Word: lowered
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...that's not an option on this mission. The Hubble orbits at an altitude of about 350 miles and an inclination of 28.5 degrees. The ISS orbits lower - roughly 220 miles above the earth - and at a much sharper 51.6-degree angle. It's not hard for a spacecraft to change its altitude, but shifting its orbital plane is monstrously hard and energy-consuming, and the shuttle would never be able to pull off such a maneuver. So, the fallback for this crew is another whole orbiter, the shuttle Endeavour, which has been poised on Pad B at Cape Canaveral...
...wants on his desk by the end of the month. The bill, which builds on rules issued by the Federal Reserve Board and other agencies at the end of last year, would do away with interest-rate hikes on existing balances, prohibit issuers from putting customer payments toward lower-rate balances first and abolish the practice of raising a customer's interest rate because he was late paying a bill to someone else...
...most biting ironies of Sept. 11 was that the terror attacks led fearful authorities to ban visitors from the United States' most enduring icon of freedom, the Statue of Liberty. Though the pedestal and lower observation deck re-opened in 2004, the statue itself has been off-limits since the Twin Towers fell barely two miles away. Last week Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that, beginning July 4, 2009, intrepid tourists would again be welcomed into the statue and up the 168 narrow, twisting steps to the crown and its breathtaking views of New York Harbor...
...filed in Helena, Mont., challenging the constitutionality of requiring local enforcement officers to perform background checks required by the federal Brady Act, regulating handgun sales. The district court found the requirement unconstitutional but was overturned by the more liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The lower court decision was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1997, four years after the Brady Act passed. The ruling was, in effect, moot because a federal background database supplanted local background checks by the time the court ruled, but it left in place an important precedent on the limits of federal...
...Given that, European leaders who in 2008 had enthusiastically backed proposing the EaP to the six former Soviet republics began scrambling to lower its scope ahead of its May 7 launch in Prague. Just hours before the gathering, for example, German and Dutch officials pushed to change wording in the official document to refer to the six EaP postulates as "partner countries" rather than "European countries". They similarly struck any language that even remotely hinted at possible E.U. membership for any time in the future, and revised a "long-term goal" previously described as "visa-free travel" by EaP citizens...