China Lays Out Ambitious 5-Year Plan to Explore Space
China has announced an ambitious five-year plan to explore outer space. The plan includes Beijing's previously-stated goals of putting a man on the moon and building a space station. In a policy paper released Thursday, the China National Space Administration said Beijing will deploy space laboratories, launch manned spaceships and space freighters, and make technological preparations for the construction of a space station by the end of 2016.

One Year on the Health Subcommittee
Joe Pitts
Last year at this time, my colleagues appointed me to lead the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee. After years of hard work in the House, it is an honor to be able to lead a subcommittee that is doing important work improving health care for all Americans. The federal government’s involvement in health care was already significant before last year’s new health care law, the Affordable Care Act.

Clinton to High-Tech Firms: Don’t Aid Web Repression
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Thursday urged software companies and high-tech firms not to sell technology that would help repressive governments restrict Internet freedom. Delivering a keynote address in the Netherlands at a 23-nation Dutch-sponsored conference at the Hague, convened to launch a coalition of countries that work with companies and civil society groups to advance Internet freedom, she also warned against the imposition of national barriers to the Internet.

Keystone, Our Missed Opportunity
Jon Kyl
Earlier this year, President Obama delivered a speech at Georgetown University where he bemoaned our continued reliance on oil imported from the Middle East and unsavory regimes. "Politicians of every stripe have promised energy independence, but that promise has so far gone unmet," he said.

Mother Nature, Meet Big Brother
Jon Kyl
Much of our state is covered by desert. And deserts, as we know all too well, are prone to kick up dust storms that can sweep across the landscape, blanketing farms, towns, and major metropolitan areas with dust and other particulate matter.

A Sputnik Moment
Joe Pitts
In 1957, the Soviet space program launched the first satellite into orbit around the earth. If the communists could put a beeping metal ball into the sky over our country, we wondered what else they could send our way. Sputnik was a wake up call to our space program. We renewed our efforts and concentrated on the task of sending a man to the moon. Just 12 years later we would accomplish this goal.

Authoritarian Governments Have Immensely Benefited From The Web
Evgeny Morozov, a noted specialist on the use of new communications technologies to promote democratic values, has a new book titled "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom." In it, he argues that hype about "Twitter revolutions" and the enormous potential of the Internet to promote open societies and roll back authoritarianism is naive and overblown.

China: Rare Earths Exports Up in 2010
China says its rare earths exports grew 14.5 percent in the first 11 months of last year, despite Beijing's decision to reduce sales of the exotic metals needed to manufacture high-tech products. The Chinese Commerce Ministry says exports of the minerals - 17 elements used to make an array of products from computers to batteries for hybrid cars - rose to 35,000 tons from January to November, exceeding the full-year quota of just over 30,000 tons.

Stuxnet Worm Continues To Create Havoc In Iran
The Stuxnet malware is being blamed by analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington for the deactivation of over 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility earlier this year, dealing a devastating blow to Iran’s renegade nuclear weapons program.

WikiLeaks Exploits Weaknesses in Technology, Human Nature
Historians, anti-war activists and armchair observers of human nature have had plenty to mull over in recent years thanks to the online group WikiLeaks. The Web site has published hundreds of thousands of stolen U.S. military and diplomatic documents from as recently as February of this year and as far back as the 1960s.

Chinese Web Surfers Blocked From Wikileaks
The WikiLeaks website that is attracting millions of fascinated viewers this week appears to unavailable to Chinese web surfers. People trying to log onto wikileaks.org in China are met with a notice saying the connection has been reset. That is the typical response when Chinese censors have used their sophisticated firewall to block access to a site.

U.S. Pact Could Turn Russia Into World’s Nuclear Dump
What should countries do with their nuclear waste? This question has been tormenting scientists and politicians since the early days of nuclear energy. Proposals have ranged from storing radioactive material in polar ice sheets, burying it in the ocean floor, or even blasting it into space.

Breaking Internet Censorship Will Take More Than Circumvention Tools
Hal Roberts
The OpenNet Initiative has documented Internet filtering in more than 40 countries worldwide. Filtering allows governments to prevent people within their borders from accessing websites that governments find offensive for any of a variety of political, social, or security reasons.