receive government assistance for food. (more…)

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the “alternative interrogation methods” that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26. (more…)

Several prominent neoconservatives have turned on George Bush days before critical midterm elections, lambasting his administration for incompetence in the handling of the Iraq war and questioning the wisdom of the 2003 invasion they were instrumental in promoting.
Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, who were both Pentagon advisers before the war, Michael Rubin, a former senior official in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, were among the neoconservatives who recanted to Vanity Fair magazine in an article that could influence Tuesday’s battle for the control of Congress. The Iraq war has been the dominant issue in the election. (more…)

Iraq’s prime minister said on Saturday he hoped Saddam Hussein gets “what he deserves” when judgment is delivered in his trial for crimes against humanity on Sunday, and called for calm amid fears of a violent backlash.

If convicted, Saddam could be sentenced to hang.

The army was on alert with all leave canceled and state television said a curfew will keep Baghdad and two flashpoint provinces locked down on Sunday. A source in the prime minister’s office said it was not clear how long it would last.

As the curfew went into effect in Baghdad, mortar rounds killed seven people and wounded 20 in western Adhamiya district late on Saturday, an Interior Ministry source said. Baghdad’s international airport was closed under security measures. (more…)

Plans to boost Nato’s co- operation with countries such as Australia and Japan in an effort to forge a partnership against terrorism have been blocked by France.

The moves were to have been at the centre of a summit of the alliance’s leaders to be held in Riga this month. Nato officials now accept that only a loosely worded pledge to increase contacts with partners in Asia and Australasia will be included in the communiqué, which will be agreed by President George Bush and other leaders in the Latvian capital.

The French opposition comes as a blow to the US, which spearheaded the proposal and which would like to see regular Nato “forums” with countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. But while the idea won support from traditional allies of Washington such as the UK, France has made it clear that it opposes a move it sees as part of a campaign to extend US influence. (more…)

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea denounced U.S. leaders as “warmongers” on Saturday and called Japanese officials “political imbeciles” for saying they won’t accept Pyongyang as a nuclear power.

In typically harsh rhetoric, the reclusive communist state demanded Japan stay away from international disarmament negotiations, which also include China, Russia, the U.S. and South Korea.

The North agreed earlier this week to return to the talks, the first relaxation of tension after its Oct. 9 nuclear test. The talks have been stalled for a year. (more…)

Federal drug regulators halted plans by a California biotechnology firm to begin human testing of an anthrax vaccine this month, throwing the fate of the troubled program into doubt.

VaxGen Inc. officials said yesterday that it was unclear how long it would take to address Food and Drug Administration concerns about the vaccine’s reliability. The delay prompted the Department of Health and Human Services to warn the company that it might terminate work potentially worth nearly $1 billion. (more…)