Thousands of police crush hundreds of protesters

June 25, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

TEHRAN, Iran — A flood of security forces using tear gas and clubs quickly overwhelmed a small group of rock-throwing protesters near Iran’s parliament Wednesday, and the country’s supreme leader said the outcome of the disputed presidential election will stand — the latest signs of the government’s growing confidence in quelling unrest on the streets.

As the election showdown has shifted, demonstrators are finding themselves increasingly scattered and struggling under a blanket crackdown that the wife of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi compared with martial law. In Wednesday’s clashes, thousands of police crushed hundreds of Mousavi supporters.

The statement by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that the June 12 election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would not be reversed was accompanied by a vow that the nation’s rulers would never yield to demands from the streets.

N. Korea accuses U.S. of provoking another war

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea accused Washington of seeking to “provoke a second Korean War” as the regime prepared to hold maritime military exercises off the eastern coast. U.S., and regional authorities were watching closely for signs that North Korea might fire short- or mid-range missiles during the June 25 to July 10 timeframe cited in a no-sail ban for military drills sent to Japan’s Coast Guard.

North Korea had warned previously it would fire a long-range missile as a response to U.N. Security Council condemnation of an April rocket launch seen as a cover for its ballistic missile technology.

In a first test of the new U.N. resolution to clamp down on North Korea’s trading of banned arms and weapons-related material, a North Korean ship suspected of transporting illicit weapons was sailing off China’s coast with a U.S. destroyer close behind.

The Kang Nam, which left the North Korean port of Nampo a week ago, is believed bound for Myanmar, South Korean and U.S. officials said.

D.C. train crash probe centers on track circuit

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators say they are looking closely at a track circuit near where a deadly transit train crash occurred in Washington, D.C. Debbie Hersman of the National Transportation Safety Board says five of six circuits, or stretches of track, in the area showed no problems during tests Wednesday. But she says there were anomalies with the sixth circuit. Hersman would not elaborate on what those might be, saying more tests are needed.

Equipment along each circuit receives signals that generate speed commands for the train. Hersman said the circuit in question is about 740 feet long.

Nine people were killed Monday when a train plowed into a train that was stopped. It was the deadliest accident in the 33-year history of the Metro.

Bomber kills at least 69, injures more than 100

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A bomb ripped through a crowded market in Baghdad’s main Shiite district on Wednesday, killing at least 69 people and wounding more than 100 less than a week before a deadline for U.S. combat troops to leave Iraq’s urban areas.

A series of blasts this week have killed more than 160 people, as U.S. and Iraqi officials warned they expected more violence before the U.S. withdrawal from cities.

American troops already have begun pulling back from the joint bases that they occupied with Iraqi security forces as part of a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at clearing volatile areas and holding them.

Weird space blobs called adolescent galaxies

WASHINGTON — Mysterious space blobs aren’t infant galaxies as astronomers once thought. Scientists say they mostly consist of galaxies going through puberty, all hot and bothered.

A new study using NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and other space and ground telescopes comes up with an explanation for these high-energy glowing blobs that have been observed for about a decade. Astronomers looked at 29 of these gaseous blobs in one distant area of the universe, dating back to more than 11 billion years ago.

One theory was that they were young galaxies cooling off. But the new research says they are hot and chaotic with gas halos, growing supermassive black holes and about to stabilize. The blobs are the adolescent galaxies, and the hydrogen gas, leftover from their creation.

Associated Press