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WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that the new missile defense system planned for Europe has the flexibility to adapt to changes in Iranian missile capabilities even if U.S. intelligence about Tehran’s slower-than-expected pace turns out to be wrong.

President Barack Obama’s decision to scrap a Bush-era missile intercept system in Europe was based largely on a new U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran’s effort to build a nuclear-capable long-range missile would take three years to five years longer than originally thought, officials said earlier.

Gates, a former CIA director, said that even if Iran moves more quickly on its long-range missile program, the revised program will have the flexibility to deal more quickly and effectively with the change.

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BALI, Indonesia (AP) — A strong earthquake shook the popular Indonesian resort island of Bali early Saturday, injuring at least seven people and sending panicked tourists and residents fleeing out of homes and hotels.

No tsunami warning was issued and there were no immediate reports of major damage.

The magnitude 5.8 quake hit just after 6 a.m. local time (2300 GMT) 45 miles (75 kilometers) south of Denpasar, the island’s capital, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Indonesia’s Meteorological and Geophysics Agency put the quake at a more powerful 6.4 magnitude.

Seven people were treated for head injuries and broken bones at Sanglah Hospital in Denpasar, said Dr. Ken Wirasandi, adding that women and children had run from their homes screaming when the ground began to rattle.

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NEW YORK (AP) — More New Yorkers are out of work, and the cash-strapped city isn’t graduating a new class of police cadets this year. And yet crime is going down — way down.

The city is heading toward its lowest number of murders in almost 50 years, and overall crime is also down, the New York Police Department said Friday.

The NYPD projects about 457 murders this year, the lowest total since the department started keeping records in 1962.

And, overall crime is down nearly 12 percent from 2008, and 40 percent since 2001, the NYPD said.

The downward trend is mystifying criminologists who say crime usually rises when times are tough.

The city had about six murders on average per 100,000 people last year, a rate among the lowest in the U.S., according to FBI crime statistics. In 2008, New Orleans had 64, St. Louis 47 and Los Angeles 10 per 100,000 people, according to the FBI.

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Conservative writer Irving Kristol dies at 89

WASHINGTON (AP) — Irving Kristol, the political writer, editor and publisher known as the godfather of neoconservatism whose youthful radicalism evolved into a historic rejection of communism, liberalism and the counterculture, died Friday. He was 89.

“His wisdom, wit, good humor and generosity of spirit made him a friend and mentor to several generations of thinkers and public servants,” said the editors of The Weekly Standard in announcing Kristol’s death on its Web site. He died of complications from lung cancer.

Kristol was the husband of critic-historian Gertrude Himmelfarb and father of neoconservative editor and commentator William Kristol, an editor of The Weekly Standard.

A Trotskyist in the 1930s, Kristol would soon sour on socialism, break from liberalism after the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and in the 1970s commit the unthinkable — support the Republican Party, once as “foreign to me as attending a Catholic Mass.”

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