Why am I not surprised?

He's no Churchill

The president of Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., said in a campus-wide email he was "surprised and disappointed" after a speech by Vice President Dick Cheney, a marquee event that should have been a moment of pride for the school, which in 1946 was the site of Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech. The AP reports that Westminster had been told the vice president would give a "major foreign policy address" in the school gym. Instead, Cheney went into partisan attack dog mode, embarrassing the college president.

"Westminster College's president said Monday he was so 'surprised and disappointed' by Vice President Dick Cheney's attacks on John Kerry during a speech that he is inviting the Democrat to visit for a reply. Fletcher Lamkin told The Associated Press that Cheney's staff approached him last week about using Westminster as the backdrop "for a major foreign policy address. Nothing was said about a stump speech." In a campus-wide e-mail after the speech, Lamkin said: 'I must admit that I was surprised and disappointed that Mr. Cheney chose to step off the high ground and resort to Kerry-bashing for a large portion of his speech.'"

Neat!

New moon mineral found

April 27, 2004 15:53 IST

A new mineral has been found in a meteorite from the moon which was found in Oman in April 2001, report agencies.

The mineral has been named hapkeite, after Bruce Hapke of the University of Pittsburgh who predicted the existence of such a compound on the moon 30 years ago. Hapke, 70, retired recently.

Hapkeite, an iron and silicon compound, is made when tiny particles from space impact the moon's surface at very high speeds. Since the moon has an airless surface, the process is very different from what occurs under similar circumstances on earth, said scientists.

Small meteorites which would burn after entering the earth's atmosphere constantly bombard the lunar surface and in turn darken the moon's surface, a process called 'weathering.' The new found mineral is one of several such compounds predicted as possible a result of space weathering.